Author: Kōji Suzuki
Date: 1991-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Fiction; Japan; Japanese Literature; Mystery; Thriller; Fantasy; Paranormal; Supernatural; Adult
Description: A mysterious videotape warns that the viewer will die in one week unless a certain, unspecified act is performed. Exactly one week after watching the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure. Asakawa, a hardworking journalist, is intrigued by his niece's inexplicable death. His investigation leads him from a metropolitan tokyo teeming with modern society's fears to a rural Japan--a mountain resort, a volcanic island, and a countryside clinic--haunted by the past. His attempt to solve the tape's mystery before it's too late--for everyone--assumes an increasingly deadly urgenc
Rights: All rights reserved

KOJI SUZUKI

THE COMPLETE RING TRILOGY

Ring
Spiral
Loop

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Ring

Copyright © Koji Suzuki 2003

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004,

First published in the USA by Vertical, Inc 2003,

Originally published in Japan as Ringu by Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 1991

Cover photograph/illustration © Ghislain & Marie David de Lossy/Getty Images

Spiral

Copyright © Koji Suzuki 2004

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005,

First published in the USA by Vertical, Inc 2004,

Originally published in Japan as Rasen by Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 1995

Cover photograph © pierre d’alancaisez/Alamy

Loop

Copyright © Koji Suzuki 2005

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006,

First published in the USA by Vertical, Inc 2005,

Originally published in Japan as Rupu by Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 1998

Cover photographs © Sean Murphy/Getty Images (dust cloud); Karl Weather/Getty Images (motorcycle).

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2007

Koji Suzuki asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBNs:
Ring: 9780007331574
Spiral: 9780007331581
Loop: 9780007331598

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780008121815

Version: 2015-09-29

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Ring

Spiral

Loop

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

RING

KOJI SUZUKI

Translation

Robert B. Rohmer

Glynne Walley

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One: Autumn

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Two: Highlands

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Part Three: Gusts

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part Four: Ripples

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

PART ONE

Autumn

1

September 5, 1990, 10:49 pm, Yokohama

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

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

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

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

How was she supposed to study in this stupid heat?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey. Stop scaring me. Please …

Before she knew it she was even asking politely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come home!” Tomoko cried aloud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 5, 10:54 pm

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

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

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

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

You asshole.

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

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

Does it hurt that bad?

Kimura realized now that something was seriously wrong with the rider. He finally squatted down next to him and asked, “You all right?” Because of the tinted visor he couldn’t makeout the man’s expression. The biker clutched at Kimura’s hand and seemed to be begging for something. He was almost clinging to Kimura. He said nothing. He didn’t try to raise the visor. Kimura jumped to action.

“Hold on, I’ll call an ambulance.”

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

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

Kimura had a bad feeling about this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

“Kita Shinagawa, please.”

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

“You covering a story?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, you’re just like me then.”

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

“Is your work interesting?”

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

“The New Gods of Modernity.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Heart attack.”

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

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

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

“Eh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you want my number?”

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know what you’re thinking, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“… So?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well … no.”

“And have you asked a doctor about it?”

“About what?”

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

Asakawa fell silent. He had, in fact, asked a doctor. The doctor had replied, I couldn’t rule it out. It was a wishy-washy answer. After all, the opposite sometimes happens. Sometimes when a person experiences a cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in the cerebral membrane, they feel stomach discomfort at the same time as a headache.

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

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

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YOUNG COUPLE DEAD OF UNNATURAL CAUSES IN RENTAL CAR

At 6:15 a.m. on the 7th, a young man and woman were found dead in the front seats of a car on a vacant lot in Ashina, Yokosuka, along a prefectural road. The bodies were discovered by a truck driver who happened to pass by and who then reported the case to the Yokosuka police precinct.

From the car registration they were identified as a preparatory school student from Shibuya, Tokyo (age 19), and a private girls’ high school student from Isogo, Yokohama (age 17). The car had been rented from an agency in Shibuya two evenings previously by the preparatory school student.

At the time of discovery, the car was locked with the key in the ignition. The estimated time of death was sometime between late night on the 5th and the predawn hours of the 6th. Since the windows were rolled up, it is thought that the couple fell asleep and asphyxiated, but the possibility that they had taken an overdose of drugs in order to commit a love suicide has not been ruled out. The exact cause of death has not been determined. As of yet there is no suspicion of homicide.

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

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

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

“Hey, Yoshino.”

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

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

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

“You keeping busy?”

“You could say that.”

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

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

“Why? You need me for something?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?”

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

“So, what do you want to know?”

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

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

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

“Impossible. No bruise marks on the neck.”

“Drugs?”

“No traces in the autopsy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So, you mean it was coitus interruptus?”

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

“When what happened?”

Yoshino was telling his story for maximum effect.

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

Asakawa didn’t reply.

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

Asakawa still remained silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eh?”

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

“No. I don’t think so.”

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

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

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

5

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

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

CARD 1:

TOMOKO OISHI

Date of birth: 10/21/72

Keisei School for Girls, senior, age 17

Address: 1-7 Motomachi, Honmoku, Naka Ward, Yokohama

Approx. 11 pm, Sept. 5: dies in kitchen on first floor of home, parents away. Cause of death sudden heart failure.

CARD 2:

SHUICHI IWATA

Date of birth: 5/26/71

Eishin Preparatory Academy, first year, age 19

Address: 1-5-23 Nishi Nakanobu, Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo

10:54 pm, Sept. 5: falls over and dies at intersection in front of Shinagawa Sta. Cause of death cardiac infarction.

CARD 3:

HARUKO TSUJI

Date of birth: 1/12/73

Keisei School for Girls, senior, age 17

Address: 5-19 Mori, Isogo Ward, Yokohama

Late night, Sept. 5 (or early next morning): dies in car off pref. road at foot of Mt Okusu. Cause of death sudden heart failure.

CARD 4:

TAKEHIKO NOMI

Date of birth: 12/4/70

Eishin Preparatory Academy, second year, age 19 Address: 1-10-4 Uehara, Shibuya Ward, Tokyo

Late night, Sept. 5 (or early next morning): dies w/Haruko Tsuji in car at foot of Mt Okusu. Cause of death sudden heart failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

6

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

I guess grandchildren really mean a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you have lodging there?”

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

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

“Certainly, at non-member rates.”

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

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

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

“One moment, please.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll find the owner and return it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How long has she been like this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“No way. Why would I?”

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

PART TWO

Highlands

1

October 11—Thursday

The rain was coming down harder now, and Asakawa turned his wipers on high. The weather at Hakone was liable to change at any moment. The skies had been clear down in Odawara, but the higher he climbed, the moister the air, and as he neared the pass he’d encountered several pockets of wind and rain. If it had been daytime, he would have been able to guess at the weather on the mountains from the appearance of the clouds over Mt Hakone. But it was night, and his attention was fixed on whatever came into the beams of his headlights. It wasn’t until he had stopped the car and looked up at the sky that he’d realized the stars had disappeared. When he’d got on the Kodama bullet-train at Tokyo Station, the city had still been wrapped in twilight. When he’d rented the car at Atami Station, the moon was still intermittently peeking out from gaps in the clouds. But now the fine water droplets drifting across his headlight beams were growing into a full-fledged downpour, pounding on his windshield.

The digital clock over the speedometer said 7:32. Asakawa quickly calculated how long it had taken him to come this far. He’d taken the 5:16 down from Tokyo, arriving in Atami at 6:07. By the time he’d left the gates and finished the paperwork at the rent-a-car place it had been 6:30. He’d stopped at a market and bought two packs of cup o’ noodles and a small bottle of whiskey; it had been seven by the time he’d found his way through the maze of one-way streets and out of town.

A tunnel loomed in front of him, its entrance outlined in brilliant orange light. On the other side, just after he entered the Atami-Kannami Highway, he should start to see signs for South Hakone Pacific Land. The long tunnel would take him through the Tanna Ridge. As he entered it the sound of the wind changed. At the same time, his flesh, the passenger seat, and everything else in the car was bathed in orange light. He could feel his calm slipping away, he could feel his hackles rise. There were no cars coming from the opposite direction. The wipers squeaked as they rubbed against the now-dry windshield. He turned them off. He should reach his destination by eight. He didn’t feel quite like flooring it, although the road was empty. Subconsciously, Asakawa was dreading the place he was heading to.

At 4:20 this afternoon, Asakawa had watched as a fax had crawled out of the machine at the office. It was a reply from the Atami bureau, and he had expected it to contain a copy of the Villa Log Cabin’s guest register for August 27th through the 30th. When he saw it he did a little dance. His hunch was right. There were four names he recognized: Nonoyama, Tomoko Oishi, Haruko Tsuji, and Takehiko Nomi. The four of them had spent the night of the 29th in cabin B-4. Obviously, Shuichi Iwata had used Nonoyama’s name. With this he knew when and where the four had been together: on Wednesday, August 29th, at South Hakone Pacific Land, Villa Log Cabin, No. B-4. It was exactly a week prior to their mysterious deaths.

There and then he’d picked up the receiver and dialed the number for Villa Log Cabin to make a reservation for tonight for cabin B-4. All he had tomorrow was a staff meeting at eleven. He could spend the night down in Hakone and easily be back in time.

… Well, that’s it. I’m going. The actual place.

He was eager. Never in his wildest dreams could he imagine what awaited him there.

There was a tollbooth just as he came out of the tunnel, and as he handed over three hundred-yen coins he asked the attendant, “Is South Hakone Pacific Land up ahead?”

He knew full well it was. He’d checked his map any number of times. He just felt like it had been a long time since he’d seen another human being, and something within him wanted to talk.

“There’s a sign just up ahead. Make a left there.”

He took his receipt. With so little traffic, it hardly seemed worth having someone stationed here. How long was this guy planning to stand there in his booth? Asakawa made no move to drive off, and the man began to give him a suspicious look. Asakawa forced a smile and pulled away slowly.

The joy he’d felt a few hours ago at establishing a common time and place for the four victims had withered and died. Their faces flickered behind his eyelids. They’d died exactly one week after staying in Villa Log Cabin. Now’s the time to turn back, they seemed to be telling him, leering. But he couldn’t turn back now. First of all, his instincts as a reporter had kicked into gear. On the other hand, there was no denying that he was scared to be going alone. If he’d called Yoshino, chances were he would have come running, but he didn’t think having a colleague along was such a good idea. Asakawa had already written up his progress so far and saved it on a floppy disk. What he wanted was someone who wouldn’t run around getting in his way, but simply help him pursue this … It wasn’t like he didn’t have someone in mind. He did know one man who would tag along out of pure curiosity. He was a part-time lecturer at a university, so he had plenty of free time. He was just the guy. But he was … idiosyncratic. Asakawa wasn’t sure how long he could take his personality.

There, on the mountainside, was the sign for South Hakone Pacific Land. There was no neon, just a white panel with black lettering. If he’d happened to be looking away when his headlights hit it, he would have missed it completely. Asakawa turned off the highway and began climbing a mountain road between terraced fields. The road seemed awfully narrow for the entrance to a resort, and he had lonely visions of it dead-ending in the middle of nowhere. He had to shift down to negotiate the road’s steep, dark curves. He hoped he didn’t encounter anybody coming from the opposite direction: there was no room for two cars to pass.

The rain had let up at some point, although Asakawa had just noticed it. The weather patterns seemed different east and west of the Tanna Ridge.

At any rate, the road didn’t dead-end, but kept climbing higher and higher. After a while he started to see summer homes scattered here and there on the sides of the road. And the road suddenly widened to two lanes, the surface improved drastically, and elegant streetlights graced the shoulders. Asakawa was amazed at the change. The minute he entered the grounds of Pacific Land he was confronted with lavish accoutrements. So what was with the garden path that led here? The corn and weeds hanging over the road had narrowed it even further, heightening his nervousness over what lay around the next hairpin curve.

The three-story building on the other side of the spacious parking lot doubled as an information center and a restaurant. Without thinking twice, Asakawa parked in front of the lobby and walked toward the hall. He looked at his watch: eight on the nose. Right on schedule. From somewhere he heard the sound of balls bouncing. There were four tennis courts below the center, with several couples giving it their all under the yellowish lights. Surprisingly, all four courts were occupied. Asakawa couldn’t fathom what made people come all the way up here at eight on a Thursday night in the middle of October, just to play tennis. Far below the tennis courts he could see the distant lights of the cities of Mishima and Numazu, glittering in the darkness. The emptiness beyond, black as tar, was Tago Bay.

As he entered the information center, the restaurant was directly in front of him. Its outer wall was glass, so he could see inside. Here Asakawa got another surprise. The restaurant closed at eight, but it was still half full of families and young women in groups. What was going on here? He cocked his head in puzzlement. Where had everybody come from? He couldn’t believe all these people came here on the same road that had brought him here. Maybe what he had used was the back entrance. There must be a brighter, wider road somewhere else. But that was how the girl he’d spoken to on the phone had told him to get here.

Go about halfway down the Atami-Kannami road and turn left. Drive up the mountain from there. Asakawa had done just that. It was inconceivable that there was another way out of here.

Nodding as he was told that it was past time for last orders, he went into the restaurant. Below its wide windows, a carefully groomed lawn sloped gently through the night toward the cities. The inside lights were kept intentionally low, probably to better allow customers to enjoy the view of the distant lights. Asakawa stopped a passing waiter and asked where he could find Villa Log Cabin. The waiter pointed back toward the entry hall Asakawa had just come through.

“Follow that road to the right about two hundred meters. You’ll see the office.”

“Is there a parking lot?”

“You can park in front of the office.”

That was all there was to it. If he had just kept going instead of stopping in here, he would have found it on his own. Asakawa could more or less analyze why he’d been drawn to this modern building, to the point of barging into the restaurant. He found it somehow comforting. All the way here he had been imagining dark, utterly primitive log cabins—the perfect backdrop for a Friday the 13th scenario—and there was nothing of that in this building. Faced with this proof that the power of modern science functioned here, too, he felt somewhat reassured, strengthened. The only things that bothered him were the bad road that led here from the world below, and the fact that in spite of it there were so many people playing tennis and enjoying their dinner here in the world above. He wasn’t sure exactly why this bothered him. It was just that, somehow, nobody here seemed quite … lifelike.

Since the tennis courts and restaurant were crowded, he should have been able to hear the cheerful voices of people from the log cabins. That’s what he expected. But standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking down over the valley, he could discern only about six of the ten cabins built among the trees scattered over the gentle slope. Everything below was immersed in the darkness of the forest, beyond the pale of the street lamps, unrelieved by any light coming from inside the cabins. B-4, where Asakawa would be spending the night, seemed to stand on the border between the darkness and the lighted area—all he could see was the top of the door.

Asakawa walked up to the office, opened the door, and stepped inside. He could hear a television, but there was no sign of anyone. The manager was in a Japanese-style room in the back, off to the left, and hadn’t noticed Asakawa. Asakawa’s view was blocked by the counter and he couldn’t see into the room. The manager seemed to be watching an American movie on video, not a TV program. He could hear English dialogue as he watched the flickering light from the screen reflected in the glass of a cabinet out front. The built-in cabinet was full of videotapes, neatly lined up in their cases. Asakawa placed his hands on the counter and spoke up. Immediately, a small man in his sixties stuck his head out and bowed, saying, “Oh, welcome.” He must be the same man who had so cheerfully showed the guest register to the guy from the Atami bureau and the lawyer, thought Asakawa, smiling back at him pleasantly.

“I have a reservation, name of Asakawa.”

The man opened his notebook and confirmed the reservation. “You’re in B-4. Can I get you to write your name and address here?”

Asakawa wrote his real name. He’d just sent Nonoyama’s membership card back to him, so he couldn’t use it.

“Just you, then?” The manager looked up at Asakawa, suspiciously. He’d never had anybody stay here alone. At nonmember rates, it was more economical for one person to stay at the hotel. The manager handed over a set of sheets and turned to the cabinet.

“If you’d like you’re free to borrow one. We have most of the popular titles.”

“Oh, you rent videos?” Asakawa ran his gaze casually over the titles of the videos covering the wall. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Back to the Future, Friday the 13th. All popular American films, mostly science fiction. A lot of new releases, too. Probably the cabins were mostly used by groups of young people. There was nothing that grabbed him. Besides, Asakawa had ostensibly come here to work.

“I’m afraid I’ve brought work with me.” Asakawa picked up his portable word processor from where he’d placed it on the floor and showed the manager. Seeing it, the manager seemed to understand why he was staying here alone.

“So, there are dishes and everything?” Asakawa said, just to make sure.

“Yes. Use anything you like.”

The only thing Asakawa needed to use, though, was a kettle to boil water for his cup o’ noodles. He took the sheets and his room key from the manager, who told him how to find B-4 and then said, with odd formality, “Please, make yourself at home.”

Before touching the knob Asakawa put on his rubber gloves. He’d brought them to give him peace of mind, as a charm to ward off the unknown virus.

He opened the door and flipped on the light switch in the entry hall. A hundred-watt bulb lit a spacious living room. Papered walls, carpet, four-person sofa, television, dinette set: everything was new, everything was functionally arranged. Asakawa took off his shoes and went in. There was a balcony on one edge of the living room and small Japanese-style rooms on the ground and first floors. It was a little luxurious for a single guest, after all. He drew the lace curtains and opened the sliding glass door to allow the night air in. The room was perfectly clean, as if to betray his expectations. It suddenly occurred to him that he might go home clueless.

He went into the Japanese-style room off the living room and checked the closet. Nothing. He took off his shirt and slacks and changed into a sweatshirt and sweatpants, hanging his street clothes in the closet. Next he went upstairs and turned on the light in the Japanese-style room. I’m acting like a child, he thought wryly. Before he’d realized it he’d turned on every single light in the place.

With everything sufficiently illuminated, he now opened the bathroom door, gently. He checked inside first, and left the door slightly ajar while he was inside. It reminded him of his fearrituals as a child, when he was too scared to go to the bathroom alone on summer nights. He used to leave the door open a crack and have his dad stand watch outside. A neat shower room stood behind a pane of frosted glass. There wasn’t even a hint of steam, and the area outside the tub and the tub itself were both dry as a bone. It must have been some time since anybody had stayed here. He went to take off his rubber gloves; they stuck to his sweaty hands. The cool highlands breeze blew into the room, disturbing the curtains.

Asakawa filled a glass with ice from the freezer and poured it half full of the whiskey he had bought. He was about to top it off with tap water, but then hesitated. Turning off the tap he persuaded himself that he’d really rather have it straight, on the rocks. He didn’t have the courage to put anything from this room into his mouth. He’d been careless enough to use ice cubes from the freezer, but he was under the impression that micro-organisms didn’t like extreme heat or cold.

He sank back deep into the sofa and turned on the TV. Singing filled the room: some new pop idol. A Tokyo station was showing the same program right about now. He changed channels. He didn’t really intend to watch anything, though, so he adjusted the volume to a suitable level and then opened his bag. He took out a video camera and placed it on the table. If anything strange happened, he wanted to catch it all on tape. He sipped a mouthful of whiskey. It was only a little, but it strengthened up his courage. Asakawa went over in his head again everything he knew. If he couldn’t find a clue here tonight then the article he was trying to write would be dead in the water. But on the other hand, maybe it was better that way. If not finding a clue meant not picking up the virus, well … after all, he had a wife and child to think about. He didn’t want to die, not in some weird way. He propped his feet up on the table.

So, what are you waiting for? he asked himself. Aren’t you afraid? Hey—shouldn’t you be afraid? The angel of death might be coming to get you.

His gaze darted around the room nervously. Asakawa couldn’t fix his eyes on any one point on the wall. He had the feeling that if he did so, his fears would begin to take physical form while he watched.

A chill wind blew in from outside, stronger than before. He closed the window and as he went to draw the curtains he happened to glance at the darkness outside. The roof of B-5 was directly in front of him, and in its shadow the darkness was even deeper. There had been lots of people on the tennis courts and in the restaurant. But here Asakawa was alone. He shut the curtains and looked at his watch. 8:56. He hadn’t even been in this room for thirty minutes. It easily could have been an hour or more, he felt. But just being here wasn’t dangerous in and of itself. He tried to believe that, to calm himself down. After all, how many people must have stayed in B-4 in the six months since these cabins were built? It wasn’t like all of them had died under mysterious circumstances. Only those four, according to his research. Maybe if he dug deeper he’d find more, but at the moment that appeared to be all. Thus, simply being here wasn’t the problem. The problem was what they’d done here.

So, what did they do here?

Asakawa then subtly rephrased the question. What could they have done here?

He’d found nothing resembling a clue—not in the bathroom, not in the bath, not in the closet, not in the fridge. Even assuming there had been something, the manager would have disposed of it when he cleaned the place. Which meant that, instead of sitting here drinking whiskey, he should be talking to the manager. That would be quicker.

He’d drained his first glass; he made his second a little smaller. He couldn’t afford to get drunk. He put a lot of ice in it, and this time he cut it with tap water. His sense of danger must have been numbed a little. He suddenly felt foolish: stealing time from work, coming all the way up here. He took off his glasses, washed his face, then looked at his reflection in the mirror. It was the face of a sick man. Maybe he’d already caught the virus. He gulped down the whiskey-and-water he’d just made and fixed himself another.

Returning from the dining room, Asakawa noticed a notebook on the shelf beneath the telephone stand. The cover said Memories. He leafed through a few pages.

Saturday, April 7

Nonko will never forget this day. Why? That’s a s-e-c-r-e-t. Yuichi is wonderful. Hee-hee! ♥

NONKO

Inns, B&B’s, and the like often had notebooks like this in the rooms, so that guests could write down their memories and impressions. On the next page was a crude drawing of mommy and daddy. Must have been a family trip. It was dated April 14th—also a Saturday, naturally.

Daddys fat,
Mommys fat,
So Im fat too.
Aprul 14nth

Asakawa kept turning pages. He could feel some sort of force urging him to open the pages at the end of the book, but he kept going through them in order. He was afraid that if he messed up the chronology he might miss something.

He couldn’t say for sure, since there were probably a lot of guests who didn’t write anything, but it seemed like there were only people here on Saturdays until summer started. After that the time between each entry shrank. By the end of August there was a steady stream of entries lamenting the end of summer.

Sunday, August 20

Another summer vacation come and gone. And it sucked. Somebody help me! Rescue poor little me! I have a motorbike, 400cc. I’m pretty good-looking.

A bargain!

A.Y.

This guy looked like he’d decided the guest book was a means to advertise himself, maybe find a pen-pal. It looked like a lot of people had the same ideas about the place. When couples stayed here, their entries showed it, while when single people stayed, they wrote about how much they wanted a companion.

Still, it made for interesting reading. Presently his watch showed nine o’clock.

Then he turned the page:

Thursday, August 30

Ulp! Consider yourself warned: you’d better not see it unless you’ve got the guts. You’ll be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.)

S. I.

That was all there was to the message. August 30th was the morning after the four had stayed here. The initials “S.I.” would stand for “Shuichi Iwata”. His entry was different from all the rest. What did it mean? You’d better not see it. What in the world was it? Asakawa closed the guest book and looked at it from the side. There was a slight gap where it didn’t close tightly. He put his finger there and opened it to that page. Ulp! Consider yourself warned: you’d better not see it unless you’ve got the guts. You’ll be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.) S.I. The words jumped out at him. Why did the book want to open to this exact page? He thought for a moment. Perhaps the four had opened the book here and set something heavy on top of it. The weight had created this force that remained even now, trying to open to this page. And maybe whatever they’d placed on top of the page was the “it” that he’d “better not see”. That must be it.

Asakawa looked around anxiously, searching every corner of the shelf beneath the telephone stand. Nothing. Not even a pencil.

He sat back down on the sofa and continued reading. The next entry was dated Saturday, September 1st. But it said only the usual things. It didn’t say if the group of students who had stayed here had seen it. None of the remaining pages mentioned it, either.

Asakawa closed the guest book and lit a cigarette. You’d better not see it unless you’ve got the guts. He imagined that it must be something frightening. He opened the notebook at random and pressed down on the page lightly. Whatever it was must have been heavy enough to overcome the pages’ tendency to close. One or two photos of ghosts, for example, wouldn’t have done the trick. Maybe a weekly, or a hardcover book … Anyway, something you look at. Maybe he’d ask the manager if he remembered finding anything strange left in the cabin after the guests had checked out on August 30th. He wasn’t sure if the manager would even remember, but he figured that if it had been strange enough he would. Asakawa began to get to his feet when the VCR in front of him caught his eye. The TV was still on, showing a famous actress chasing her husband around with a vacuum. A home appliance commercial.

… Yeah, a VHS tape would be heavy enough to keep the notebook open, and they might have had one handy, too.

Still in a crouch, Asakawa ground out his cigarette. He recalled the video collection he had seen in the manager’s office. Maybe they’d happened to watch a particularly interesting horror flick, and thought they’d recommend it to the next guests—hey, this one’s cool, check it out. If that’s all it was … But wait. If that was it, why hadn’t Shuichi Iwata used the name? If he wanted to tell somebody that, say, Friday the 13th was a great movie, wouldn’t it have been easier just to say Friday the 13th was a great movie? He didn’t need to go to all the trouble of actually leaving it on top of the notebook. So maybe it was something that didn’t have a name, something they could only indicate with the word it.

… Well? Worth checking out?

Well, he certainly didn’t have anything to lose, not with no other clues presenting themselves. Besides, sitting around here thinking wasn’t getting him anywhere. Asakawa left the cabin, climbed the stone steps and pushed open the office door.

Just as before, there was no sign of the manager at the counter, only the sound of the television coming from the back room. The guy had retired from his job in the city and decided to live out his years surrounded by Mother Nature, so he’d taken a job as a manager at a resort, but the work turned out to be utterly boring, and now all he did every day was watch videos. That’s how Asakawa interpreted the manager’s situation. Before he had a chance to call the guy, though, he crawled to the doorway and stuck his head out. Asakawa spoke somewhat apologetically.

“I thought I’d maybe borrow a video after all.”

The manager grinned happily. “Go right ahead, whichever you’d like. They’re three hundred yen each.”

Asakawa scanned the titles for scary-looking movies. The Legend of Hell House, The Exorcist, The Omen. He had seen them all in his student days. Nothing else? There had to be some he hadn’t seen. He searched from one end of the shelves to the other, and saw nothing that looked likely. He started over, reading the titles of every one of the two hundred or so videos. And then, on the very bottom shelf, way over in the corner, he noticed a video without a case, fallen over on its side. All the other tapes were encased in jackets with photos and imposing logos, but this one lacked even a label.

“What’s that there?” After he’d asked the question, Asakawa realized that he’d used a pronoun, that, as he pointed to the tape. If it didn’t have a name, what else was he supposed to call it?

The manager gave a bothered frown and replied, none too brightly, “Huh?” Then he picked up the tape. “This? This isn’t anything.”

… Hey, I wonder if this guy even knows what’s on that tape.

“Have you seen it? That one,” asked Asakawa.

“Let me see.” The manager cocked his head repeatedly, as if he couldn’t figure out what something like this was doing here.

“If you don’t mind, could I borrow that tape?”

Instead of replying, the manager slapped his knee. “Ah, I remember now. It was kicking around in one of the rooms. I just figured it was one of ours and brought it here, but …”

“This wouldn’t have happened to be in B-4, I don’t suppose?” Asakawa asked slowly, pressing the point home. The manager laughed and shook his head.

“I haven’t the foggiest. It was a couple of months ago.”

Asakawa asked once more, “Have you … seen … this video?”

The manager just shook his head. The smile disappeared from his face. “No.”

“Well, let me rent it.”

“You going to record something on the TV?”

“Yeah, well, I, ah …”

The manager glanced at the video. “The tab is broken. See? You can’t record on it.”

Maybe it was the alcohol, but Asakawa was getting irritated. I’m telling you to rent it to me, you idiot, just hand it over, he griped to himself. But no matter how drunk he was, Asakawa was never able to come on very strong with other people.

“Please. I’ll bring it right back.”

He bowed. The manager couldn’t figure out why his guest was showing so much interest in this old thing. Maybe there was something interesting on it, something somebody had forgotten to erase … Now he wished he’d watched it when he found it. He felt the sudden temptation to watch it right now, but he couldn’t very well refuse a guest who had asked for it. The manager handed over the tape. Asakawa reached for his wallet, but the manager stopped him with his hand.

“That’s alright, you don’t need to pay. I can’t charge you for this, now, can I?”

“Thanks a lot. I’ll bring it right back.”

“If it turns out to be interesting, then please do!” The manager’s curiosity had been piqued. He’d already seen every video here at least once, and most of them had ceased to interest him. How did I miss that one anyway? It would have killed a few hours. Aw, but it probably only has some stupid TV show recorded on it anyway.

The manager was sure the video would come back right away.

2

The tape had been rewound. It was an ordinary 120-minute tape, the sort you could get anywhere, and, as the manager had pointed out, the anti-erasure tabs had been broken off. Asakawa turned on the VCR and pushed the tape into the slot. He sat down cross-legged right in front of the screen and pressed play. He heard the capstans start to turn. He had high hopes that the key to unlock the riddle of four people’s deaths was hidden on this tape. He’d pushed play fully intending to be satisfied with just a clue, any clue. There can’t be any danger, he was thinking. What harm could come from just watching a videotape?

Random sounds and distorted images flickered on the screen, but once he had selected the right channel, the picture steadied. Then the screen went black as ink. This was the video’s first scene. There was no sound. Wondering if it had broken, he brought his face close to the screen. Consider yourself warned: you’d better not see it. You’ll be sorry you did. Shuichi Iwata’s words came back to him. Why should he be sorry? Asakawa was used to things like this. He’d covered the local news. No matter what sort of horrific images he might be shown, he felt confident he wouldn’t regret watching.

In the middle of the black screen he thought he saw a pinpoint of light begin to flicker. It gradually expanded, jumping around to the left and right, before finally coming to rest on the left-hand side. Then it branched out, becoming a frayed bundle of lights, crawling around like worms, which finally formed themselves into words. Not the kind of captions one normally saw on film, though. These were poorly-written, as if scrawled by a white brush on jet-black paper. Somehow, though, he managed to make out what they said: WATCH UNTIL THE END. A command. These words disappeared, and the next floated up into view. YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE LOST … The last word didn’t make much sense, but being eaten didn’t sound too pleasant. It seemed that there must have been an “or else” implied there. Don’t turn off the video halfway through, or else something awful will happen: it was a threat.

YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE LOST … The words grew larger and chased all the black from the screen. It was a flat change, from black to milk-white. It was a patchy, unnatural color, and it began to resemble a series of concepts painted on a canvas, one over another. The unconscious, squirming, worrying, finding an exit, spurting out—or maybe it was the throb of life. Thought had energy, bestially satiating itself on darkness. Strangely, he felt no desire to push stop. Not because he was unafraid of whatever wanted to eat him, but because this intense outpouring of energy felt good.

Something red burst onto the monochrome screen. At the same time he heard the ground rumble, from an indefinable direction. The sound seemed to come from everywhere, such that he began to imagine that the whole cabin was shaking. It didn’t feel like the sound was coming from those little speakers. The sluggish red fluid exploded and flew about, sometimes occupying the whole screen. From black to white, and now red … It was nothing but a violent succession of colors, he hadn’t seen any natural scenery yet. Just concepts in the abstract, etched vividly into his brain by the brilliantly shifting colors. It was tiring, actually. And then, as if it had read the viewer’s mind, the red retreated from the screen, and a mountain vista stretched out. At one glance he could tell it was a volcano, with a gentle peak. The volcano was sending up white puffs of smoke against a clear blue sky. The camera seemed to be situated somewhere at the foot of the mountain, where the ground was covered with rugged blackish-brown lava.

Again the screen was swathed in darkness. The clear blue sky was instantaneously painted black, and then, a few seconds later, a scarlet liquid spurted out from the center of the screen, flowing downward. A second explosion. The spray thrown up by it burned red, and as a result he could begin to make out, faintly, the outline of the mountain. The images were now concrete where they had previously been abstract. This was clearly a volcanic eruption, a natural phenomenon, a scene that could be explained. The molten lava flowing from the mouth of the volcano threaded its way down through ravines and headed this way. Where was the camera positioned? Unless it was an aerial shot, it looked like the camera was about to be swallowed up. The rumblings of the earth increased until the whole screen seemed about to be engulfed in molten rock, and then the scene abruptly changed. There was no continuity from one scene to the next, only sudden shifts.

Thick, black letters floated into view against a white background. Their edges were blurred, but he somehow managed to make out the character for “mountain”. It was surrounded by black splatters, as if it had been written sloppily by a brush dripping with ink. The character was motionless, the screen was calm.

Another sudden shift. A pair of dice, tumbling around in the rounded bottom of a lead bowl. The background was white, the bottom of the bowl was black, and the one on the dice was red. The same three colors he’d seen so often already. The dice rolled around soundlessly, finally coming to rest: a one and a five. The single red dot and the five black ones arranged on the white faces of the dice … What did it mean?

In the next scene people appeared for the first time. An old woman, face lined with wrinkles, sat perched on a pair of tatami mats on a wooden floor. Her hands rested on her knees and her left shoulder was thrust slightly forward. She was speaking, slowly, looking straight ahead. Her eyes were different sizes—when she blinked, it looked like she was winking instead.

She was speaking in an unfamiliar dialect, and he could only catch every other word or so:

… your health … since … spend all your time … bound to get you. Understand? Be careful of … you’re going to … you listen to granny now because … there’s no need to …

The old expressionless woman made her statement, then vanished. There were a lot of words he didn’t understand. But he had the impression he’d just been lectured to. She was telling him to be careful of something, warning him. Who was this old lady talking to—and about?

The face of a newborn baby filled the screen. From somewhere he could hear a baby’s first cry. This time, too, he was sure it didn’t come from the television speakers. It came from very near, beneath his face. It was very like a real voice. On-screen, he could now see hands holding the baby. The left hand was under its head, and the right was behind its back, holding it carefully. They were beautiful hands. Totally absorbed by the image, Asakawa found himself holding his own hands in the same position. He heard the birth cry directly below his own chin. Startled, he pulled back his hands. He had felt something. Something warm and wet—like amniotic fluid, or blood—and the weight of flesh. Asakawa jerked his hands apart, as if casting something aside, and brought his palms close to his face. A smell lingered. The faint smell of blood—had it come from the womb, or … ? His hands felt wet. But in reality, they weren’t even damp. He restored his gaze to the screen. It still showed the baby’s face. In spite of the crying its face was swathed in a peaceful expression, and the shaking of its body had spread to its groin, even wiggling its little thing.

The next scene: a hundred human faces. Each one displayed hatred and animosity; he couldn’t see any distinguishing features other than that. The myriad faces, looking as if they had been painted on a flat surface, gradually receded into the depths of the screen. And as each face diminished in size, the total number increased, until they had swollen to a great multitude. It was a strange multitude, though—existing only from the neck up—but the sounds welling up from them befit a crowd. Their mouths were shouting something, even as they shrank and multiplied. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. It sounded like the commotion of a great gathering, but the voices were tinged with criticism, abuse. The voices were clearly not welcoming or cheering. Finally he made out a word: “Liar!” And another: “Fraud!” By now there were perhaps a thousand faces: they had become nothing but black particles, filling the screen until it looked like the television had been turned off, but the voices continued. It was more than Asakawa could bear. All that criticism, directed right at him. That’s how it felt.

When the next scene appeared, it showed a television on a wooden stand. It was an old-fashioned nineteen-inch set with a round channel selector, and a rabbit-ear antenna sat on its wooden cabinet. Not a play within a play, but a TV within a TV. The television within had nothing on its screen yet. But it seemed to be on: the red light by the channel knob was lit. Then the screen-within-the-screen wavered. It stabilized and then wavered again, over and over, with increasing frequency. Then a single character appeared, hazily: sada. The word faded in and out of focus, distorted, and began to look like another before disappearing altogether, like chalk on a blackboard wiped with a wet rag.

As he watched, Asakawa began to find it hard to breathe. He could hear his heart beat, feel the pressure of the blood flowing in his veins. A smell, a touch, a sour-sweet taste stabbing his tongue. Strange—something was stimulating his five senses, some medium besides the sounds and visions that appeared as if he were suddenly recalling them.

Then the face of a man appeared. Unlike the previous images, this man was definitely alive—he had a pulsating vitality. As he watched, Asakawa began to feel hatred toward him. He had no idea why he should hate this man. He wasn’t particularly ugly. His forehead sloped a bit, but other than that he was actually rather well-formed. But there was something dangerous in his eyes. They were the eyes of a beast closing in on its prey. The man’s face was sweaty. His breathing was ragged, his gaze was turned upward, and his body was moving rhythmically. Behind the man grew scattered trees, the afternoon sunlight shone between their branches. The man brought his eyes down and looked straight ahead again, and his gaze locked with the viewer’s. Asakawa and the man stared at each other for a while. The stifling sensation grew, and he suddenly wanted to tear his gaze away. The man was drooling; his eyes were bloodshot. His neck muscles began to fill the screen in a closeup, then disappeared off the left side of the screen. For a while only the black shade of the trees could be seen. A scream began to well up from deep down inside. At the same time, the man’s shoulder came back into view, then his neck, and finally his face again. His shoulders were bare, and the right one carried a deep, bloody gash several centimeters long. Drops of blood seemed to be sucked toward the camera, growing larger and larger until they hit the lens and clouded over the view. The screen cut to black once, twice, almost like blinking, and when the light returned everything was red. There was a murderous look in the man’s eyes. His face drew closer, along with his shoulder, the bone peeking out white where the flesh had been gouged out. Asakawa felt a violent pressure on his chest. He saw trees again. The sky was spinning. The color of the sky fading into sunset, the rustling of dry grass. He saw dirt, then weeds, and then sky again. Somewhere he heard a baby crying. He wasn’t sure if it was the little infant from before. Finally, the edge of the screen turned black, darkness gradually encroaching in a ring on the center. Dark and light were clearly defined now. At the center of the screen, a small round moon of light floated in the middle of the darkness. There was a man’s face in the moon. A fist-sized clump of something fell from the moon, making a dull thud. Another, and then another. With each sound, the image jumped and swayed. The sound of flesh being smashed, and then true darkness. Even then, a pulse remained. Blood still circulated, throbbing. The scene went on and on. A darkness that seemed as if it would never end. Then, just as at the beginning, words faded into view. The writing in the first scene had been crude, like that of a child just learning to write, but this was somewhat better. White letters, drifting into view and then fading, read:

Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly …

Asakawa gulped and stared wide-eyed at the television. But then the scene changed yet again. A complete and utter change. A commercial came on, a perfectly ordinary, common television commercial. A romantic old neighborhood on a summer’s evening, an actress in a light cotton robe sitting on her verandah, fireworks lighting up the night sky. A commercial for mosquito-repelling coils. After about thirty seconds the commercial ended, and just as another scene was about to start, the screen returned to its previous state. Darkness, with the last afterglow of faded words. Then the sound of static as the tape ended.

Bug-eyed, Asakawa rewound the tape and replayed the last scene. The same sequence repeated itself: a commercial interrupted at the most important point. Asakawa stopped the video and turned off the television. But he kept staring at the screen. His throat was parched.

“What the hell?”

There was nothing else to say. One unintelligible scene after another, and the only thing he’d comprehended was that anybody who watched would die in exactly a week. And the part which told how to avoid this fate had been taped over with a commercial.

… Who erased it? Those four?

Asakawa’s jaw quivered. If he didn’t know that the four young people had died simultaneously, he could have laughed this off as sheer nonsense. But he knew. They had died, mysteriously, as predicted.

At that moment the phone rang. Asakawa’s heart nearly jumped out of his chest at the sound. He picked up the receiver. He felt as though something were concealing itself, watching him from the darkness.

“Hello,” he finally managed to croak. There was no reply. Something was swirling around in a dark, cramped place. There was a deep rumble, as if the earth were resounding, and the damp smell of soil. There was a chill at his ear, and the hairs on the nape of his neck stood up. The pressure on his chest increased, and bugs from the bowels of the earth were crawling on his ankles and his spine, clinging to him. Unspeakable thoughts and long-ripened hatred almost reached him through the receiver. Asakawa slammed down the receiver. Covering his mouth, he ran to the bathroom. Chills ran up and down his backbone, waves of nausea swept over him: the thing on the other end of the line hadn’t said anything, but Asakawa knew what it wanted. It was a confirmation call.

You’ve seen it now, you know what that means. Do like it said. Or else …

Asakawa vomited over the toilet. He didn’t have much to throw up. The whiskey he’d drunk earlier flowed out of him now, mixed with bile. The bitterness seeped into his eyes, squeezing out tears; it hurt his nose. But he felt that if he threw up everything now, here, maybe the images he’d just watched would go flowing out of him, too.

“If I don’t, what? I don’t know! What do you want me to do? Huh? What am I supposed to do?”

He sat on the bathroom floor and yelled, trying not to give in to his fear. “Look, those four erased it, the important part … I don’t understand it! Help me out here!”

All he could do was make excuses. Asakawa jumped back from the toilet, not even realizing how awful he looked, and peered around the room in every direction, bowing his head in supplication to whatever might be there. He didn’t realize that he was trying to look pathetic, to draw sympathy. Asakawa stood up and rinsed his mouth at the sink, swallowing some water. He felt a breeze. He looked at the living room window. The curtains were trembling.

Hey, I thought I shut that.

He was certain that before drawing the curtains he’d shut the sliding glass door tightly. He remembered doing it. He couldn’t stop trembling. For no reason at all, the image of skyscrapers at night flashed across his brain, the way the lighted and unlighted windows formed a checkerboard pattern, sometimes even forming characters. If you saw the buildings as huge, oblong tombstones, then the lights were epitaphs. The image disappeared, but the white lace curtains still danced in the breeze.

In a frenzy, Asakawa grabbed his bag from the closet and threw his things inside. He couldn’t stay here one second longer.

I don’t care what anybody says. If I stay here I won’t last the night, forget about the week.

Still in his sweats, he stepped down into the entryway. He tried to think rationally before going outside. Don’t just run away in fear, try to figure out some way to save yourself! An instantaneous survival instinct: he went back into the living room and pushed the eject button. He wrapped the videotape tightly in a bath towel and stowed it in his bag. The tape was his only clue, he couldn’t afford to leave it behind. Maybe if he figured out the riddle as to how the scenes were connected he’d find a way to save himself. No matter what, he only had a week left. He looked at his watch: 10:18. He was sure he’d finished watching at 10:04. Suddenly, the time seemed quite important to him. Asakawa left the key on the table and went out, leaving all the lights on. He ran to his car, not even stopping by the office first, and jammed his key in the ignition.

“I can’t do this alone. I’ll have to ask him to help.” Talking to himself, Asakawa put the car in motion, but he couldn’t help glancing in the rearview mirror. No matter how he floored it, he couldn’t seem to get up any speed. It was like being chased in a dream, running in slow-motion. Over and over he looked at the mirror. But the black shadow chasing him was nowhere to be seen.

PART THREE

Gusts

1

October 12—Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asakawa’s survey had included questions like this:

Tell me about your dreams for the future.

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

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

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

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

“I did another one last night.”

Again?

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

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

“Sure. But why?”

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

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

“Never mind that, just do it, okay?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No excited voices in the background or anything?”

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

“Well, okay, then. Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

“Yeah, sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what do you think?” asked Asakawa.

“It’s child’s play.”

“Huh?”

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

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

“So what are you getting at?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s The Night Show on NBS.”

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

“I get it.”

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

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

“Gotcha. I’ll look into it.”

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

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

“Aren’t you scared?”

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

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

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

“That’s mine, too?”

Ryuji downed his beer in one swig and thought for a moment. “Of course. We’ve got a deadline. Don’t you have a buddy you can rely on? If so, get him to help.”

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

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

“Not everybody’s like you, you know.”

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

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

“Yeah. I’ll give it a try.”

Ryuji sat at the dining room table holding the remote.

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

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

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

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

“Do you recognize this man?” Ryuji asked.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Looks faintly sinister.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s drink a toast.”

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

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

“I haven’t forgotten.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know.”

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

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

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

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

3

October 13—Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So, what is it you want from me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, of course.”

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

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

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

“Just a moment, please.”

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

“An empty case, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I found two.”

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

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

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

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

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

The airwaves had been hijacked.

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello? Excuse me …”

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

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

“Are you calling for Professor Takayama?”

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

“He’s not back yet.”

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

“I see. My name is Asakawa.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 14—Sunday

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

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

“Where were you last night?”

“Huh? Oh. Asakawa?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you getting at?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How can you be sure?”

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

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

“Right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is this? What does it mean?”

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

“We’ve only got four days left!”

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

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

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

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

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

Asakawa still glared at him resentfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asakawa looked at Ryuji, uncertain how to respond.

“Don’t be shy. Mai’s quite the chef.”

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

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

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

“Oh, sorry.”

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

“You haven’t shown Mai the video.”

“What do you think I am?”

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

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

“The antenna?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You too, huh? So what does it mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about?”

“He asked if we were thinking about selling.”

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

“Did he make a good offer?”

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

“Seventy million yen.”

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

“So what did you tell him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What … what’s wrong?”

“We have to talk. Come on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This morning.”

“Really?”

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

“What time?”

“Why do you ask?”

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

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

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

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

Shizu looked like she was about to burst into tears.

“On my lap.”

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

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

“Shut up! That doesn’t matter!”

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

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

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

“It’s not for real, right? Right?”

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

5

October 15—Monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A rental car?”

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

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

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

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

“Enter! It’s unlocked.”

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

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

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

“Relax!”

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

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

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

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

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

Asakawa nodded his head like a little boy.

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

“I understand,” Asakawa said, meekly.

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

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

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

1) | Intro | 83 | seconds | [0] | abstract
2) | Red fluid | 49 | ” | [0] | abstract
3) | Mt Mihara | 55 | ” | [11] | real
4) | Mt Mihara erupting | 32 | ” | [6] | real
5) | The word ‘mountain’ | 56 | ” | [0] | abstract
6) | Dice | 103 | ” | [0] | abstract
7) | Old woman | 111 | ” | [0] | abstract
8) | Infant | 125 | ” | [33] | real
9) | Faces | 117 | ” | [0] | abstract
10) | Old TV | 141 | ” | [35] | real
11) | Man’s face | 186 | ” | [44] | real
12) | Ending | 132 | ” | [0] | abstract

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

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

Asakawa’s expression was full of doubt.

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

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

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

Here Ryuji paused for a second.

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay, okay. Get on with it.”

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

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

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

“How does this make you feel?” Ryuji asked. “Like somehow I’m the one being reproached.

Like they’re calling me a liar, a fraud.”

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

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

“Well?” asked Ryuji again.

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

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

“They weren’t?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asakawa couldn’t hear him.

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

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

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

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

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

Asakawa reached out a hand to wake Ryuji, but then pulled it back. They weren’t at their destination yet. Asakawa didn’t even really know what their destination was. All Ryuji had done was tell him to drive to Kamakura. He didn’t know where they were going or why they were going there. It made him a nervous, irritable driver. Ryuji had packed in a hurry, saying he’d explain where they were going once they were in the car. But once underway, he’d said, “I didn’t sleep last night—don’t wake me till Kamakura,” and then he’d promptly gone to sleep.

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

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

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

“What do we do now?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that so? Please, have a seat.”

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

“Was it here, in this house?”

“Yes. Professor Takatsuka introduced us.”

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

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

“So you must be the Professor’s … ?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What am I looking for?”

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

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

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

Ryuji was right. Men could not bear children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell?”

“That’s the inn the guy runs.”

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

“You’d rather not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you think?” asked Ryuji.

“No question about it. This is it.”

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

6

October 16—Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryuji poked Asakawa in the arm.

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

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

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

“Hey, have you ever died?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What else?”

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

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

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

“That’s about the size of it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

That again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asakawa asked himself: if the charm included a command to kill someone, would he be able to do it? Would he be able to kill a perfect stranger to save his own life? But what worried him more was, if it came to that, who would be the one to carry out the charm? He shook his head furiously. Stop thinking such stupid things. All he could do at the moment was pray that this Sadako Yamamura person’s desire was something that anybody could fulfill.

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asakawa looked back at Ryuji.

“I’m fine with that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8

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

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

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

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

“… And how old was she at the time?”

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

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

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

“And when do you plan on coming back?”

“As soon as I can.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And they weren’t married, right?”

“Exactly. Heihachiro Ikuma already had a family.”

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

“Okay, I’m with you. Go on.”

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

“Was she involved in some sort of incident?”

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

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

“You read my mind.”

“Idiot. It was obvious.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That’d be great.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Out of modesty?”

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

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

“I’m afraid so.”

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

“Right.”

“Which first?”

“Huh?”

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

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

“Could you start with the daughter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

“Try me.”

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

“Huh?” Yoshino was momentarily at a loss for words.

“See. I told you you wouldn’t believe it.”

“You mean they’re like psychic photos?”

“The phrase doesn’t even begin to cover it. She actually caused these images to appear on a TV tube. She’s projecting moving images onto a TV.”

“So, what, she’s a production agency?” Yoshino laughed at his own joke. Asakawa didn’t get angry. He understood why Yoshino had to joke. He listened silently to his friend’s carefree laughter.

9:40 p.m. As he climbed the stairs out of Yotsuya Sanchome Station on the Marunouchi subway line, a gust of wind threatened to blow Yoshino’s hat off, and he had to hold it down onto his head with both hands. He looked around him for the fire station he was supposed to use as a landmark. It was right there on the corner. A minute’s walk down the street took him to his destination.

A sign stood on the sidewalk, reading Theater Group Soaring; next to it a flight of stairs led down to a basement, from the depths of which came the voices of young men and women, raised in mingled singing and recitation. They probably had a performance coming up and were planning to rehearse until the trains stopped running. He didn’t have to be an arts reporter to figure that out. But he spent most of his time chasing after crime stories. He had to admit it felt a little weird visiting the rehearsal space of a repertory theater company.

The stairs to the basement were made of steel and every step clanged. If the founding members of the company had no recollection of Sadako Yamamura, then the thread would snap, and that psychic’s life, on which all their hopes rested, would sink back into the darkness. Theater Group Soaring had been founded in 1957, and Sadako had joined in 1965. There were only four founding members still around today, including a guy named Uchimura, a playwright and director who spoke for the group.

Yoshino gave his card to a twenty-something intern standing at the entrance to the rehearsal hall and asked him to call Uchimura.

“You have a visitor from the Daily News, sir.” The intern spoke in a resonant, actorly voice, calling to the director, who sat by the wall watching over everyone’s performances. Uchimura turned around in surprise. Realizing his visitor was from the press, he was all smiles as he approached Yoshino. Theater companies all treated the press with great politeness. Even the smallest mention in a newspaper’s arts column could make a big difference in ticket sales. With only a week left until opening night, he assumed the reporter had come to take a peek at the rehearsals. The Daily News had never paid much attention to him before, so Uchimura poured on the charm, determined to make the most of the chance. But the minute he learned the real reason for Yoshino’s visit, Uchimura abruptly seemed to lose all interest in him. Suddenly he was extremely busy. He looked around the hall until he spied a smallish actor in his fifties, seated on a chair. “Over here, Shin,” he said in a shrill voice, summoning the man. Something in the overly familiar tone he used when addressing the middle-aged actor—or maybe it was his womanish voice itself, combined with his ungainly long arms and legs—gave the brawny Yoshino the creeps. This guy is different, he thought.

“Shin baby, you don’t go on until the second act. Be a dear and talk to this man about Sadako Yamamura. You remember that creepy girl, don’t you?”

Shin’s voice was one Yoshino had heard before, dubbing Japanese dialogue onto Western movies shown on TV. Shin Arima was better known as a voice actor than for his work onstage. He was one of the other original members still in the troupe.

“Sadako Yamamura?” Arima scratched his balding head as he tried to reel in quarter-century-old memories. “Oh, that Sadako Yamamura.” He grimaced. Evidently the woman had left a deep impression on him.

“You remember? Well, then, I’m rehearsing here, so take him up to my room, won’t you?” Uchimura bowed slightly and walked back toward the assembled players; by the time he reached the place where he’d been sitting, he was once more every inch the lordly director.

Opening a door marked President, Arima pointed to a leather sofa set and said, “Have a seat.” If this was the President’s office, it meant that the troupe was organized like a business. No doubt the director doubled as CEO.

“So what brings you out in the middle of a storm like this?” Arima’s face glistened red with sweat from rehearsing, but a kindly smile lurked in the depths of his eyes. The director looked like the type of person who was always weighing the other’s motives while conversing, but Arima was the kind of guy who answered everything you asked him honestly, without covering anything up. Interviews could either be easy or painful, depending on the subject’s personality.

“I’m sorry to bother you when you’re so busy like this.” Yoshino sat down and took out his notepad. He assumed his usual pose, pen clutched in his right hand.

“I never expected to hear the name Sadako Yamamura, not now. That was ages ago.”

Arima was recalling his youth. He missed the youthful energy he’d had then, running away from the commercial theater company he’d originally belonged to and founding a new troupe with his friends.

“Mr Arima, when you placed her name a few minutes ago you said, ‘that Sadako Yamamura.’ What exactly did you mean by that?”

“That girl—let me see, when was it she joined, anyway? I believe we’d only been around a few years. The company was really taking off then, and we had more kids wanting to join every year. Anyway, that Sadako, she was a strange one.”

“In what way was she strange?”

“Hmm.” Arima put his hand to his jaw and thought for a while. Come to think of it, why do I have the impression that she was strange?

“Was there something in particular about her, something that stood out?”

“No, to look at her, she was just an ordinary girl. A little tall, but quiet. She was always alone.”

“Alone?”

“Well, usually the interns become quite close to each other. But she never tried to get involved with the others.”

There was always someone like that in any group. It was hard for Yoshino to imagine that this alone had made her stand out.

“How would you describe her, say, in a word?”

“In a word? Hmm. Eerie, I’d have to say.” Without hesitating, he called her “eerie.” And Uchimura had called her “that creepy girl”. Yoshino couldn’t help but feel sorry for a young woman of eighteen whom everybody characterized as eerie. He began to imagine some grotesque figure of a woman.

“What was it about her that made her seem eerie?”

Now that he stopped to think about it, it seemed odd to Arima that his impressions of an intern who’d been around for no longer than a year, and twenty-five years ago at that, should still seem so fresh. There was something tugging at the back of his mind. Something had happened, something that had served to fix her name in his memory.

“Oh, yes, now I remember. It was right in this room.” Arima looked around the president’s office. Thinking back on the incident, he could vividly recall even how the furniture had been arranged in those days, when this room was still being used as the main office.

“You see, we’ve rehearsed in this space since the beginning, but it used to be a lot smaller. This room we’re in now used to be our main office. There were lockers over there, and we had a frosted-glass divider standing right about here … Right, and there used to be a TV right there—well, we have a different one there now.” Arima pointed as he spoke.

“A TV?” Yoshino narrowed his eyes and adjusted his grip on his pen.

“Right. One of those old black and white jobs.”

“Okay. So what happened?” Yoshino urged him to go on.

“Rehearsal had just ended and nearly everybody had gone home. I wasn’t happy with one of my lines, and I came up here to go over my part one more time. I was right over there, see …” Arima pointed to the door. “I was standing there, looking into the room, and through the frosted glass I could see the TV screen flickering. I thought, well, someone’s watching TV. Mind you, I wasn’t mistaken. It was on the other side of the divider, so I couldn’t actually see what was on the screen, but I could see the quavering black and white light. There was no sound. The room was dim, and as I came around the divider, I wondered who was in front of the TV, and I peered at the person’s face. It was Sadako Yamamura. But when I came around to the other side of the divider and stood beside her, there was nothing on the screen. Of course, I automatically assumed that she’d just switched it off. At that point, I had no doubts yet. But …”

Arima seemed reluctant to continue.

“Please, go on.”

“I spoke to her. I said, ‘You’d better hurry home before the trains stop running.’ And I turned on the desk lamp. But it wouldn’t turn on. I looked and saw that it wasn’t plugged in. I crouched down to plug it in, and that’s when I noticed it: the television wasn’t plugged in, either.”

Arima vividly recalled the chill that had run up his spine when he saw the plug lying there on the floor.

Yoshino wanted to confirm what he’d just heard. “So even though it wasn’t plugged in, the television was definitely on?”

“That’s right. It made me shudder, let me tell you. I raised my head without thinking and looked at Sadako. What was she doing sitting there in front of an unplugged television set? She didn’t meet my gaze, but just kept staring at the screen, with a faint smile on her lips.”

Arima seemed to remember the smallest detail. The episode had obviously made a deep impression on him.

“And did you tell anyone about this?”

“Naturally. I told Uchy—that is, Uchimura, the director, whom you just met—and also Shigemori.”

“Mr Shigemori?”

“He was the real founder of the company. Uchimura is actually our second leader.”

“Ah-ha. So how did Mr Shigemori react to your story?”

“He was playing mah-jongg at the time, but he was fascinated. He always did have a weakness for women, and it seemed he’d had his eye on her for a while, planning to make her his. Then that evening, after he’d had a few, he started talking crazy, saying ‘tonight I’m going to storm Sadako’s apartment’. We didn’t know what to do. It was just drunken babbling—we couldn’t take it too seriously, but we couldn’t go along with it, either. After a while, everybody went home, and Shigemori was left alone. And in the end we never knew if he actually went to Sadako’s apartment that night or not. Because the next day, when Shigemori showed up at the rehearsal space, he looked like a completely different person. He was pale and silent, and he just sat in his chair saying absolutely nothing. Then he died, right there, just like going to sleep.”

Startled, Yoshino looked up. “What was the cause of death?”

“Cardiac paralysis. Today they’d call it ‘sudden heart failure’, I guess. He was pushing himself pretty hard to get ready for a premiere, and I think he just overdid it.”

“So basically, nobody knows if something happened between Sadako and Shigemori.”

Yoshino pressed the point, and Arima gave a definite nod. No wonder she’d left such a strong impression, Yoshino thought.

“What happened to her after that?”

“She quit. I think she was only with us for a year or two.”

“And then what did she do, after she quit?”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there.”

“What do most people do after they quit the troupe?”

“People who are really dedicated try to join another company.”

“Do you think Sadako Yamamura might have done that?”

“She was a bright girl, and her acting instincts weren’t bad at all. But she had such personality defects. I mean, this business is all about personal relationships. I don’t think she was really cut out for it.”

“So you’re saying there’s a possibility she left the theater world altogether?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Isn’t there anybody who might know what happened to her?”

“Maybe one of the other interns who was here at the time.”

“Would you happen to have any of their names and addresses?”

“Hold on.” Arima stood up and walked over to the shelves built into the wall. Bound files were lined up from one end of the shelf to the other; he took one down. It contained the portfolios applicants submitted when they took the entrance exam.

“Including her, there were eight interns who joined in 1965.” He waved their portfolios in the air.

“May I have a look?”

“Go right ahead.”

Each portfolio had two photos attached, a head shot and a full-body shot. Trying to remain calm, Yoshino pulled out Sadako Yamamura’s portfolio. He looked at her photos.

“Hey, didn’t you say she was ‘eerie’ a few minutes ago?” Yoshino was confused. There was too much of a gap between the Sadako he’d imagined from Arima’s description and the Sadako in the photos. “Eerie? You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve never seen such a pretty face.”

Yoshino wondered why he had phrased it that way—why he’d said “pretty face” instead of “pretty girl”. Certainly her facial features were perfectly regular. But she lacked a certain womanly roundness. But looking at the full-body shot, he had to admit that her slender waist and ankles were strikingly feminine. She was beautiful—and yet, the passage of twenty-five years had corroded their impressions of her, until they remembered her as “eerie”, as “that creepy girl”. Normally they should have recalled her as “that wonderfully beautiful young woman”. Yoshino’s interest was piqued by this “eeriness” that seemed to elbow out the salient prettiness of her face.

9

October 17—Wednesday

Standing at the intersection of Omotesando and Aoyama-dori, Yoshino once more took out his notebook. 6-1 Minami Aoyama, Sugiyama Lodgings. That had been Sadako’s address twenty-five years before. The address had him worried. He followed Omotesando as it curved, and sure enough, 6-1 was the block opposite the Nezu Museum, one of the more upmarket districts in the city. Just as he’d feared, there were nothing but imposing red-brick condos where the cheap Sugiyama Lodgings should have been.

Who were you kidding anyway? How were you supposed to follow this woman’s tracks twenty-five years later?

His only remaining lead was the other kids who’d joined the theater group at the same time as Sadako. Of the seven who’d come in that year, he’d only been able to find contact information for four. If none of them knew anything about Sadako’s whereabouts, then the trail would have gone dead. And Yoshino had a feeling that was exactly what would happen. He looked at his watch: eleven in the morning. He dashed into a nearby stationery shop to send a fax to the Izu Oshima bureau. He might as well tell Asakawa everything he’d found out up to this point. At that very moment, Asakawa and Ryuji were at that “bureau”, Hayatsu’s home.

“Hey, Asakawa, calm down!” Ryuji yelled toward Asakawa, who was pacing around the room with his back turned. “Panicking won’t help, you know.”

The typhoon warnings flowed steadily from the radio: maximum wind velocity, barometric pressure near the eye of the storm, millibars, north-northeasterly winds, areas of violent winds and rain, heaving swells … It all rubbed Asakawa the wrong way.

At the moment, Typhoon No. 21 was centered on a point in the sea roughly a hundred and fifty kilometers south from Cape Omaezaki, advancing in a north-northeasterly direction at a speed of roughly twenty kilometers an hour, maintaining wind speeds of forty meters per second. At this rate it would hit the sea just south of Oshima by evening. It would probably be tomorrow—Thursday—before air and sea travel was restored. At least, that was Hayatsu’s forecast.

“Thursday, he says!” Asakawa was seething. My deadline is tomorrow night at ten! You damn typhoon, hurry up and blow through, or turn into a tropical depression, or something. “When the hell are we going to be able to catch a plane or a boat off this island?” Asakawa wanted to get angry at someone, but he didn’t even know who. I never should’ve come here. I’ll regret it forever. And that’s not all—I don’t even know where to begin regretting. I never should have watched that video. I never should have got curious about Tomoko Oishi and Shuichi Iwata’s deaths. I never should have taken a cab that day … Shit.

“Don’t you know how to relax? Complaining to Mr Hayatsu isn’t going to get you anywhere.” Ryuji grabbed Asakawa’s arm, with an unexpected gentleness. “Think about it this way. Maybe the charm is something that can only be carried out here on the island. It’s at least possible. Why didn’t those brats use the charm? Maybe they didn’t have the money to come to Oshima. It’s plausible. Maybe these stormclouds’ll have a silver lining—at least try to believe it, and maybe you’ll be able to calm down.”

“That’s if we can figure out what the charm is!” Asakawa brushed away Ryuji’s hand. Asakawa saw Hayatsu and his wife Fumiko exchange a glance, and it seemed to him they were laughing. Two grown men going on about charms.

“What’s so funny?” He started to advance on them, but Ryuji grabbed his arm, with more force than before, and pulled him back.

“Knock it off. You’re wasting your energy.”

Seeing Asakawa’s irritation, the kind-hearted Hayatsu had begun to feel almost responsible for transportation being disrupted on account of the typhoon. Or perhaps he was just sympathetic at the sight of people suffering so because of the storm. He prayed for the success of Asakawa’s project. A fax was due to arrive from Tokyo, but waiting seemed only to ratchet up Asakawa’s annoyance. Hayatsu tried to defuse the situation.

“How is your investigation coming?” Hayatsu asked gently, seeking to calm Asakawa.

“Well …”

“One of Shizuko Yamamura’s childhood friends lives right nearby. If you’d like, I can call him over and you can hear what he has to say. Old Gen won’t be out fishing on a day like this. I’m sure he’s bored—he’d be happy to come over.”

Hayatsu figured that if he gave Asakawa something else to investigate it would be bound to distract him. “He’s nearing seventy, so I don’t know how well he’ll be able to answer your questions, but it has to be better than just waiting.”

“Alright …”

Without even waiting for the answer, Hayatsu turned around and called to his wife in the kitchen: “Hey, call Gen’s place and have him get over here right away.”

Just as Hayatsu had said, Genji was happy to talk to them. He seemed to like nothing better than talking about Shizuko Yamamura. He was sixty-eight, three years older than Shizuko would have been. She’d been his childhood playmate, and also his first love. Whether it was because the memories became clearer as he talked about them or just because he was stimulated by having an audience, the recollections came pouring out of him. For Genji, talking about Shizuko was talking about his own youth.

Asakawa and Ryuji learned a certain amount from his rambling, occasionally tearful stories about Shizuko. But they were aware that they could only trust Old Gen so far. Memories were always liable to being prettified, and all of this had happened over forty years ago. He might even be getting her confused with another woman. Well, maybe not—a man’s first love was special, not someone he’d mix up with someone else.

Genji wasn’t exactly eloquent. He used a lot of roundabout expressions, and Asakawa soon got tired of listening. But then he said something that had Asakawa and Ryuji listening intently. “I think that what made Shizu change was that stone statue of the Ascetic we pulled up out of the sea. There was a full moon that night …” According to the old man, Shizuko’s mysterious powers were somehow connected to the sea and the full moon. And on the night it happened, Genji himself had been beside her, rowing the boat. It was 1946, on a night toward the end of summer; Shizuko was twenty-one and Genji was twenty-four.

It was hot for so late in the season, and even nightfall brought no relief. Genji spoke of these events of forty-four years ago as though they had happened last night.

That sweltering evening, Genji was sitting on his front porch lazily fanning himself, gazing at the night sky calmly reflected on the moonlit sea. The silence was broken when Shizu came running up the hill to his house. She stood in front of him, tugging at his sleeve, and cried, “Gen, get your boat! We’re going fishing.” He asked her why, but all she would say was, “We’ll never have another moonlit night like this.” Genji just sat there as if in a daze, looking at the most beautiful girl on the island. “Wipe that stupid look off your face and hurry up!” She pulled at his collar until he got to his feet. Genji was used to having her push him around and tell him what to do, but he asked her anyway, “What in the world are we going fishing for?” Staring at the ocean, she gave a brisk reply: “For the statue of the Ascetic.”

“Of the Ascetic?”

With raised eyebrows and a note of regret in her voice, Shizuko explained that earlier in the day, some Occupation soldiers had hurled the stone statue of the Ascetic into the sea.

In the middle of the island’s eastern shore there was a beach called the Ascetic’s Beach, with a small cave called the Ascetic’s Grotto. It contained a stone statue of En no Ozunu, the famed Buddhist ascetic, who had been banished here in the year 699. Ozunu had been born with great wisdom, and long years of discipline had given him command of occult and mystic arts. It was said that he could summon gods and demons at will. But Ozunu’s power to foretell the future had made him powerful enemies in the world of books and weapons, and he’d been judged a criminal, a menace to society, and exiled here to Izu Oshima. That had been almost thirteen hundred years ago. Ozunu holed himself up in a small cave on the beach and devoted himself to even more strenuous disciplines. He also taught farming and fishing to the people of the island, earning respect for his virtue. Finally he was pardoned and allowed to return to the mainland, where he founded the Shugendo monastic tradition. He was thought to have spent three years on the island, but stories of his time there abounded, including the legend that he had once shod himself with iron clogs and flown off to Mt Fuji. The islanders still retained a great deal of affection for En no Ozunu, and the Ascetic’s Grotto was considered the holiest place on the island. A festival, known as the Festival of the Ascetic, was held every year on June 15th.

Right after the end of World War II, however, as part of their policy toward Shintoism and Buddhism, the Occupation forces had taken En no Ozunu’s statue from where it was enshrined in the cave and tossed it into the ocean. Shizuko, who had deep faith in Ozunu, had evidently been watching. She had hid herself in the shadow of the rocks at Worm’s Nose Point and watched carefully as the statue was cast from the American patrol boat. She memorized the exact spot.

Genji couldn’t believe his ears when he heard that they were going fishing for the statue of the Ascetic. He was a good fisherman with strong arms, but he’d never tried to catch a stone statue. But there was no way he could just turn Shizuko down, given the secret feelings he nursed for her. He launched his boat into the night, thinking to take this opportunity to put her in his debt. And truth be told, being out on the sea under a beautiful moon like this, just the two of them, promised to be a wonderful thing.

They’d built fires on Ascetic’s Beach and at Worm’s Nose as landmarks, and now they rowed farther and farther out to sea. Both of them were quite familiar with the ocean here—the lie of the seafloor, the depth, and the schools of fish that swam here. But now it was nighttime, and no matter how bright the moon was, it illuminated nothing beneath the surface. Genji didn’t know how Shizuko intended to find the statue. He asked her, while working the oars, but she didn’t answer. She just checked their position again by the bonfires on the beach. One might have been able to get a pretty good idea of where they were by gazing over the waves at the fires on the beach, and estimating the distance between them. After they’d rowed several hundred meters, Shizuko cried, “Stop here!”

She went to the stern of the boat, leaned down close to the surface of the water, and peered into the dark sea. “Look the other way,” she commanded Genji. Genji guessed what Shizuko was about to do, and his heart leapt. Shizuko stood up and took off her splash-patterned kimono. His imagination aroused by the sound of the robe slipping across her skin, Genji found it hard to breathe. Behind him he heard the sound of her jumping into the sea. As the spray hit his shoulders he turned around and looked. Shizuko was treading water, her long black hair tied back with a rag and one end of a slender rope clenched between her teeth. She thrust her upper body out of the water, took two deep breaths, then dived to the bottom of the sea.

How many times did her head pop up from the surface of the water to gasp for air? The last time, she no longer had the end of the rope in her mouth. “I’ve tied it fast to the Ascetic. Go ahead and pull him up,” she said in a trembling voice.

Gen shifted his body to the bow of the boat and pulled on the rope. In no time Shizuko climbed aboard, draped her kimono around her body, and came up beside Genji in time to help him haul up the statue. They placed it in the center of the boat and headed back to the shore. The whole way back, neither Genji nor Shizuko said a word. There was something in the atmosphere that quashed all questions. He found it mysterious that she’d been able to locate the statue in the darkness at the bottom of the sea. It was only three days later that he was able to ask her. She said that the Ascetic’s eyes had called to her on the ocean floor. The green eyes of the statue, master of gods and demons, had glowed at the bottom of the deep dark sea … That’s what Shizuko had said.

After that, Shizuko began to feel physical discomfort. She’d never even had a headache up until then, but now she often experienced searing pains in her head, accompanied by visions of things she’d never seen before flashing across her mind’s eye. And it happened that these scenes she had glimpsed very soon manifested themselves in reality. Genji had questioned her in some detail. It seemed that when these future scenes inserted themselves into her brain, they were always accompanied by the same citrus fragrance in her nostrils. Genji’s older sister had married and moved to Odawara, on the mainland; when she died, the scene had presented itself to Shizuko beforehand. But it didn’t sound like she could actually, consciously predict things that would happen in the future. It was just that these scenes would flash across her mind, with no warning, and with no inkling of why she’d witnessed those exact scenes. So Shizuko never allowed people to ask her to predict their futures.

The following year she went up to Tokyo, despite Genji’s efforts to stop her. She came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, and conceived his child. Then, at the end of the year, she went back to her hometown and gave birth to a baby girl. Sadako.

They didn’t know when Genji’s tale would end. Ten years later Shizuko jumped into the mouth of Mt Mihara, and to judge by the way Genji related the event, it seemed he had decided to blame it on her lover, Ikuma. It was perhaps a natural thought, as he had been Genji’s rival in love, but his obvious resentment made his account hard to sit through. All they’d gleaned from him was the knowledge that Sadako’s mother had been able to see the future, and the possibility that this power had been given her by a stone statue of En no Ozunu.

Just then the fax machine began to hum. It printed out an enlargement of the head shot of Sadako Yamamura that Yoshino had got from Theater Group Soaring.

Asakawa was strangely moved. This was the first actual look he’d had at this woman. Even though it had only been for the briefest moment, he’d shared the same sensations as her, seen the world from the same vantage point. It was like catching the first glimpse of a lover’s face in the dim morning light, finally seeing what she looks like, after a night of entwined limbs and shared orgasms in the dark.

It was odd, but he couldn’t think of her as hideous. That was only natural; although the photo that came through the fax machine was somewhat blurred around the edges, still it fully communicated the allure of Sadako’s beautifully regular features.

“She’s a fine woman, isn’t she?” Ryuji said. Asakawa suddenly recalled Mai Takano. If you compared them purely on the basis of looks, Sadako was far more beautiful than Mai. And yet the scent of a woman was much more powerful with Mai. And what about that “eerie” quality that was supposed to characterize Sadako? It didn’t come through in the photograph. Sadako had powers that ordinary people didn’t have; they must have influenced the people around her.

The second page of the fax summarized information about Shizuko Yamamura. It picked up right where Genji’s story had left off just now.

In 1947, having left behind her hometown of Sashikiji for the capital, Shizuko suddenly collapsed with head pains and was taken to a hospital. Through one of the doctors, she came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, an assistant professor in the psychiatry department of Taido University. Ikuma was involved in trying to find a scientific explanation for hypnotism and related phenomena, and he became very interested in Shizuko when he discovered that she had startling powers of clairvoyance. The finding went so far as to change the thrust of his research. Thereafter Ikuma would immerse himself in the study of paranormal powers, with Shizuko as the subject of his research. But the two soon progressed beyond a mere researcher-subject relationship. In spite of his having a family, Ikuma began to have romantic feelings toward Shizuko. By the end of the year she was pregnant with his child, and to escape the eyes of the world she went back home, where she had Sadako. Shizuko immediately returned to Tokyo, leaving Sadako in Sashikiji, but three years later she returned to reclaim her child. From then until the time of her suicide, evidently, she never let Sadako leave her side.

When the 1950s dawned, the partnership of Heihachiro Ikuma and Shizuko Yamamura was a sensation in the pages of the news papers and the weekly news magazines. They provided a sudden insight into the scientific underpinnings of supernatural powers. At first, perhaps dazzled by Ikuma’s position as a professor at such a prestigious university, the public unanimously believed in Shizuko’s powers. Even the media wrote her up in a more-or-less favorable light. Still, there were persistent claims that she could only be a fake, and when an authoritative scholarly association weighed in with the one-word comment “questionable”, people began to shift their support away from the pair.

The paranormal powers Shizuko exhibited were mainly ESP-related, such as clairvoyance or second sight, and the ability to produce psychic photographs. She didn’t display the power of telekinesis, the ability to move things without touching them. According to one magazine, simply by holding a piece of film in a tightly sealed envelope against her forehead, she could psychically imprint upon it a specified design; she could also identify the image on a similarly concealed piece of film a hundred times out of a hundred. However, another magazine maintained that she was nothing more than a con-woman, claiming that any magician, with some training, could easily do the same things. In this way the tide of public opinion began to rise against Shizuko and Ikuma.

Then Shizuko was visited by misfortune. In 1954 she gave birth to her second baby, but it became ill and died at only four months of age. It had been a boy. Sadako, who was seven at the time, seemed to have showered a special affection on her newborn little brother.

The following year, in 1955, Ikuma challenged the media to a public demonstration of Shizuko’s powers. At first Shizuko didn’t want to do it. She said that it was hard to concentrate her awareness the way she wanted to among a mass of spectators; she was afraid she’d fail. But Ikuma was unyielding. He couldn’t stand being labeled a charlatan by the media, and he couldn’t think of a better way to outwit them than by offering clear proof of her authenticity.

On the appointed day, Shizuko reluctantly mounted the dais in the lab theater, under the watchful eyes of nearly a hundred scholars and representatives of the press. She was mentally exhausted, to boot, so these were hardly the best conditions for her to work under. The experiment was to proceed along quite simple lines. All she had to do was identify the numbers on a pair of dice inside a lead container. If she had just been able to exert her powers normally, it would have been no problem. But she knew that each one of the hundred people surrounding her was waiting and hoping for her to fail. She trembled, she crouched down on the floor, she cried out in anguish, “Enough of this!” Shizuko herself explained it this way: everybody had a certain degree of psychic power. She just had more of it than others did. But surrounded by a hundred people all willing her to fail, her power was disrupted—she couldn’t get it to work. Ikuma went even further: “It’s not just a hundred people. No, now the whole population of Japan is trying to stamp out the fruits of my research. When public opinion, fanned by the media, begins to turn, then the media says nothing the people don’t want to hear. They should be ashamed!” Thus the great public display of clairvoyance ended with Ikuma’s denunciation of the mass media.

Of course, the media interpreted Ikuma’s diatribe as an attempt to shift the blame for the failed demonstration, and that’s how it was written up in the next day’s newspapers. A FAKE AFTER ALL … THEIR TRUE COLORS REVEALED … TAIDO UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR A FRAUD … FIVE YEARS OF DEBATE ENDED … VICTORY FOR MODERN SCIENCE. Not a single article defended them.

Toward the end of the year, Ikuma divorced his wife and resigned from the university. Shizuko began to become increasingly paranoid. After that, Ikuma decided to acquire paranormal abilities himself, and he retreated deep into the mountains and stood under waterfalls, but all he got was pulmonary tuberculosis. He had to be committed to a sanatorium in Hakone. Meanwhile Shizuko’s psychological state was becoming more and more precarious. Eight-year-old Sadako convinced her mother to go back home to Sashikiji, to escape the eyes of the media and the ridicule of the public, but then Shizuko slipped her daughter’s gaze and jumped into the volcano. And so three people’s lives crumbled.

Asakawa and Ryuji finished reading the two-page printout at the same time.

“It’s a grudge,” muttered Ryuji. “Imagine how Sadako must have felt when her mom threw herself into Mt Mihara.”

“She hated the media?”

“Not just the media. She resented the public at large for destroying her family, first treating them like darlings, and then when the wind changed scorning them. Sadako was with her mother and father between the ages of three and ten, right? She had first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of public opinion.”

“But that’s no reason to arrange an indiscriminate attack like this!” Asakawa’s objection was made in full consciousness of the fact that he himself belonged to the media. In his heart he was making excuses—he was pleading. Hey, I’m just as critical of the media’s tendencies as you are.

“What are you mumbling about?”

“Huh?” Asakawa realized that unknowingly he had been voicing his complaints, as if they were a Buddhist chant.

“Well, we’ve begun to illuminate the images on that video. Mt Mihara appears because it’s where her mother killed herself, and also because Sadako herself had predicted its eruption. It must have made a particularly strong psychic impression on her. The next scene shows the character for ‘mountain’, yama, floating into view. That’s probably the first psychic photograph Sadako succeeded in making, when she was very small.”

“Very small?” Asakawa didn’t see why it had to be from when she was very small.

“Yes, probably from when she was four or five. Next, there’s the scene with the dice. Sadako was present during her mother’s public demonstration; this scene means that she was watching, worried, as her mother tried to guess the numbers on the dice.”

“Hold on a minute, though. Sadako clearly saw the numbers on the dice in that lead bowl.”

Both Asakawa and Ryuji had watched that scene with their own eyes, so to speak. There was no mistaking.

“And?”

“Shizuko couldn’t see them.”

“Is it so strange that the daughter could do what the mother couldn’t? Look, Sadako was only seven then, but her power already far outstripped her mother’s. So much so that the combined unconscious will of a hundred people was nothing to her. Think about it: this is a girl who could project images onto a cathode-ray tube. Televisions produce images by an entirely different mechanism from photography—it’s not just a matter of exposing film to light. A picture on TV is composed of 525 lines, right? Sadako could manipulate those. This is power of a completely different order here.”

Asakawa still wasn’t convinced. “If she had so much power, what about the psychic photo she sent to Professor Miura? She should have been able to produce something much more impressive.”

“You’re even dumber than you look. Her mother had gained nothing but unhappiness by letting people know about her power. Her mother probably didn’t want her to make the same mistake. She probably told Sadako to hide her abilities and just lead a normal life. Sadako probably carefully restrained herself so as to produce only an average psychic photo.”

Sadako had stayed in the rehearsal hall alone after everyone else had left, so that she could test her powers on the television set, still a rarity in those days. She was trying to be careful not to let anyone know what she could do.

“Who’s the old woman who appears in the next scene?” asked Asakawa.

“I don’t know who that is. Perhaps she came to Sadako in a dream or something, whispered prophecies in her ear. She was using an old dialect. I’m sure you’ve noticed that everyone here now speaks fairly standard Japanese. That lady was pretty old. Maybe she lived in the twelfth century, or maybe she has some connection to En no Ozunu.”

… Next year you’re going to have a child.

“I wonder if that prediction really came true?”

“Oh, that? Well, there’s the scene with the baby boy right after that. So I originally thought it meant that Sadako had given birth to a boy, but according to this fax, that doesn’t appear to be the case.”

“There’s her brother who died at four months old …”

“Right. I think that’s it.”

“But what about the prediction? The old woman is definitely speaking to Sadako—she says you. Did Sadako have a baby?”

“I don’t know. If we believe the old lady, then I guess she did.”

“Whose child was it?”

“How should I know? Listen, don’t think I know everything. I’m just speculating here.”

If Sadako Yamamura did have a child, who was the father? And what was the child doing now?

Ryuji stood up suddenly, banging his knees on the table as a result.

“I thought I was getting hungry. Look—it’s way past noon. Say, Asakawa, I’m going to get something to eat.” So saying, Ryuji headed for the door, rubbing his kneecaps. Asakawa had no appetite, but something still bothered him, and he decided to tag along. He’d just remembered something Ryuji had told him to investigate, something he’d had no clue how to approach and so hadn’t done anything about. This was the question of the identity of the man in the video’s last scene. It might be Sadako’s father, Heihachiro Ikuma, but there was too much enmity in the way Sadako looked at him for that. When he’d seen the man’s face on the screen, Asakawa had felt a dull, heavy pain somewhere deep inside his body, accompanied by a strong feeling of antipathy. He was a rather handsome man, particularly around the eyes; he wondered why she hated him so. No matter what, that kind of gaze was not one Sadako would have turned on a relative. There was nothing in Yoshino’s report to suggest that she had squared off against her father. Rather, he got the impression that she was close to her parents. Asakawa suspected it would be impossible to discover the identity of this man. Nearly thirty years had undoubtedly changed his looks considerably. Still, just on the off-chance, maybe he should ask Yoshino to dig up a photo of Ikuma. He wondered what Ryuji would think about this. Wanting to take the matter up with him, Asakawa followed Ryuji outside.

The wind blew loudly. There was no point in using an umbrella. Asakawa and Ryuji hunched their shoulders and ran down the street to a bar in front of the harbor.

“How about a beer?” Without waiting for a reply, Ryuji turned to the waitress and called out, “Two beers.”

“Ryuji, to go back to our earlier conversation, what do you think the images on that video are, finally?”

“Don’t know.”

Ryuji was too busy eating his Korean barbecue lunch special to even look up, so he gave a curt answer. Asakawa stabbed a sausage with his fork and took a swallow of his beer. Out the window they could see the pier. There was nobody at the ticket window for the Tokai Kisen ferry line. Everything was silent. No doubt all the tourists trapped on the island were sitting at the windows of their hotels or B&Bs, looking worriedly at this same dark sea and sky.

Ryuji looked up. “I imagine you’ve probably heard what people say goes though a person’s mind at the moment of death, right?”

Asakawa returned his gaze to the scene in front of him. “The scenes from your life that have made the deepest impression on you are replayed, sort of like a flashback.” Asakawa had read a book in which the author described an experience along those lines. The author had been driving his car along a mountain road when he lost control of the steering wheel, plunging the car into a deep ravine. During the split second that the car hung in the air after leaving the road, the author realized that he was going to die. And at the instant he realized that, a sequence of different scenes from throughout his life came pitter-pattering up and flashed through his brain, so clearly that he could see every detail. In the end, miraculously, the writer had survived, but the memory of that instant remained vivid for him.

“You can’t be suggesting … Is that what this is?” Asakawa asked. Ryuji raised a hand and signaled the waitress to bring him another beer.

“All I’m saying is, that’s what the video reminds me of. Each one of those scenes represents a moment of extreme psychic or emotional engagement for Sadako. It’s not too much of a stretch to think that they were the scenes in her life that left the deepest impression, is it?”

“I get it. But hey, does that mean that …”

“Right. There’s a strong possibility that that’s the case.”

So Sadako Yamamura is no longer of this world? She died, and the scenes which flitted through her mind at the moment of death had taken this shape and remained in the world of the living—was that it?

“So why did she die? And another thing, what was her relationship with the man in the last scene of the video?”

“I told you to stop asking me so many questions. There’s a lot I don’t understand about it, either.”

Asakawa looked unconvinced.

“Hey, try using your head for a change. You rely too much on other people. What would you do if something happened to me and you were stuck trying to figure out the charm all by yourself?”

That hardly seemed likely. Asakawa might die, and Ryuji might solve the riddle alone, but the opposite would never happen. Asakawa was sure of that, if of nothing else.

They went back to the “bureau” where Hayatsu was waiting for them. “You had a call from a fellow named Yoshino. He wasn’t at his office, so he said he’d call back in ten minutes.”

Asakawa sat in front of the phone and prayed for good news. The phone rang. It was Yoshino.

“I’ve been trying to call you. Where were you?” There was a note of reproach in his voice.

“Sorry about that. We went out to get a bite to eat.”

“Okay. Now, did you get my fax?” Yoshino’s tone changed. The note of criticism disappeared, and his voice became gentler. Asakawa felt something unpleasant coming.

“Yes, thanks. It was very helpful.” Asakawa switched the receiver from his left hand to his right. “And, so? Did you find out what happened to Sadako after that?” Asakawa asked enthusiastically.

There was a pause before Yoshino replied, however. “No. I hit a dead end.”

The second he heard this, Asakawa’s face crumpled as if he were about to burst into sobs. Ryuji watched as if he found it amusing to see a man’s expression turn from hope to despair before his eyes. Then he plopped himself down on the floor facing the garden and stretched his legs out in front of him.

“What do you mean, a dead end?” Asakawa’s voice had risen several notes.

“I was only able to locate four of the interns who joined the troupe with Sadako. I called them, but none of them know anything. They’re all middle-aged guys of around fifty now. All any of them could tell me was they hadn’t seen her since shortly after the death of Shigemori, the company’s representative. There’s no more information to be had about Sadako Yamamura.”

“Nonsense. This can’t be the end of it.”

“Well, how does it look on your end?”

“How does it look on my end? I’ll tell you how it looks. It looks like I’m going to die tomorrow night at ten o’clock. And not just me—my wife and daughter are going to die on Sunday morning at eleven. That’s how it looks.”

Ryuji called out from behind him, “Hey, don’t forget about me! You’ll make me feel bad.”

Asakawa ignored him and continued. “There’ve got to be other things you can try. Maybe there’s someone besides the interns who would know what happened to Sadako. Listen, my family’s lives depend on it.”

“Not necessarily, though.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe you’ll still be alive after the deadline passes.”

“You don’t believe me. I get it.” Asakawa could feel the whole world go dark before his eyes.

“Well … I mean, how could I really believe a hundred percent in a story like this?”

“Now, look, Yoshino.” How should he put it? What did he need to say to convince him? “I don’t even believe the half of it myself. It’s stupid. A charm? Come on! But you see, if there’s even a one-in-six chance that it’s all true … It’s like Russian roulette. You’ve got a gun with one bullet in it, and you know that there’s only one chance in six that when you pull the trigger it’ll kill you. But could you pull that trigger? Would you risk your family on those odds? No, you wouldn’t. You’d move the muzzle away from your temple—if you could you’d throw the whole damned gun into the ocean. Right? It’s only natural.”

Asakawa was all wound up now. Behind him Ryuji was wailing, “We’re idiots! Both of us, idiots!”

“Shut up!” Asakawa shielded the receiver with the palm of his hand as he turned to yell at Ryuji.

“Something wrong?” Yoshino lowered the tone of his voice.

“No, it’s nothing. Listen, Yoshino, I’m begging you. You’re the only one I can count on.” Suddenly Ryuji grabbed Asakawa’s arm. Giving way to anger, Asakawa spun around, but when he did he saw that Ryuji was looking unexpectedly earnest.

“We’re idiots. You and I both have lost our cool,” he said, quietly.

“Could you hold on a minute?” Asakawa lowered the receiver. Then, to Ryuji, “What’s the matter?”

“It’s so simple. Why didn’t we think of it before? There’s no need to follow Sadako’s trail chronologically. Why can’t we work our way backwards? Why did it have to be cabin B-4? Why did it have to be Villa Log Cabin? Why did it have to be South Hakone Pacific Land?”

Asakawa’s expression changed in a heartbeat as he came to a realization. Then, in a much calmer mood, he picked up the receiver again.

“Yoshino?”

Yoshino was still waiting on the other end of the line.

“Yoshino, forget about the theater company lead for a while. There’s something else I urgently need you to check on. It’s just come up. I believe I’ve already told you about South Hakone Pacific Land …”

“Yeah, you did. It’s a resort club, right?”

“Right. As I recall, they built a golf course there about ten years ago, and then gradually expanded into what they are now. Now, listen, what I need you to look up is, what was there before Pacific Land?”

He could hear the scratching of pen on paper.

“What do you mean, what was there before? Probably nothing but mountain meadows.”

“You may be right. But then again, you may be wrong.”

Ryuji tugged at Asakawa’s sleeve again. “And a layout. If there was something standing on that land before the resort, tell your gentleman caller to get a map that shows the layout of the buildings and the grounds.”

Asakawa relayed the request to Yoshino and hung up the phone, willing him to come up with something, anything, by way of a lead. It was true: everybody had a little psychic power.

10

October 18—Thursday

The wind was a little stronger, and low white clouds raced by in the otherwise clear sky. Typhoon No. 21 had passed by the previous evening, grazing the Boso Peninsula to the northeast of Oshima before dissipating over the ocean. In its wake it left painfully dazzling blue seas. In spite of the peaceful autumn weather, as Asakawa stood on the deck of the boat watching the waves he felt like a condemned man on the eve of his execution. Raising his eyes he could see the gentle slope of the Izu highlands in the middle distance. Today, at last, he would face his deadline. It was now ten in the morning; in another twelve hours, it would come, unerringly. It had been a week since he watched the video in cabin B-4. It seemed like ages ago. Of course it felt like a long time: in just one week he’d experienced more terror than most people experience in a lifetime.

Asakawa wasn’t sure now that being cooped up on Oshima all day Wednesday had hurt him. On the phone yesterday he’d got excited and accused Yoshino of dragging his feet, but now that he thought about things calmly, he was actually very grateful to his colleague for doing so much for him. If Asakawa had been running around chasing down leads himself, he probably would have got agitated and missed something, or gone down a blind alley.

This is fine. The typhoon was on our side. If he didn’t think that way, he’d never make it. Asakawa was starting to prepare his mind so that when his time came to die he wouldn’t be consumed with regrets about what he had or hadn’t done.

Their last clue was the three-page printout he held in his hand. Yoshino had spent half the previous day tracking down the information before faxing it. Before South Hakone Pacific Land had been built, the land had been occupied by a rather unusual facility. Unusual these days, that is—at the time, establishments like it were perfectly run-of-the-mill. It was a tuberculosis treatment facility—a sanatorium.

Nowadays few people lived in fear of TB, but if one read much prewar fiction, one couldn’t help but come across mention of it. It was the tuberculosis bacillus that gave Thomas Mann the impetus to write The Magic Mountain, that allowed Motojiro Kajii to sing with piercing clarity of his decay. However, the discovery of streptomycin in 1944, and hydrazide in 1950, stole TB’s literary cachet, reducing its status to that of just another communicable disease. In the ’20s and ’30s, as many as 200,000 people a year were dying from it, but the number dropped drastically after the war. Even so, the bacillus didn’t become extinct. Even now, it still kills around five thousand people a year.

In the days when TB ran rampant, clean, fresh air and a quiet, peaceful environment were deemed essential for recovery. Thus, sanatoriums were built in mountainous areas. But as progress in medicinal treatments produced a corresponding drop in the number of patients, these facilities had to adjust their range of services. In other words, they had to start treating internal ailments, even performing surgeries, or else they wouldn’t be able to survive financially. In the mid-1960s, the sanatorium in South Hakone was faced with just this choice. But its situation was even more critical than most, due to its extreme remoteness. It was just too hard to get to. With TB, once patients checked in they usually didn’t check back out again, so ease of access wasn’t much of an issue. But it proved to be a fatal flaw in the plan to transform the place into a general hospital. The sanatorium ended up shutting down in 1972.

Waiting in the wings was Pacific Resorts, which had been looking for a suitable location to build a golf course and resort. In 1975, Pacific Resorts bought a section of alpine land which included the old sanatorium site and immediately set about developing their golf course. Later they built summer homes to sell, a hotel, a swimming pool, an athletic club, and tennis courts—the whole line of resort facilities. And in April of this year, six months ago, they’d put the finishing touches to Villa Log Cabin.

“What kind of place is it, then?” Ryuji was supposed to be on deck, but he suddenly appeared in the seat next to Asakawa.

“Huh?”

“South Hakone Pacific Land, of course.”

That’s right. He’s never been there.

“It’s got a nice view at night.” Asakawa recalled the curiously lifeless atmosphere, the tennis balls with their hollow echo under the orange lights … Where does that atmosphere come from anyway? I wonder how many people died there when it was a sanatorium. Asakawa pondered this as he remembered how the beautiful evening lights of Numazu and Mishima had spread out at his feet.

Asakawa put the first page of the printout on the bottom and spread the other two pages out on his lap. The second page was a simple diagram showing the layout of the sanatorium grounds; the third showed the building as it was today, an elegant three-story building containing an information center and a restaurant. This was the building Asakawa had entered to ask directions to Villa Log Cabin. Asakawa shifted his gaze back and forth between the two pages. The passage of nearly thirty years was embodied in those two pieces of paper. If it wasn’t for the fact that the access road was in the same place, he’d have no idea what on one map corresponded to what on the other. Mentally reconstructing the layout as he knew it, he looked at the second page to try to find out what had originally stood where the cabins were now. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, but when he lay one page on top of the other, it certainly seemed as if there had been nothing there before. Just thick woods covering the side of a valley.

He went back to the first page. It contained one more very important piece of information, besides the story of the sanatorium’s transformation into a resort. Jotaro Nagao, 57. A doctor, a GP and pediatrician, with a private practice in Atami. For five years, from 1962 to 1967, Nagao had worked at the South Hakone sanatorium. He’d been young, just past his internship. Of the doctors who’d been there at the time, the only ones still alive were Nagao and Yozo Tanaka, who was retired now, living with his daughter and her husband in Nagasaki. All the rest, including the head of the facility, were dead. Therefore, Dr Nagao was their only chance to find out anything about the sanatorium in South Hakone. Yozo Tanaka was already 80, and Nagasaki was much too far away—they wouldn’t have time to visit him.

Asakawa had pleaded desperately with Yoshino to find a living witness, and Yoshino, gritting his teeth to keep from yelling back at Asakawa, had come up with Dr Nagao. He’d sent not only the man’s name and address, but also an intriguing summary of his career. It was probably just something Yoshino had happened to come across in his research, and he’d decided to append it, not actually meaning anything by it. Dr Nagao had been at the sanatorium from 1962 to 1967, but he hadn’t spent the entirety of those five years in the performance of his duties. For two weeks—a short time, to be sure, but significant—he’d gone from doctor to patient, and been housed in an isolation ward. In the summer of 1966, while visiting an isolation ward up in the mountains, he’d carelessly allowed himself to contract the smallpox virus from a patient. Fortunately, he had been inoculated a few years previously, so it didn’t turn into anything major: no visible outbreak, no recurrence of the fever, only minor symptoms. But they’d put him in isolation to keep him from infecting anyone else. What was so interesting was that this had assured Nagao a place in medical history. He had been the last smallpox patient in Japan. It wasn’t necessarily something that would get him into the Guinness Book, but Yoshino seemed to have thought it was interesting. For people of Asakawa and Ryuji’s generation, the word “smallpox” didn’t even register.

“Ryuji, have you ever had smallpox?”

“Idiot. Of course not. It’s extinct.”

“Extinct?”

“Yes. Eradicated through human ingenuity. Smallpox no longer exists in this world.”

The World Health Organization had made a dedicated effort to wipe out smallpox through vaccinations, and as a result it had all but disappeared from the face of the earth by 1975. There are records of the last smallpox patient in the world: a Somalian youth who came down with it on October 26, 1977.

“Can a virus become extinct? Is that possible?” Asakawa didn’t know much about viruses, but he couldn’t shake the impression that no matter how much you tried to kill one, eventually it would mutate and find a way to survive.

“See, viruses kind of wander around on the border between living things and non-living things. Some people even theorize that they were originally human genes, but nobody really knows where they come from or how they emerged. What’s certain is that they’ve been intimately connected with the appearance and evolution of life.”

Ryuji’s arms had been folded behind his head; now he stretched them wide. His eyes glittered. “Don’t you find it fascinating, Asakawa? The idea that genes could escape from our cells and become another life form? Maybe all opposites were originally identical. Even light and darkness—before the Big Bang they were living together in peace, with no contradiction. God and the Devil, too. All the Devil is is a god who fell from grace—they’re the same thing, originally. Male and female? It used to be that all living things were hermaphroditic, like worms or slugs, with both female and male sex organs. Don’t you think that’s the ultimate symbol of power and beauty?” Ryuji laughed as he said this. “It’d sure save a lot of time and trouble when it comes to sex.”

Asakawa peered at Ryuji’s face to see what was so funny. There was no way that an organism with both female and male genitalia epitomized perfect beauty.

“Are there any other extinct viruses?”

“Gee, if you’re so interested I suggest you look right into it when you get back to Tokyo.”

“If I get back.”

“Heh, heh. Don’t worry. You’ll get back.”

At that moment the high-speed boat they were on was exactly halfway through the voyage linking Oshima and Ito, on the Izu Peninsula. They could have made it back to Tokyo quicker by flying, but they wanted to visit Dr Nagao in Atami, so they’d taken the sea route.

Straight ahead they could see the ferris wheel at the Atami Korakuen. They were arriving right on time, at 10:50. Asakawa descended the gangway and ran to the parking lot where they’d left their rental car.

“Calm down, would you?” Ryuji followed at a leisurely pace. Nagao’s clinic was near Kinomiya Station on the Ito Line—not very far away at all. Asakawa watched impatiently as Ryuji climbed into the car, and then headed into Atami’s maze of hills and one-way streets.

Immediately after he’d settled himself, Ryuji said, with a perfectly straight face, “Hey, I was thinking—maybe the Devil’s behind this whole thing after all.” Asakawa was too busy looking at street signs to answer. Ryuji continued. “The Devil always appears in the world in a different form. You know the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the second half of the thirteenth century? Half of the total population died. Can you believe that? Half, that’s like the population of Japan being reduced to sixty million. Naturally, artists at the time likened the plague to the Devil. It’s like that now, too—don’t we talk about AIDS as if it were a modern Devil? But listen, devils never drive humanity to extinction. Why? Because if people cease to exist, so do devils. The same with viruses. If the host cell perishes, the virus can’t survive. But humanity drove the smallpox virus to extinction. Really? Could we really do that?”

It’s impossible in the modern world to even imagine the terror once inspired by smallpox, when it raged throughout the world claiming so many lives. Such was the suffering it caused that it gave rise to innumerable religious beliefs and superstitions in Japan, as well as elsewhere. People believed in gods of pestilence, and it was the God of Smallpox that brought that disease, though perhaps it should have been called a devil. In any case, could people really drive a god to the brink of extinction? Ryuji’s question harbored a deep uncertainty.

Asakawa wasn’t listening to Ryuji. In some corner of his mind he wondered why the guy was rambling on about this now, but mainly he was just thinking about not making any wrong turns. Every nerve focussed on getting to Dr Nagao’s clinic as fast as possible.

11

In a lane in front of Kinomiya Station was a small, one-story house with a shingle by the door that read Nagao Clinic: Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. Asakawa and Ryuji stood in front of the door for some time. If they couldn’t pull any information out of Nagao, it’d be sorry, time’s up! There was no more time to scare up new leads. But just what was there to find out from him? It was probably hoping for too much to think that he’d even remember much of anything about Sadako Yamamura from thirty years ago. They didn’t even have any hard evidence that Sadako had any connection at all with the sanatorium in South Hakone. All of Nagao’s colleagues at the sanatorium, except for Yozo Tanaka, had died of old age. They probably could have tracked down the names of some nurses if they’d tried, but it was too late for that now.

Asakawa looked at his watch. 11:30. Only a little over ten hours left until the deadline, and here he was, hesitating to open the door.

“What are you waiting for? Go on in.” Ryuji gave him a shove. Of course, he could understand why Asakawa was hesitating, even though he’d been in such a hurry to get here. He was scared. No doubt he was afraid of seeing his last hope dashed, his last chance to survive eliminated. Ryuji stepped in front of him and opened the door.

A couch big enough for three people stood along one wall of the small waiting room. Conveniently, there were no patients waiting. Ryuji bent over at the little receptionist’s window and spoke to the fat middle-aged nurse behind it. “Excuse me. We’d like to see the doctor.”

Without lifting her eyes from her magazine, the nurse lazily replied, “Would you like to make an appointment?”

“No, that’s not it. There’s something we’d like to ask him about.”

She closed her magazine, looked up, and put on her glasses. “May I ask what this is in regards to?”

“Like I say, we’d just like to ask him a few questions.”

Irritated, Asakawa peeked out from behind Ryuji’s back and asked, “Is the doctor in?”

The nurse touched the rims of her glasses with both hands and studied the two men. “What is this about?” she asked overbearingly.

Both Ryuji and Asakawa stood up straight. Ryuji said, loudly enough to be heard, “With a receptionist like her it’s no wonder there are no patients.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

Asakawa hung his head; it wouldn’t do to get her angry. But just then the door to the examination room opened and Nagao appeared, dressed in a white lab coat.

Although he was completely bald, Nagao looked rather younger than his 57 years. He frowned and fixed a suspicious gaze on the two men in his entryway.

Asakawa and Ryuji both turned at the sound of Nagao’s voice, and the instant they saw his face, they gasped simultaneously.

And we thought this guy might be able to tell us something about Sadako? No kidding. As if it were an electric current coursing through his brain, Asakawa found himself replaying the final scene of the video in his head. The sweating, panting face of a man seen from close up, eyes bloodshot. A gaping wound in his exposed shoulder, from which blood ran, dripping into the viewer’s eyes, clouding them over. A tremendous pressure on the viewer’s chest, murderous intent in the man’s face … And that face was exactly what they saw now: Dr Nagao. He was older now, but there was no way of mistaking him.

Asakawa and Ryuji exchanged glances. Then Ryuji pointed at the doctor and began to laugh. “Heh, heh, heh. Now this is why games are interesting. Ah, who would have thought it? Imagine running into you here.”

Nagao was obviously displeased at the way these two strange men had reacted to seeing him. He raised his voice. “Who are you?” Unfazed, Ryuji walked right up to him and grabbed him by the lapels. Nagao was several centimeters taller than Ryuji. Ryuji flexed his powerful arms and pulled the doctor’s ear to his mouth, then spoke in a gentle voice that belied his strength.

“So tell me, pal, what was it you did to Sadako Yamamura thirty years ago at the South Hakone Sanatorium?”

It took a few seconds for the words to sink into the doctor’s brain. Nagao’s eyes darted around nervously as he searched his memories. Then they came to him, scenes of a time he’d never been able to forget. His knees sagged; all the strength seemed to go out of his body. Just as he was about to faint, Ryuji steadied him and leaned him back against the wall. Nagao wasn’t shocked by the memories themselves. Rather, it was the fact that the man before him, who may or may not have even been thirty years old, knew about what had happened. Indescribable dread pierced his soul.

“Doctor!” exclaimed the nurse, Ms Fujimura.

“I think it’s about time this place closed for lunch,” Ryuji said, signaling to Asakawa with his eyes. Asakawa closed the curtain over the entryway so that no patients would come in.

“Doctor!” Nurse Fujimura didn’t know how to handle the situation. She just waited, dumbly, for Nagao to instruct her. Nagao somehow pulled himself together a little and thought about what to do next. Thinking that above all, he couldn’t let this nosy woman find out about what had happened, he assumed a calm expression.

“Nurse Fujimura, you can take your break now. Run along now and get something to eat.”

“But, doctor …”

“Just do as I say. There’s no need to worry about me.”

First two strange men come in and whisper something in the doctor’s ear, and the next thing she knows the doctor is collapsing. She didn’t know what to make of all this, and so she just stood there for a few moments. Finally, the doctor shouted, “Go, now!” She practically flew out the front door.

“Now, then. Let’s hear what you have to say for yourself.” Ryuji went into the examination room. Nagao followed after, looking like a patient who’s just been informed he has cancer.

“I’ll warn you before we start, you mustn’t lie to us. I and this gentleman here know everything—we’ve seen it with our very eyes.” Ryuji pointed first to Asakawa and then to his own eyes.

“What the … ?” Seen it? Impossible. The bushes were too thick. There was nobody else around. Not to mention, these two are too young. They would have only been …

“I understand why you might be reluctant to believe me. But we both know your face—all too well.” Suddenly Ryuji’s tone changed. “Why don’t I tell you one of your distinguishing features? You’ve still got a scar on your right shoulder, haven’t you?”

Nagao’s eyes grew wide with astonishment, and his jaw started to quiver. After a pregnant pause, Ryuji said, “Now, shall I tell you why you have that scar on your shoulder?” Ryuji leaned over and stretched his neck until his lips were almost touching Nagao’s shoulder. “Sadako Yamamura bit you, didn’t she? Just like this.” Ryuji opened his mouth and pretended to bite through the white cloth. Nagao’s trembling grew worse, and he desperately tried to say something, but his mouth wouldn’t work. He couldn’t form words.

“I think you get my point. Now, we’re not going to repeat anything you tell us. We promise. All we want to know is everything that happened to Sadako.”

Not that he was in any condition to think at all, but Nagao didn’t think Ryuji’s words quite added up. If they’d already seen everything, why did they need to hear anything from the doctor’s mouth? But wait, the whole idea that they saw anything is silly. They couldn’t have seen anything. They probably weren’t even born yet. So what’s going on here? What do they think they’ve seen? The more he thought about it the less sense it made, until his head felt like it was ready to burst.

“Heh, heh, heh.” Ryuji chuckled and looked at Asakawa. The man’s eyes said it all. Frighten him like this and he’ll come clean. He’ll tell us anything.

And indeed, Nagao began to talk. He himself was puzzled as to why he remembered everything so clearly. And as he spoke, every sensory organ in his body began to recall the excitement of that day. The passion, the heat, the touch, the glossy shine of her skin, the song of the locusts, the mingled smells of sweat and grass, and the old well …

“I don’t even know what caused it. Maybe the fever and headache robbed me of my ordinary good judgment. Those were the early symptoms of smallpox—which meant I had already passed through the incubation period. But I didn’t dream that I had caught the disease myself. Fortunately, I managed not to infect anyone else in the sanatorium. To this day I’m haunted by the thought of what would have happened if the tuberculosis patients had been attacked by smallpox as well.

“The day was a hot one. I’d been examining the tomograms of a newly-admitted patient, and I had found a hole the size of a one-yen coin in one of his lungs. I’d told him to resign himself to spending a year with us, and then I’d given him a copy of the diagnosis to give his company. Then I couldn’t take it anymore—I just had to get outside. But even breathing the fresh mountain air didn’t make the pain in my head go away. So I went down the stone steps beside the ward, thinking to take shelter in the shade of the garden. There I noticed a young woman leaning against a tree trunk, gazing at the world down below. She wasn’t one of our patients. She was the daughter of a patient who’d been there long before I arrived, a man named Heihachiro Ikuma, a former assistant professor at Taido University. Her name was Sadako Yamamura. I remember the name well: her family name was different from her father’s. For about a month she had been making frequent visits to the sanatorium, but she didn’t spend much time with her father. Nor would she ask the doctors much about his condition. All I could assume was that she was there to enjoy the alpine scenery. I sat down next to her and smiled at her, asking her how her father was doing. But she didn’t look like she even wanted to know much about his illness. On the other hand, it was clear that she knew he didn’t have much longer. I could tell by the way she spoke. She knew the day her father was going to die, with more certainty than any doctor’s educated guess.

“Sitting there beside her like that, talking to her about her life and her family, I suddenly became aware that my headache, so unbearable a little while ago, had retreated. In its place appeared a fever accompanied by an odd feeling of excitement. I felt vitality well up within me, as if the temperature of my blood had been raised. I gazed at her face. I felt what I always felt, a sense of wonder that a woman with such perfect features should exist in the world. I’m not exactly sure what defines beauty, but I know that Dr Tanaka, who was twenty years older than me, used to say the same thing. That he’d never seen anyone more beautiful than Sadako Yamamura. My breathing was choked with fever, but somehow I controlled it enough to softly put a hand on her shoulder and say to her, ‘Let’s go somewhere cooler to talk, in the shade.’

“She suspected nothing. She nodded once and started to get to her feet. And as she stood up, and bent over, I saw—down the front of her white blouse—her perfectly-formed little breasts. They were so white that my whole mind was suddenly dyed milky white, and it was as if my reason was taken from me in the shock.

“She paid no attention to my agitation, but just brushed the dust from her long skirt. Her gestures seemed so innocent and adorable.

“We strolled on and on through the lush forest, surrounded by the droning of the cicadas. I hadn’t decided on any particular destination, but my feet kept heading in a certain direction. Sweat ran down my back. I took off my shirt, leaving only my undershirt. We followed an animal track until it opened up onto the side of a valley where there stood a dilapidated old house. It had probably been at least ten years since anyone had lived there. The walls were rotting and the roof looked like it could collapse at any moment. There was a well on the other side of the house, and when she saw it she ran toward it, saying, ‘Oh, I’m so thirsty.’ She bent over to look in. Even from the outside it was obvious that the well wasn’t used anymore. I ran to the well, too. But not to look inside. What I wanted to see was Sadako’s chest as she bent over again. I placed both hands on the lip of the well and got a close look. I could feel cool, damp air rising from the dark depths of the earth to caress my face, but it couldn’t take away the burning urge I felt. I didn’t know where the urge came from. I think now that the smallpox fever had taken away my mechanism of control. I swear to you, I had never experienced such sensual temptation before in my life.

“I found myself reaching out to touch that gentle swelling. She looked up in shock. Something snapped inside me. My memories of what happened next are hazy. All I can recall are fragmentary scenes. I found myself pressing Sadako to the ground. I pulled her blouse up over her breasts, and then … My memory skips to her resisting, violently, and then biting my shoulder; it was the intense pain that brought me to my senses. I saw the blood flowing from my shoulder drip onto her face. Blood dripped into her eyes, and she shook her head in revulsion. I adjusted my body to that rhythmic movement. What did my face look like then? What did she see when she looked at me? The face of a beast, I’m sure. That’s what I was thinking as I finished.

“When it was over, she fixed me with an implacable gaze. Still lying on her back, she raised her knees and skillfully used her elbows to scoot backwards. I looked at her body again. I thought my eyes had deceived me. Her wrinkled gray skirt had bunched up around her waist, and she made no move to cover her breasts as she backed up. A ray of sunlight fell on the point where her thighs converged, clearly illuminating a small, blackish lump. I raised my eyes to her chest—beautifully-shaped breasts. Then I looked down again. Within her pubic mound, covered with hair, was a pair of perfectly developed testicles.

“Had I not been a doctor, I probably would have been shocked senseless. But I knew of cases such as this from photos in medical texts. Testicular feminization syndrome. It’s an extremely rare syndrome. I never thought I’d see one outside of a textbook—much less in a situation such as that. Testicular feminization is a type of male pseudohermaphroditism. Externally the person seems completely female, having breasts and a vagina, but usually not a uterus. Chromosomally the person is XY, however—male. And for some reason people with this condition are all beautiful.

“Sadako was still staring at me. I was probably the first person outside her family to discover the secret of her body. Needless to say, she had been a virgin up until a few minutes previously. It had been a necessary trial if she were to go on living as a woman. I was trying to rationalize my actions. Then, suddenly, words flew into my head.

“I’ll kill you.

“As I reeled from the strength of will behind the words, I instantaneously intuited that her telepathic message was no lie. There was no room within it for even a sliver of doubt; my body accepted it as a certainty. She’d kill me, if I didn’t kill her first. My body’s instinct for self-preservation gave me an order. I climbed back on top of her, placed both hands on her slender neck, and pressed with my full weight. To my surprise, there was less resistance this time. She narrowed her eyes with pleasure and relaxed her body, almost as if she wanted to die.

“I didn’t wait to see if she’d stopped breathing. I picked her body up and went to the well. I think my actions were still beyond my will at this point. In other words, I didn’t pick her up intending to drop her into the well, but rather, the moment I picked her up, the round black mouth of the well caught my eye, and put it in my mind to do it. Everything felt as if it was working out perfectly for me. Or, rather, I felt as if I was being moved by a will beyond my own. I had a general idea of what was going to happen next. I could hear a voice in the back of my head saying this was all a dream.

“The well was dark, and from where I stood at the top I couldn’t see the bottom very clearly. From the smell of soil wafting up, it seemed that there was a shallow accumulation of water at the bottom. I let go. Sadako’s body slid down the side of the well into the earth, hitting the bottom with a splash. I stared into the well until my eyes got used to the dark, but I still couldn’t see her curled up down there. Even so, I couldn’t shake my uneasiness. I flung rocks and dirt into the well, trying to hide her body forever. I threw in armfuls of dirt and five or six fist-sized rocks before I just couldn’t do any more. The rocks hit her body, making a dull thud at the bottom of the well and stimulating my imagination. When I thought of that sickly beautiful body being broken by those stones, I couldn’t go through with it. I know that doesn’t make any sense. On the one hand I desired the destruction of her body, but on the other hand I didn’t want her body to be marred.”

When Nagao had finished speaking, Asakawa handed him the map of South Hakone Pacific Land.

“Where on this map would that well be?” Asakawa asked, urgently. It took Nagao a few moments to understand what he was being shown, but after he was told that what had once been the sanatorium was now a restaurant, he seemed to regain his orientation.

“I think it was right about here,” he said, pointing to a place on the map.

“No doubt about it. That’s where Villa Log Cabin is,” Asakawa said, rising. “Let’s go!”

But Ryuji was calm. “Don’t go rushing off just yet. We still have some things we need to ask this old fart. Now, this syndrome you mention …”

“Testicular feminization syndrome.”

“Can a woman with this bear children?” Nagao shook his head. “No, she can’t.”

“One other thing. When you raped Sadako Yamamura, you had already contracted smallpox, right?”

Nagao nodded.

“In which case, the last person in Japan to be infected with smallpox was Sadako Yamamura, no?”

It was certain that just before her death, Sadako Yamamura’s body had been invaded by the smallpox virus. But she had died immediately afterward. If its host perishes, a virus can’t go on living. Nagao didn’t know how to answer and looked down, avoiding Ryuji’s gaze. He gave only a vague reply.

“Hey! What are you doing? We’ve got to get going!” Asakawa was in the doorway, urging Ryuji to hurry.

“Shit. Hope you’re happy,” said Ryuji, flicking the tip of the doctor’s nose with his index finger before following Asakawa.

12

He couldn’t explain it logically, but from his experience reading novels and watching trashy TV shows, he felt like he had a good idea of the kind of plot device called for now, based on the way the story had unfolded. There was a certain tempo to the unfolding. They hadn’t been searching for Sadako’s hiding place, but in the blink of an eye they’d stumbled upon the tragedy that had befallen her and the spot where she was buried. So when Ryuji told him to “stop in front of a large hardware store,” Asakawa was relieved: he’s thinking the same thing I am. Asakawa still couldn’t imagine what a horrible task this would be. Unless it had been completely buried, finding the old well in the vicinity of Villa Log Cabin shouldn’t be too difficult. And once they found it, it should be easy to bring up Sadako’s remains. It all sounded pretty simple—and he wanted to think it would be. It was one in the afternoon; the midday sun reflected brilliantly from the hilly streets in this hot-spring resort town. The brightness, and the neighborhood’s laid-back weekday mood, clouded his imagination. It didn’t occur to him that even if it were only four or five meters deep, the bottom of a well was bound to be an entirely different world from the well-lit ground above.

Nishizaki Hardware. Asakawa saw the sign and braked. There were stepladders and lawn mowers lined up in front of the store. They should be able to get everything they needed here.

“I’ll let you do the shopping,” Asakawa said, running to a nearby phone booth. He paused before entering it to take a phone card from his wallet.

“Hey, we don’t have time to waste on phone calls.” But Asakawa wasn’t listening. Grumbling, Ryuji went into the store and grabbed rope, a bucket, a shovel, a pulley block, and a high-powered flashlight.

Asakawa was desperate. This might be his last chance to hear their voices. He knew full well how little time he had to waste. He only had nine hours left until his deadline. He slipped his card into the phone and dialed the number of his wife’s parents’ house in Ashikaga. His father-in-law answered.

“Hello, it’s Asakawa. Could you call Shizu and Yoko to the phone?” He knew he was being rude, skipping the customary exchange of pleasantries. But he didn’t have time to worry about his father-in-law’s feelings. The man started to say something, but then seemed to sense the urgency of the situation, and immediately summoned his daughter and granddaughter. Asakawa was extremely glad his mother-in-law hadn’t been the one to answer. He’d never have got a word in edgewise then.

“Hello?”

“Shizu, is that you?” Hearing her voice, he missed her already.

“Where are you?”

“Atami. How’s everything there?”

“Oh, about the same. Yoko’s having a great time with Grandma and Grandpa.”

“Is she there?” He could hear her voice. No words, just sounds as she struggled to climb up on her mother’s lap to get to her father.

“Yoko, it’s Daddy.” Shizu put the receiver to Yoko’s ear.

“Dada, Dada …” He could barely hear the words, if words they were. They were all but drowned out by the sounds of her breathing into the phone, or rubbing the mouthpiece against her cheek. But these noises only made him feel that much closer to her. He was overcome with the desire to leave all this behind him and hug her.

“Yoko, you wait there, okay? Daddy’s coming soon to get you in the vroom-vroom.”

“Really? When are you getting here?” Shizu had taken the phone without him realizing it.

“On Sunday. Right, I’ll be renting a car and driving up, so let’s all take a drive into the mountains, to Nikko or something.”

“Really? Yoko, isn’t that great? Daddy’s going to take us for a drive in a car on Sunday!”

He felt his ears burning. Was he really in a position to make that kind of promise? A doctor was never supposed to say anything to give his patient false hope; he was supposed to do things to minimize the eventual shock as much as possible.

“It sounds like you’ve got this thing you’re working on straightened out.”

“Well, it’s coming along.”

“You promised me that when all this is over you’d tell me the whole thing from the beginning.”

He had promised that. In exchange for her not asking any questions right now, he’d said he’d tell her all about it once it was taken care of. His wife had kept her end of the bargain.

“Hey, how long are you going to keep talking?” Ryuji said from behind him. Asakawa turned around. Ryuji had the trunk open and was loading his purchases into the car.

“I’ll call again. I might not be able to tonight, though.” Asakawa placed his hand on the hook. If he pushed, the connection would be broken. He didn’t even know why he’d called. Was it just to hear their voices, or did he have something more important to tell them? But he knew that even if he’d been able to talk to her for an hour, when it came time to hang up he’d still feel constrained, as if he’d only said half of what he wanted to say. It’d just be the same thing. He pressed down on the hook, and then let go. In any case, everything would be clear tonight at ten. Tonight at ten …

Driving up in the daytime like this, South Hakone Pacific Land felt like a typical mountain resort. The creepy mood he’d felt last time he came was hidden by the sunlight. Even the sound of bouncing tennis balls was normal, not sluggish and sonorous like before, but crisp and light. They could see Mt Fuji, hazy and white, and below them in the distance scattered flashes of sun from greenhouse roofs.

It was a weekday afternoon and Villa Log Cabin appeared deserted. It seemed that the only time the rental units were fully occupied was weekends and the summer vacation season. B-4 was vacant today, too. Leaving Ryuji to check in, Asakawa unloaded the car and changed into lighter clothes.

He looked carefully around the room. A week ago this evening Asakawa had fled in fear from this haunted house. He remembered running into the bathroom to throw up, feeling that he was about to piss himself. He could even remember, quite vividly, the graffiti he’d seen on the bathroom wall when he’d knelt down in front of the toilet. Now he opened the bathroom door. The same graffiti in the same place.

It was just after two. They went out onto the balcony and ate the box lunches they’d bought on the way while gazing over the grassy meadow surrounding the cabins. The fretful mood that had shadowed them here from Nagao’s clinic subsided a bit. Even amidst the worst panic, there are still scattered moments like this, when time flows leisurely by. Even when trying to finish a story by an impending deadline, Asakawa would sometimes find himself aimlessly watching coffee drop from the spout of the coffee maker, and later he’d reflect on how elegantly he’d wasted precious time.

“Eat up. We’ll need our strength,” said Ryuji. He’d bought two lunches just for himself. Asakawa meanwhile didn’t seem to have much appetite; from time to time he’d rest his chopsticks and look back inside the cabin.

Suddenly, he spoke, as if it had just occurred to him. “Maybe we’d better get this straight. What exactly are we doing here?”

“We’re going to look for Sadako, of course.”

“And what do we do once we’ve found her?”

“Take her back to Sashikiji and lay her to rest.”

“So that’s the charm. You’re saying that’s what she wants.”

Ryuji chewed loudly for a while on a big mouthful of rice, eyes staring straight ahead, unfocused. Asakawa could tell from the look on his face that Ryuji wasn’t entirely convinced, either. Asakawa was scared. It was his last chance, and he wanted some sort of assurance that they were doing the right thing. There were to be no second chances.

“There’s nothing else we can do now,” said Ryuji, tossing away his empty lunch box.

“What about this possibility? Maybe she wants us to clear away her resentment toward the person who killed her.”

“You mean Jotaro Nagao? You mean if we exposed him, Sadako would be appeased?”

Asakawa looked deep into Ryuji’s eyes, trying to figure out what he really thought. If they dug up the remains and laid them to rest and it still didn’t save Asakawa’s life, maybe Ryuji was planning to kill Dr Nagao. Maybe he was using Asakawa as a test case, trying to save his own skin …

“Come on. Don’t be stupid,” said Ryuji with a laugh. “First of all, if Nagao had really incurred Sadako’s resentment, he’d already be dead.”

True. She definitely had that kind of power.

“So why did she let herself be killed by him?”

“I can’t say. But look: she was surrounded by the deaths of people close to her. She knew nothing but frustration. Even disappearing from the theater company like that was essentially a frustration of her goals, right? Then she visits her father at the sanatorium and finds out that he’s near death.”

“A person who’s given up on the world harbors no resentment toward the person who takes her out of it, is that what you’re saying?”

“Not exactly. Rather, I think it’s possible that Sadako herself caused those impulses in Old Man Nagao. In other words, maybe she killed herself, but borrowed Nagao’s hands to do it.”

Her mother had thrown herself into a volcano, her father was dying of tuberculosis, her own dreams of becoming an actress had been shattered, and then there was her congenital handicap. She had any number of reasons to commit suicide. And there were things that just didn’t add up unless one assumed she’d killed herself. Yoshino’s report had mentioned Shigemori, founder of Theater Group Soaring. He’d got drunk and dropped in on Sadako, and died the next day of cardiac paralysis. It was almost certain that Sadako had killed him using some abnormal ability of hers. She had that kind of power. She could easily kill a man or two without leaving any evidence. So why was Nagao still alive? It made no sense, unless one decided that she must have guided his will in order to kill herself.

“Well, okay, let’s say it was suicide. But why did she have to be raped before she died? And don’t tell me it’s because she didn’t want to die a virgin.”

Asakawa had hit the nail on the head, and as a result Ryuji was at a loss for an answer. That was exactly what he was going to say.

“Is that really so stupid?”

“Huh?”

“Is it really so foolish to not want to die a virgin?” Ryuji pressed his point with a desperate earnestness. “If it were me … if by some chance it were me, that’s how I’d feel. I wouldn’t want to die a virgin.”

This wasn’t like Ryuji, Asakawa felt. Asakawa couldn’t explain it logically, but neither the words nor the facial expression were like Ryuji at all.

“Are you serious? Men and women are different. Especially in the case of Sadako Yamamura.”

“Heh, heh. Just kidding. Sadako didn’t want to be raped. Of course she didn’t. I mean, who’d want a thing like that to happen to oneself? Plus, she bit Nagao’s shoulder down to the bone. It was only after it had happened that the thought of dying occurred to her, and without even considering it she guided Nagao in that direction. I think that’s probably what happened.”

“But then, wouldn’t you still expect her to have a lingering resentment toward Nagao?” Asakawa still wasn’t convinced.

“But aren’t you forgetting? We need to imagine the spear-tip of her resentment being pointed, not at any one individual, but at society in general. Compared to that, her hatred of Nagao was as insignificant as a fart in a windstorm.”

If hatred toward society in general was what was incorporated into that video, then what was the charm? What could it be? The phrase indiscriminate attack came into Asakawa’s mind, before Ryuji’s thick voice interrupted his thoughts.

“Enough already. If we have time to think about crap like this, we should be spending it trying to find Sadako. She’s the one who’ll solve every riddle.”

Ryuji drained the last of his oolong tea and then stood up and tossed the empty can out toward the valley floor.

They stood on the gentle hillside looking around at the tall grass. Ryuji handed Asakawa a sickle and pointed with his chin to the slope on the left side of B-4. He wanted him to cut away the tangles of grass and examine the contours of the ground there. Asakawa bent down, dropped his knee, and began to swing the sickle in an arc parallel to the ground. Grass began to fall.

Thirty years before, a dilapidated house had stood here, with a well in its front yard. Asakawa stood up again. He looked around again, wondering where he’d build his dwelling if he were to live here. He’d probably choose a site with a nice view. There was no other reason to build a house up here. Where was the best view? Eyes trained on the greenhouse roofs shining far below, Asakawa walked around a bit, paying attention to the shifting perspective. The view didn’t seem to change much no matter where he went. But he thought that if he were building a house, it would be easier to build it where cabin A-4 stood than where B-4 was. When he bent down to the ground and looked he realized that was the only level area. He crawled around in the space between A-4 and B-4, cutting the grass and feeling the earth with his hands.

He had no memory of ever drawing water from a well. He realized that he’d never even seen a real well. He had no idea what one really looked like, especially one in a mountainous area such as this. Was there really groundwater here? But then, a few hundred meters east along the floor of the valley there was a patch of marsh, surrounded by tall trees. Asakawa’s thoughts weren’t coming together. What was he supposed to concentrate on during a task such as this? No idea. He felt the blood rush to his head. He looked at his watch: almost three o’clock. Seven hours left. Would all this effort get them any closer to meeting the deadline? The thought sent his mind into further disarray. His image of the well was hazy. What would remain to mark the site of an old well? A bunch of stones piled up in a circle? What if they’d collapsed and fallen into the earth? No way. Then they’d never make it in time. He looked at his watch again. Exactly three now. He’d just drunk 500 milliliters of oolong tea on the balcony, but already his throat was dry again. Voices echoed in his head: look for a bulge in the earth, look for rocks. He jabbed the shovel into the exposed dirt. Time and blood assaulted his brain. His nerves were shot, but he didn’t feel fatigued. Why was time flowing so differently now than it had on the balcony, when they were eating lunch? Why had he started to panic so much the minute he’d set to work? Was this the right thing to do, really? Weren’t there a lot of other things they should be doing?

He’d dug a cave once as a child. He must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. He laughed weakly as he recalled the episode.

“What in the world are you doing?” At the sound of Ryuji’s voice, Asakawa’s head jerked up. “What’ve you been up to, crawling around over here. We’ve got to search a wider area.”

Asakawa gaped up at Ryuji. Ryuji had the sun at his back, his face was shadowy. Drops of sweat from his dark face fell to the grass by his feet. What was I up to? A little hole had been dug in the ground right in front of him. Asakawa had dug it.

“You digging a pit or something?”

Ryuji sighed. Asakawa frowned and moved to look at his watch.

“And stop looking at your fucking watch!” Ryuji slapped his hand away. He glared at Asakawa for a little while, then sighed again. He squatted and whispered, calmly, “Maybe you ought to take a break.”

“No time.”

“I’m telling you, you need to get a hold of yourself. Panicking won’t get you anywhere.” Asakawa was crouching, too, and Ryuji poked him lightly in the chest. Asakawa lost his balance and fell over backwards, feet up in the air.

“That’s it, lie down just like that, just like a baby.”

Asakawa squirmed, trying to get to his feet.

“Don’t move! Lie down! Don’t waste your strength.” Ryuji stepped on Asakawa’s chest until he stopped struggling. Asakawa closed his eyes and gave up resisting. The weight of Ryuji’s foot receded into the distance. When he gently opened his eyes again, Ryuji was moving his short, powerful legs, crossing over into the shade of B-4’s balcony. His gait was eloquent. He’d had an inspiration as to where they could find the well, and his sense of desperation had faded.

After Ryuji had left, Asakawa lay still for a while. Flat on his back, spread-eagled, he gazed up into the sky. The sun was bright. How weak his spirit was compared to Ryuji’s. Disgusting. He regulated his breathing and tried to think coolly. He wasn’t confident he could keep himself together as the next seven hours ticked away. He’d just follow Ryuji’s every order. That’d be best. Lose himself, place himself under the sway of someone with an unyielding spirit. Lose yourself! You’ll even be able to escape the terror then. You’re going to be buried in the earth—you’ll become one with nature. As if in answer to his wish, he was suddenly overcome by drowsiness and began to lose consciousness. At the very threshold of sleep, in the midst of a daydream about lifting Yoko high into the air, he remembered once again that episode from his grade-school days.

There was a municipal sports ground on the outskirts of the town where he’d grown up. There was a cliff at its edge, and at the foot of the cliff was a swamp with crayfish in it. When he was a schoolboy, Asakawa often went there with his buddies to catch crayfish. On that particular day, the sun shining on the exposed red earth of the cliff next to the swamp was like a challenge. He was tired of sitting there holding his fishing pole anyway, so he went over to where the sun was shining on the cliff and began to dig a hole in its steep face. The dirt was soft clay, and it crumbled away at his feet when he thrust in an old piece of board he’d found. Before long his friends joined him. There’d been three of them, he seemed to recall, or maybe four. Just the perfect number for digging a cave. Any more and they would have been bumping heads, any fewer and it would have been too much work for each of them.

After an hour of digging they’d made a hole just the right size for one of them to crawl into. They kept going. They’d originally been on their way home from school, and soon one of his friends said he had to be getting home. Only Asakawa, whose idea it had been in the first place, kept at it silently. And by the time the sun set the cave had grown large enough for all the boys who were left to squeeze into. Asakawa had hugged his knees; he and his friends giggled at each other. Curled up in the red clay like that, they felt like the Stone Age people at Mikkabi, whose remains they’d just learned about in Social Studies.

However, after a little while the entrance to the hole was blocked by a lady’s face. The setting sun was at her back, so her face was in shadow and they couldn’t make out her expression, but they realized it was a fiftyish housewife from the neighborhood.

“What are you boys doing digging a hole here? It’d be pretty disgusting if you got buried alive in there,” the lady said, peering into the cave. Asakawa and the two other boys exchanged glances. Young though they were, they still noticed something odd about her warning. Not, “Cut it out—that’s dangerous,” but, “Cut it out, because if you got buried alive in there and died it would be disgusting to people in the neighborhood, such as me.” She was cautioning them purely for her own good. Asakawa and his friends began to giggle again. The lady’s face blocked the entrance like a figure in a shadow play.

Ryuji’s face gradually superimposed itself over the lady’s.

“Now you’re a bit too relaxed. Imagine being able to go night-night in a place like this. Hey, you jerk, what are you giggling at?”

Ryuji woke him up. The sun was nearing the western horizon, and darkness was fast approaching. Ryuji’s face and figure against the weakening sunlight were even blacker than before.

“Come over here a minute.” Ryuji pulled Asakawa to his feet and then silently crawled back under the balcony of B-4. Asakawa followed. Under the balcony, one of the boards between the supporting pillars had been peeled partway back. Ryuji stuck his hand in behind the board and pulled it out with all his might. With a loud snap the board broke in half diagonally. The decor inside the cabin was modern, but these boards were so flimsy you could break them by hand. The builders had thoroughly skimped on the parts you couldn’t see. Ryuji poked the flashlight inside and shined it around under the cabin. He nodded as if to say, come look at this. Asakawa fixed his gaze on the gap in the wall and looked inside. The flashlight beam was trained on a black protrusion over by the west side. As he stared at it he noticed that the sides seemed to have an uneven texture, like a pile of rocks. The top was covered with a concrete lid; blades of grass poked out of cracks in the concrete and between the stones. Asakawa immediately realized what was directly overhead. The living room of the cabin. And directly over the round rim of the well were the television and VCR. A week ago, when he’d watched that video, Sadako Yamamura had been this close, hiding, watching what went on above.

Ryuji pulled off more boards until there was an opening large enough for a man to pass through. They both ducked through the hole in the wall and crawled to the rim of the well. The cabin was built on a gradient, and they’d entered from the downhill end, so the further they went the lower the floorboards got, creating a sense of something pressing down on them. Even though there should be plenty of air in the dark crawl space, Asakawa began to find it hard to breathe. The soil here was clammier than outside. Asakawa knew full well what they must do now. He knew, but he felt no fear yet. He felt claustrophobic just from the floorboards over his head, but maybe he’d have to go down into the bottom of the well, into a place ruled by an even deeper darkness … Not maybe. To pull Sadako out, they’d almost certainly have to descend into the well.

“Give me a hand here,” said Ryuji. He’d grabbed a piece of rebar poking out from a crack in the concrete lid and was trying to pull the lid onto the downhill slope. But the ceiling was too low, and he couldn’t get much leverage. Even someone like Ryuji who could bench 120 kilos was down to half strength if he didn’t have the right footing. Asakawa went around the well until he was uphill from it and lay down on his back. He placed both hands on a support column to brace himself and then pushed against the lid with his feet. There was an ugly sound as concrete scraped against stone. Asakawa and Ryuji began to chant in order to synchronize their efforts. The lid moved. How many years had it been since the well’s face was exposed? Had the well been capped when Villa Log Cabin was built, or when Pacific Land was established, or when the sanatorium closed? They could only guess, based on the strength of the seal between the concrete and the stones, on the almost-human screech as the lid was torn away. Probably more than just six months or a year. But no longer than twenty-five years. In any case, the well had now started to open its mouth. Ryuji stuck the blade of the shovel into the space they’d made so far and pushed.

“Okay, when I give the signal, I want you to lean on the handle.”

Asakawa turned around.

“Ready? One, two, three, push!”

As Asakawa leaned on the makeshift lever, Ryuji pushed on the side of the cap with both hands. With an agonized shriek, the lid fell to the ground.

The lip of the well was faintly damp. Asakawa and Ryuji picked up their flashlights, placed their other hands on the wet rim, and pulled themselves up. Before shining light into the well, they moved their heads and shoulders into the roughly fifty-centimeter gap between the top of the well and the floor above. A putrid smell arose on the cold air. The space inside the well was so dense that they felt if they let go their hands they’d be sucked in. She was here, all right. This woman with extraordinary supernatural power, with testicular feminization syndrome … “Woman” wasn’t even the right word. The biological distinction between male and female depended on the structure of the gonads. No matter how beautifully feminine the body, if those gonads were in the form of testes it was a male. Asakawa didn’t know whether he should consider Sadako Yamamura a man or a woman. Since her parents had named her Sadako, it seemed they had intended to raise her as a woman. This morning, on the boat to Atami, Ryuji had said, Don’t you think a person with both male and female genitals is the ultimate symbol of power and beauty? Come to think of it, Asakawa had once seen something in an art book that had made him doubt his eyes. A perfectly mature female nude was reclining on a slab of stone, with a splendid example of the male genitalia peeking out from between her thighs …

“Can you see anything?” asked Ryuji. The beams of their flashlights showed that water had collected in the bottom of the well, about four or five meters down. But they didn’t know how deep the water was.

“There’s water down there.” Ryuji scuffled around, tying the end of the rope to a post.

“Okay, point your flashlight downward and hold it over the edge. Don’t drop it, whatever you do.”

He’s planning to go down in there. As he realized this, Asakawa’s legs began to shake. What if I have to go down … Now, finally, with the narrow, vertical tunnel staring him in the face, Asakawa’s imagination started to work on him. I can’t do it. Go into that black water and do what? Fish around for bones, that’s what. There’s no way I can do that, I’ll go crazy. As he gratefully watched Ryuji lower himself into the hole, he prayed to God that his turn would never come.

His eyes were accustomed to the dark now, and he could see the moss covering the inner surface of the well. The stones of the wall, in the orange beam of his flashlight, seemed to turn into eyes and noses and mouths, and when he couldn’t tear his gaze away, the patterns of the stones transformed into dead faces, distorted with demonic cries at their moment of death. Innumerable evil spirits undulated like seaweed, hands outstretched toward the exit. He couldn’t drive away the image. A pebble fell into the ghastly shaft, barely a meter across, echoed against the sides of the well, and was swallowed into the gullets of the evil spirits.

Ryuji wormed his body into the space between the top of the well and the floorboards, wrapped the rope around his hands, and slowly let himself down. Soon he was standing on the bottom. His legs were submerged up to his knees. It wasn’t very deep.

“Hey, Asakawa! Go get the bucket. Oh, and the thin rope, too.”

The bucket was where they’d left it, on the balcony. Asakawa crawled out from underneath the cabin. It was dark outside. But it still felt far brighter than under the foundation. What a feeling of release! So much pure air! He looked around at the cabins: only A-1, by the road, emitted any light. He made a point of not looking at his watch. The warm, friendly voices spilling from A-1 seemed to constitute a separate world, floating in the distance. They were the sounds of dinnertime. He didn’t have to look at his watch to know what time it must be.

He returned to the lip of the well, where he tied the bucket and shovel to the end of the rope and lowered them down. Ryuji shoveled earth from the bottom of the well into the bucket. From time to time he’d crouch and run his fingers through the mud, searching for something, but he didn’t find anything.

“Haul the bucket up!” he shouted. With his belly braced against the edge of the well, Asakawa pulled up the bucket, then dumped the mud and rocks out on the ground before lowering the empty bucket back down into the well. It seemed that quite a bit of dirt and sand had drifted into the well before it had been sealed. Ryuji dug and dug, but without turning up Sadako’s beautiful limbs.

“Hey, Asakawa.” Ryuji paused in his labors and looked up. Asakawa didn’t reply. “Asakawa! Something wrong up there?”

Asakawa wanted to reply: Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.

“You haven’t said a word this whole time. At least, you know, call out encouragement or something. I’m getting a bit melancholy down here.”

Asakawa said nothing.

“Well, then, how about a song? Something by Hibari Misora, maybe.”

Asakawa still said nothing.

“Hey! Asakawa. Are you still there? I know you didn’t faint on me.”

“I’m … I’m fine,” he managed to mutter.

“You’re a pain in the ass, that’s what you are.” Ryuji spat out the words and jammed the tip of the shovel into the water. How many times had he done this now? The water level was slowly dropping, but still there were no signs of what they were looking for. He could see the bucket climbing more and more slowly. Then, finally, it stopped. Asakawa let it slip out of his hands. He’d had it raised about half the height of the well, and now it plunged back down again. Ryuji managed to avoid a direct hit, but he got splashed from head to toe with muddy water. Along with anger came the realization that Asakawa was at the limit of his strength.

“Sonofabitch! Are you trying to kill me?” Ryuji climbed up the rope. “Your turn.”

My turn! Shocked, Asakawa stood up, banging his head hard on the floorboards in the process. “Wait, Ryuji, it’s okay, I’m alright, I’ve still got some strength left,” Asakawa stammered. Ryuji poked his head out of the well.

“No you haven’t, not an ounce. Your turn.”

“Just, just hold on. Let me catch my second wind.”

“We’d be here ’til dawn.”

Ryuji shined the light in Asakawa’s face. There was a strange look in his eyes. Fear of death had stolen his reason. One look told Ryuji that Asakawa was no longer capable of rational judgment. Between shoveling muddy water into a bucket and hauling that bucket four or five meters straight up, it didn’t take much to see which was the harder job.

“Down you go.” Ryuji pushed Asakawa toward the well.

“No—wait—I—it’s …”

“What?”

“I’m claustrophobic.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Asakawa continued to cringe, unmoving. The water at the bottom of the well trembled slightly.

“I can’t do it. I can’t go down there.”

Ryuji grabbed Asakawa by the collar and slapped him twice. “Snap out of it. ‘I can’t go down there.’ You’ve got death staring you in the face, and you might be able to do something about it, and now you say you can’t do it? Don’t be a worm. It’s not just your own life at stake here, you know. Remember that phone call? You ready to take sweet babykins down into the darkness with you?”

He thought about his wife and daughter. He couldn’t afford to be a coward. He held their lives in his hands. But his body wouldn’t obey him.

“Is this really going to work, though?” But there was no purpose in his voice; he knew it was pointless to even ask the question now. Ryuji relaxed his grip on his collar.

“Shall I tell you a little more about Professor Miura’s theory? There are three conditions that have to be met in order for a malevolent will to remain in the world after death. An enclosed space, water, and a slow death. One, two, three. In other words, if someone dies slowly, in an enclosed space, with water present, then usually that person’s angry spirit will haunt the place. Now, look at this well. It’s a small, enclosed space. There’s water. And remember what the old lady in the video said.”

… How has your health been since then? If you spend all your time playing in the water, monsters are bound to get you.

Playing in the water. That was it. Sadako was down there under that black muddy water playing, even now. An endless, watery, underground game.

“You see, Sadako was still alive when she was dropped into this well. And while she waited for death she coated the very walls with her hatred. All three conditions were met in her case.”

“So?”

“So, according to Professor Miura, it’s easy to exorcise such a curse. We just free her. We take her bones out of this nasty old well, have a nice memorial service, and lay her to rest in the soil of her native place. We bring her up into the wide, bright world.”

A while before, when he’d crawled out from under the cabin to get the bucket, Asakawa had felt an indescribable sense of liberation. Were they supposed to provide Sadako with the same thing? Was that what she wanted?

“So that’s the charm?”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.”

“That’s pretty vague.”

Ryuji grabbed Asakawa’s collar again. “Think! There’s nothing certain in our future! All we can hope for is a vague continuation. But in spite of that, you’re going to keep on living. You can’t give up on life just because it’s vague. It’s a question of possibilities. The charm … There might be a lot of other things Sadako wants. But there’s a good possibility that taking her remains out of here will break the curse of the video.”

Asakawa twisted his face and screamed silently. Enclosed space, water, and slow death, he says. Those three conditions allow the strongest survival of an evil spirit, he says. Where’s the proof that anything that fraud Miura said is true?

“If you understand me, you’ll go down into the well.”

But I don’t understand. How can I understand something like this?

“You don’t have time to dawdle. Your deadline is almost here.” Ryuji’s voice grew gradually kinder. “Don’t think you can overcome death without a fight.”

Asshole! I don’t want to hear your philosophy of life!

But he finally began to climb over the rim of the well.

“Attaboy. You finally think you can do it?”

Asakawa clung to the rope and lowered himself down the inner wall of the well. Ryuji’s face was before his eyes.

“Don’t worry. There’s nothing down there. Your biggest enemy is your imagination.”

When he looked up, the beam of the flashlight hit him full in the face, blinding him. He pressed his back against the wall; his grip on the rope began to loosen. His feet slipped against the stones, and he suddenly dropped about a meter. His hands burned from the friction.

He was dangling just above the surface of the water, but couldn’t make himself go in. He extended one foot, putting it in the water up to his ankle, as if he were testing the temperature of a bath. With the cold touch of the water came gooseflesh, from the tips of his toes to his spine, and he immediately retracted his foot. But his arms were too tired to keep hanging onto the rope. His weight pulled him slowly down, and eventually he couldn’t endure anymore so he planted both feet. Immediately the soft dirt below the water enveloped his feet, submerging them. Asakawa still clung to the rope in front of his eyes. He started to panic. He felt as if a forest of hands were reaching up from the earth to pull him into the mud. The walls were closing in on all sides, leering at him: there’s no escape.

Ryuji! He tried to scream, but he couldn’t find his voice. He couldn’t breathe. Only a faint, dry sound escaped his throat, and he looked upward like a drowning child. He felt something warm trickle down the insides of his thighs.

“Asakawa! Breathe!”

Overcome by the pressure, Asakawa had forgotten to breathe.

“It’s alright. I’m here.” Ryuji’s voice echoed down to him, and Asakawa managed to suck in a lungful of air.

He couldn’t control the pounding of his heart. He couldn’t do what he needed to do down here. He desperately tried to think of something else. Something more pleasant. If this well had been outside, under a sky full of stars, it wouldn’t be this horrible. It was because it was covered by cabin B-4 that it was so hard to take. It cut off the escape route. Even with the concrete lid gone, there were only floorboards and spiderwebs above. Sadako Yamamura has lived down here for twenty-five years. That’s right, she’s down here. Right under my feet. This is a tomb, that’s what it is. A tomb. He couldn’t think of anything else. Thought itself was closed off to him, as was any kind of escape. Sadako had tragically ended her life down here, and the scenes that had flashed through her mind at her moment of death had remained here, still strong, through the power of her psyche. And they’d matured down here in this cramped hole, breathing like the ebb and flow of the tide, waxing and waning in strength according to some cycle that had at some point coincided in frequency with the television placed directly overhead; and then they’d made their appearance in the world. Sadako was breathing. From out of nowhere, the sound of breathing enclosed him. Sadako Yamamura, Sadako Yamamura. The syllables repeated themselves in his brain, and her terrifyingly beautiful face came to him out of the photographs, shaking her head coquettishly. Sadako Yamamura was here. Asakawa recklessly began to dig through the earth beneath him, searching for her. He thought of her pretty face and her body, trying to maintain that image. That beautiful girl’s bones, covered in my piss. Asakawa moved the shovel, sifting through the mud. Time no longer mattered. He’d taken off his watch before coming down here. Extreme fatigue and stress had deadened his vexation, and he forgot the deadline he was laboring under. It felt like being drunk. He had no sense of time. Only by the frequency with which the bucket came back down the well to him, and by the beating of his heart, did he have any way of measuring time.

Finally, Asakawa grasped a large, round rock with both hands. It was smooth and pleasant to the touch, with two holes in its surface. He lifted it out of the water. He washed the dirt out of its recesses. He picked it up by what must once have been earholes and found himself face to face with a skull. His imagination clothed it with flesh. Big, clear eyes returned to the deep, hollow sockets, and flesh appeared above the two holes in the middle, forming itself into an elegant nose. Her long hair was wet, and water dripped from her neck and from behind her ears. Sadako Yamamura blinked her melancholy eyes two or three times to shake the water from her eyelashes. Squeezed between Asakawa’s hands, her face looked painfully distorted. But still, her beauty was unclouded. She smiled at Asakawa, then narrowed her eyes as if to focus her vision.

I’ve been wanting to meet you. As he thought this, Asakawa slumped down right where he was. He could hear Ryuji’s voice from far overhead.

Asakawa! Wasn’t your deadline 10:04? Rejoice! It’s 10:10!

Asakawa, can you hear me? You’re still alive, right? The curse is broken. We’re saved. Hey, Asakawa! If you die down there you’ll end up just like her. If you die, just don’t put a curse on me, okay? If you’re going to die, die nice, would you? Hey, Asakawa! If you’re alive, answer me, damnit!

He heard Ryuji, but he didn’t really feel saved. He just curled up as if in a dream, as if in another world, clutching Sadako Yamamura’s skull to his chest.

PART FOUR

Ripples

1

October 19—Friday

A phone call from the manager’s office woke Asakawa from his slumber. The manager was reminding them that checkout was at 11 a.m., and asking if they’d prefer to stay another night. Asakawa reached out with his free hand and picked up his watch beside his pillow. His arms were tired, just lifting them was an effort. They didn’t hurt yet, but they’d probably ache like hell tomorrow. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, so he couldn’t read the time until he brought the watch right up to his eyes. A few minutes past eleven. Asakawa couldn’t think of how to reply right away. He didn’t even know where he was.

“Will you be staying another night?” asked the manager, trying to suppress his annoyance. Ryuji groaned right beside him. This wasn’t his own room, that was for sure. It was as if the whole world had been repainted without his knowing it. The thick line connecting past to present and present to future had been cut into two: before his sleep and after it.

“Hello?”

Now the manager was worried that there was nobody on the other end of the line. Without even knowing why, Asakawa felt joy flood his breast. Ryuji rolled over and opened his eyes slightly. He was drooling. Asakawa’s memories were hazy; all he found when he searched his recollections was darkness. He could more or less remember visiting Dr Nagao and then heading for Villa Log Cabin, but everything after that was vague. Dark scenes came to him, one after another, and his breath caught in his throat. He felt like he did after waking up from a powerful dream, one that left a strong impression even though he’d forgotten what it was about. But for some reason, his spirits were high.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Uh, yeah.” Asakawa finally managed to reply, adjusting his grip on the receiver.

“Check-out time is eleven o’clock.”

“Got it. We’ll get our things together and leave right away.” Asakawa adopted an officious tone to match the manager’s. He could hear a faint trickle of water from the kitchen. It seemed someone hadn’t turned the faucet tight last night before going to sleep. Asakawa hung up the phone.

Ryuji had closed his eyes again. Asakawa shook him. “Hey, Ryuji. Get up.”

He had no idea how long they’d slept. Ordinarily, Asakawa slept no more than five or six hours a night, but now he felt like he’d been asleep for much longer than that. It had been a long time since he’d been able to sleep soundly, untroubled.

“Hey, Ryuji! If we don’t get out of here they’re going to charge us for another night.” Asakawa shook Ryuji harder, but he didn’t wake up. Asakawa raised his eyes and saw the milky-white plastic bag on the dining room table. Suddenly, as if some chance happening had brought back a fragment of a dream, he remembered what was inside it. Calling Sadako’s name. Pulling her out of the cold earth under the floor, stuffing her into a plastic bag. The sound of running water … It had been Ryuji, last night, who had gone to the sink and washed the mud from Sadako. The water was still running. By then, the appointed time had already passed. And even now, Asakawa was still alive. He was overjoyed. Death had been breathing down his neck, and now that it had been cleared away, life seemed more concentrated; it began to glow. Sadako’s skull was beautiful, like a marble sculpture.

“Hey, Ryuji! Wake up!”

Suddenly, he got a bad feeling. Something caught in a corner of his mind. He put his ear to Ryuji’s chest. He wanted to hear Ryuji’s heart beating through his thick sweatshirt, to know he was still alive. But just as his ear was about to touch Ryuji’s chest, Asakawa suddenly found himself in a headlock, held by two powerful hands. Asakawa panicked and started to struggle.

“Gotcha! Thought I was dead, didn’t you?” Ryuji released his grip on Asakawa’s head and laughed an odd, childlike laugh. How could he joke around after what they’d just been through? Anything was liable to happen. If at that instant he’d seen Sadako Yamamura alive and standing by the table, and Ryuji tearing at his hair dying, Asakawa would have believed his eyes. He suppressed his anger. He owed Ryuji a great deal.

“Stop fooling around.”

“It’s payback time. You scared the bejeezus out of me last night.” Still on his side, Ryuji began to chuckle.

“What did I do?”

“You collapsed down there at the bottom of the well. I really thought you’d gone and died. I was worried. Time was up. I thought you were out of the game.”

Asakawa said nothing, just blinked several times.

“Hah. You probably don’t even remember. Ungrateful bastard.”

Now that he thought about it, Asakawa couldn’t remember crawling out of the well on his own. Finally he recalled dangling from the rope, his strength totally spent. Hauling his sixty kilogram frame four or five meters straight up couldn’t have been easy, even for someone of Ryuji’s strength. The image of himself hanging suspended reminded him somehow of the stone statue of En no Ozunu being pulled up from the bottom of the sea. Shizuko had gained mysterious powers for fishing out the statue, but all Ryuji had to show for his troubles were aches and pains.

“Ryuji?” asked Asakawa in a strangely altered voice.

“What?”

“Thanks for everything you’ve done. I really owe you.”

“Don’t start getting mushy on me.”

“If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be … well, you know. Anyway, thanks.”

“Cut the crap. You’re going to make me puke. Gratitude isn’t worth a single yen.”

“Well then, how about some lunch? I’m buying.”

“Oh, well in that case.” Ryuji pulled himself to his feet, staggering a little. All of his muscles were stiff. Even Ryuji was having trouble making his body do what he wanted it to.

From the South Hakone Pacific Land rest house, Asakawa called his wife in Ashikaga and told her he’d pick her up in a rental car Sunday morning, as promised. So, everything’s all taken care of? she asked. All Asakawa could say was, “Probably”. From the fact that he was still here, alive, he could only guess that things were resolved. But as he hung up the phone, something still bothered him deeply. He couldn’t quite get over it. Just from the mere fact that he was alive, he wanted to believe that everything was wrapped up neatly, but … Thinking that Ryuji might have the same doubts, Asakawa walked back to the table and asked, “This is really the end, right?”

Ryuji had wolfed down his lunch while Asakawa was on the phone.

“Your family doing alright?” Ryuji wasn’t going to answer Asakawa’s question right away.

“Yeah. Hey, Ryuji, are you feeling like it’s not all over yet?”

“You worried?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“About what? What bothers you?”

“What the old woman said. Next year you’re going to have a child. That prediction of hers.”

The moment he realized Ryuji had exactly the same doubts, Asakawa turned to trying to dispel those doubts.

“Maybe the ‘you’, just that once, was referring to Shizuko instead of Sadako.”

Ryuji rejected this straightaway. “Not possible. The images on that video come from Sadako’s own eyes and mind. The old woman was talking to her. ‘You’ can only refer to Sadako.”

“Maybe her prediction was false.”

“Sadako’s ability to foresee the future should have been infallible, one hundred percent.”

“But Sadako was physically incapable of bearing children.”

“That’s why it’s so strange. Biologically, Sadako was a man, not a woman, so there was no way she could have a kid. Plus, she was a virgin until right before she died. And …”

“And?”

“Her first sexual experience was Nagao. The last smallpox victim in Japan. Quite a coincidence.”

It was said that in the distant past God and the Devil, cells and viruses, male and female, even light and darkness had been identical, with no internal contradiction. Asakawa began to feel uneasy. Once the discussion moved into the realm of genetic structures, or the cosmos before the creation of the Earth, the answers were beyond the pale of individual questioning. All he could do at this point was to persuade himself to dispel the niggling uncertainties in his heart and tell himself that it was all over.

“But I’m alive. The riddle of the erased charm is solved. This case is closed.”

Then Asakawa realized something. Hadn’t the statue of En no Ozunu willed itself to be pulled up from the bottom of the ocean? That will had worked on Shizuko, guiding her actions, and as a result she was given her new power. Suddenly that pattern looked awfully familiar. Bringing Sadako’s bones up from the bottom of the well, fishing En no Ozunu’s statue up from the ocean floor … But what bothered him was the irony: the power Shizuko was given brought her only misery. But that was looking at things the wrong way. Maybe in Asakawa’s case, simply being released from the curse was the equivalent of Shizuko’s receiving power. Asakawa decided to make himself think so.

Ryuji glanced at Asakawa’s face, reassuring himself that the man before him was, indeed, alive, then nodded twice. “I suppose you do have a point.” Exhaling slowly, he sank back into his chair. “And yet …”

“What?”

Ryuji sat up straight and asked, as if to himself, “What did Sadako give birth to?”

2

Asakawa and Ryuji parted company at Atami Station. Asakawa intended to take Sadako’s remains back to her relatives in Sashikiji and have them hold a memorial service for her. They probably wouldn’t even know what to do with her, a distant relative they hadn’t heard a peep out of in nearly thirty years. But, things being what they were, he couldn’t just abandon her. If he hadn’t known who she was, he could have had her buried as a Jane Doe. But he knew, and so all he could do was hand her over to the people in Sashikiji. The statute of limitations was long past, and it would be nothing but trouble to bring up a murder now, so he decided to say she’d probably been a suicide. He wanted to hand her off and then return immediately to Tokyo, but the boat didn’t depart that often. Leaving now, he’d end up having to spend the night on Oshima. Since he’d have to leave the rental car in Atami, flying back to Tokyo would just make things more complicated.

“You can deliver her bones all by yourself. You don’t need me for that.” As he’d said this, getting out of the car in front of Atami Station, Ryuji seemed to be laughing at Asakawa. Sadako’s bones were no longer in the plastic bag. They were wrapped neatly in a black cloth in the back seat of the car. To be sure, it was such a small bundle that even a child could have delivered it to the Yamamura house in Sashikiji. The point was to get them to accept her. If they refused, then Asakawa wouldn’t have anywhere to take her. That would be troublesome. He had the feeling that the charm would only be completely fulfilled when someone close to her held services for her. But still: why should they believe him when he showed up on their doorstep with a bag of bones, saying this is your relative whom you haven’t heard from in twenty-five years? What proof did he have? Asakawa was still a little worried.

“Well, happy trails. See you in Tokyo.” Ryuji waved and went through the ticket gate. “If I didn’t have so much work, I wouldn’t mind tagging along, but you know how it is.” Ryuji had a mountain of work, scholarly articles and the like, that needed immediate attention.

“Let me thank you again.”

“Forget about it. It was fun for me, too.”

Asakawa watched until Ryuji disappeared into the shadow of the stairs leading to the platform. Just before disappearing from view, Ryuji stumbled on the steps. Although he quickly regained his balance, for a brief moment as he swayed Ryuji’s muscular form seemed to go double in Asakawa’s vision. Asakawa realized he was tired, and rubbed his eyes. When he took his hands away, Ryuji had disappeared up the stairs. A curious sensation pierced his breast, and somewhere he detected the faint scent of citrus …

That afternoon, he delivered Sadako’s remains to Takashi Yamamura without incident. He’d just returned from a fishing voyage, and as soon as he saw the black wrapped bundle he seemed to know what it was. Asakawa held it out in both hands and said, “These are Sadako’s remains.”

Takashi gazed at the bundle for a while, then narrowed his eyes tenderly. He shuffled over to Asakawa, bowed deeply, and accepted the bones, saying, “thank you for coming all this way”. Asakawa was a bit taken aback. He hadn’t thought the old man would accept it that easily. Takashi seemed to guess what he was thinking, and he said, in a voice full of conviction, “It’s definitely Sadako.”

Up until the age of three, and then from age nine to age eighteen, Sadako had lived here, at the Yamamura estate. Takashi was sixty-one now. What exactly did she mean to him? Guessing from his expression as he received her remains, Asakawa imagined that he must have loved her dearly. He didn’t even ask for assurance that this was Sadako. Perhaps he didn’t need to. Perhaps he knew intuitively that it was her inside the black cloth. The way his eyes had flashed when he’d first seen the bundle attested to that. There must be some sort of power at work here, too.

Having completed his errand, Asakawa wanted to get away from Sadako as quickly as possible. So he beat a hasty retreat, lying that “I’ll miss my flight if I don’t leave now.” If the family changed their minds and suddenly decided they wouldn’t accept the remains as Sadako’s without proof, all would be lost. If they started asking him for details, he didn’t know what he’d say. It would be a long time before he’d be able to tell anyone the whole story. He particularly didn’t feel up to telling her relatives.

Asakawa stopped by Hayatsu’s “bureau” to say thanks for all his help the other day, and then he headed for the Oshima Hot Springs Hotel. He wanted to soak away all his fatigue in a hot bath and then write up the whole sequence of events.

3

Just about the time Asakawa was settling into bed at the Oshima Hot Springs Hotel, Ryuji was dozing at his desk in his apartment. His lips rested on a half-written essay, his spittle smudging the dark blue ink. He was so tired that his hand still clutched his beloved Montblanc fountain pen. He hadn’t switched over to a word processor yet.

Suddenly his shoulders jerked and his face contorted unnaturally. Ryuji leapt up. His back went ramrod-straight, and his eyes opened far wider than they usually did when he woke up. His eyes were normally slightly slanted, and when they were wide open like this he looked different, somehow cuter than usual. His eyes were bloodshot. He’d been dreaming. Ryuji, normally not afraid of anything, was shaking through and through. He couldn’t remember the dream. But the tautness of his body, and his trembling, bore witness to the terror of the dream. He couldn’t breathe. He looked at the clock. 9:40. He couldn’t immediately figure out the significance of the time. The lights were on—the overhead fluorescent bulb and the desk lamp in front of him—and there was plenty of light, but things still felt too dark. He felt an instinctual fear of the dark. His dream had been ruled by a darkness like no other.

Ryuji swiveled in his chair and looked at the video deck. The fateful tape was still in it. For some reason, he couldn’t look away again. He kept staring at it. His breathing became rough. Misgiving showed on his face. Images raced through his mind, leaving no room for logical thought.

“Shit. You’ve come …”

He placed both hands on the edge of the desk and tried to figure out what was behind him. His apartment was in a quiet place just off a main street, and all sorts of indistinct sounds came in from the street. Occasionally the revving of an engine or the squeal of tires would stand out, but other than that the sounds from outside were just a dull, solid mass stretching out behind him to the left and right. Pricking up his ears, he could figure out what was making some of the noises. Among them were the voices of insects. This mixed-up herd of sounds now started to float and flutter like a ghost. Reality seemed to recede—that was Ryuji’s impression. And as reality receded it left an empty space around him, in which some sort of spirit matter hovered. The chilly night air and the moisture clinging to his skin turned into shadows and closed in on him. The beating of his heart grew faster, outstripping the ticking of the clock. The signs were pressing down on his chest. Ryuji looked again at the clock. 9:44. Every time he looked, he gulped.

A week ago, when I watched that video at Asakawa’s, what time was that? He said his brat always goes to sleep at around nine … Assuming we hit ‘play’ after that, we would have finished at …

He couldn’t figure out exactly when they’d finished watching the video. But he could tell that the time was fast approaching. He was well aware that these indications that were now closing in on him were no counterfeit. This was different from when one’s imagination magnified one’s fears. This was no imaginary pregnancy. It was definitely coming steadily closer. What he didn’t know was …

Why’s it only coming for me? Why is it coming for me, when it didn’t come for Asakawa? It’s not fair.

His mind overflowed with confusion.

What the hell’s going on? Didn’t we figure out the charm? So why? Why? WHY?

His chest was beating an alarm. It felt like something had reached inside his breast and was squeezing his heart. Pain shot through his spine. He felt a cool touch on his neck, and, startled, he tried to get up from his chair, but instead he was overcome by severe pain in his waist and back. He collapsed on the floor.

Think! What should you do now?

Somehow his remaining consciousness managed to give orders to his body. Stand! Stand and think! Ryuji crawled over the floor mats to the video deck. He pushed eject and took out the tape. Why am I doing this? There was nothing else he could do but take a good long look at this tape that was behind everything. He looked at it back and front, and then went to put it back in the video deck, but stopped. There was a title written on the label on the spine of the tape. Asakawa’s handwriting. Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr/1989. It must have had some music program recorded on it, before Asakawa had used it to dub that video. An electric jolt ran down his spine. A single thought swiftly took shape in his otherwise blank mind. Nonsense, he told himself, putting the thought from his mind, but when he turned the tape over, that momentary jolt changed to a certainty. Suddenly Ryuji understood many things. The riddle of the charm, the old woman’s prophecy, and another power hidden in the images on that tape … Why had those four kids in Villa Log Cabin run off without trying to carry out the charm? Why was Ryuji facing death when Asakawa’s life had been spared? What had Sadako given birth to? The hint was right here, so close at hand. He hadn’t realized that Sadako’s power had become fused with another power. She’d wanted to have a child, but her body couldn’t bear one. So she’d made a bargain with the devil—for lots of children. What effect is this going to have? Ryuji wondered. He laughed through his pain, an ironic laugh.

You’ve got to be kidding. I wanted to watch the end of mankind. And here I am, in the vanguard …

He crawled to the telephone and started to dial Asakawa’s home number, but then he remembered: he was on Oshima.

Sonofabitch’ll sure be surprised when he hears I’m dead. The terrific pressure in his chest made his ribs creak.

He dialed Mai Takano’s number. Ryuji wasn’t sure whether it was a fierce attachment to life or just a desire to hear her voice one last time which had given rise to this impulse to summon Mai; he couldn’t tell the difference anymore. But a voice came to him.

Give it up. It wouldn’t be right to get her messed up in this.

But on the other hand, he still had a smidgen of hope—he might still be in time.

The clock on the desk caught his eye. 9:48. He put the receiver to his ear and waited for Mai to come to the phone. His head suddenly felt unbearably itchy. He put his hand to his head and scratched furiously, and felt several strands of hair come out. On the second ring, Ryuji lifted his face. There was a horizontal mirror on the chest of drawers in front of him, and he could see his face reflected in it. Forgetting that he had the phone wedged between his shoulder and his head, he brought his face in close to the mirror. The receiver fell, but he didn’t care; he just stared at his face in the mirror. Somebody else was reflected there. The cheeks were yellowish, dried and cracked, and hair was falling out in clumps to reveal brown scabs. A hallucination, it’s got to be a hallucination, he told himself. Even so, he couldn’t control his emotions. A woman’s voice came from the receiver where it lay on the floor: “Hello? Hello?” Ryuji couldn’t stand it. He screamed. His screams overlapped with Mai’s words, and in the end he wasn’t able to hear his beloved’s voice. The face in the mirror was none other than his own, a hundred years in the future. Even Ryuji hadn’t known it would be so terrifying to meet himself transformed into someone else.

Mai Takano picked up the phone on the fourth ring and said “Hello”. The only answer was a ghastly scream. A shudder came over the line. Fear itself came through the line from Ryuji’s apartment to Mai’s. Surprised, Mai held the receiver away from her ear. The moans continued. The first scream had been one of shock, and the subsequent moans held incredulity. She’d received harassing phone calls several times before, but she immediately realized that this was different, and brought the phone back to her ear. The voice ceased. It was followed by dead silence.

9:49 p.m. His wish to hear the voice of the woman he loved one last time had been cruelly shattered. Instead, all he’d done was drown her in his death cries. Now he breathed his last. Nothingness enveloped his consciousness. Mai’s voice came again from the receiver near his hand. His legs were splayed out on the floor, his back was up against the bed, his left arm was thrown back across the mattress, his right hand was stretched out toward the receiver which still whispered “Hello?” and his head was bent backwards, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Just before he slipped into the void, Ryuji realized he wouldn’t be saved, and he remembered to wish with all his might that he could teach that asshole Asakawa the secret of the videotape.

Mai called “Hello, hello,” over and over again. No reply. She put the receiver back in the cradle. Those groans had sounded familiar. A premonition crept into her breast, and she picked up the receiver again to dial her esteemed professor’s number. She got a busy signal. She pressed down the hook with her finger and dialed again. Still busy. And she knew that it had been Ryuji calling, and that something horrible had happened to him.

4

October 20—Saturday

He was happy to be home again at last, but with his wife and child gone, the place seemed lonely. How long had it been since he was home? He tried to count on his fingers. He’d spent one night in Kamakura, got stuck on Oshima for two nights, spent the following night in Villa Log Cabin, and then another night on Oshima. He’d only been away for five nights. But it felt as if he’d been gone from home for much longer. He often went away for four or five nights to research articles, but when he came home it always felt like the time had flown by.

Asakawa sat down at the desk in his study and turned on his word processor. His body still ached here and there, and his back hurt when he stood up or sat down. Even the ten hours he’d slept last night couldn’t make up for all the sleepless nights of the last week. But he couldn’t stop and rest now. If he didn’t take care of the work that had piled up, he wouldn’t be able to keep his promise to take them on a drive to Nikko tomorrow—Sunday.

He sat right down in front of the word processor. He’d already saved the first half of the report on a floppy disk. Now he needed to add the rest, everything that had happened since Monday, when they had learned the name of Sadako Yamamura. He wanted to finish this document as quickly as possible. By dinnertime he’d written five pages. It was a pretty good pace. The speed of Asakawa’s writing usually picked up as the night wore on. At this rate, he’d be able to relax and enjoy seeing his wife and daughter tomorrow. Then, on Monday, he’d go back to his normal life. He couldn’t predict how his editor would react to what he was writing now, but he’d never know until he’d finished writing it. Knowing it was probably fruitless effort, Asakawa went through and put the events of the second half of the week in order. Only when the manuscript was finished would he feel that the episode was really and truly over.

Sometimes his fingers stopped over the keyboard. The printout containing Sadako’s photo was sitting by the desk. He felt as if that terrifyingly beautiful girl were watching him, and it ruined his concentration. He’d seen the same things she’d seen, through those beautiful eyes. He still had the feeling that part of her had entered into his body. Asakawa put the photo out of sight. He couldn’t work with Sadako staring at him.

He ate dinner at a local diner, and then he suddenly wondered what Ryuji was doing right now. He wasn’t really worried—somehow he just remembered Ryuji’s face. And as he went back to his room and continued working, that face floated at the edge of his consciousness, gradually becoming clearer.

I wonder what he’s up to right now?

His mental image of Ryuji’s face drifted in and out of focus. He felt strangely agitated, and reached out for the phone. After seven rings, he heard the receiver being picked up, and he felt relieved. But it was a woman’s voice he heard.

“… Hello?” The voice was faint and thin. Asakawa had heard it before.

“Hello. This is Asakawa.”

“Yes?” came the faint reply.

“Ah, you must be Mai Takano, right? I should thank you for the lunch you made the last time we met.”

“Don’t mention it,” she whispered, and waited.

“Is Ryuji there?” Asakawa wondered why she didn’t just turn the phone over to Ryuji right away.

“Is Ryuji—”

“The Professor is dead.”

“… What?” How long was he speechless? All he could say, stupidly, was, “What?” His eyes stared blankly at a point on the ceiling. Finally, when the phone felt ready to slip out of his hands, he managed to ask, “When?”

“Last night, at around ten o’clock.”

Ryuji had finished watching the video at Asakawa’s condominium last Friday night at 9:49. He’d died right on schedule.

“What was the cause of death?” He didn’t need to ask.

“Sudden heart failure … but they haven’t determined an exact cause of death.”

Asakawa barely managed to stay on his feet. This wasn’t over. They’d just entered the second round.

“Mai, are you going to be there for a while?”

“Yes. I need to put the Professor’s papers in order.”

“I’ll be over right away. Wait for me.”

Asakawa hung up the phone and sank to the floor. His wife and daughter’s deadline was tomorrow morning at eleven. Another race against time. And this time, he was alone in the fight. Ryuji was gone. He couldn’t stay on the floor like this. He had to take action. Quickly. Right now.

He stepped out onto the street and gauged the traffic situation. It looked like driving would be faster than taking the train. He crossed at the crossing and climbed into the rental car, parked at the curb. He was glad he’d extended the rental another day so he could pick up his family.

What did this mean? Hands gripping the wheel, he tried to get his thoughts together. Scene after scene flashed back to him, but none of them made any sense. The more he thought, the less his mind could absorb, and the thread connecting events got more and more tangled until it seemed ready to snap. Calm down! Calm down and think! He lectured himself. Finally, he realized what he had to focus on.

First of all, we didn’t really figure out the charm—the way to escape death. Sadako didn’t want her bones to be found and laid to rest with an appropriate memorial service. She wanted something entirely different. What? What is it? And why am I still alive like this if we didn’t figure out the charm? What does that mean? Tell me that! Why did only I survive?

At eleven o’clock next morning, Shizu and Yoko would face their deadline. It was already nine at night. If he didn’t do something, he’d lose them.

He’d been thinking of this from the perspective of a curse pronounced by Sadako, a woman who’d met an unexpected death, but he began to doubt that approach now. He had a premonition of a bottomless evil, sneering at human suffering.

Mai was kneeling formally in the Japanese-style room with an unpublished manuscript of Ryuji’s on her lap. She was turning the pages, casting her eyes over each one, but it was a difficult subject at the best of times, and now nothing was sinking in. The room felt cavernous. Ryuji’s parents had picked up his body early this morning and taken it back home to Kawasaki. He was gone.

“Tell me everything about last night.”

His friend was dead. Ryuji was like a brother-in-arms to him. He grieved. But he hadn’t time now to wallow in sentiment. Asakawa sat next to Mai and bowed.

“It was after nine-thirty at night. I got a call from the Professor …” She told him the details. The scream that had come from the phone, the silence that had followed. Then when she’d rushed to Ryuji’s apartment she’d found him leaning against the bed, legs spread wide. She fixed her gaze on the spot where Ryuji’s corpse had been, and as she described the scene tears came to her eyes.

“I called and called, but the Professor didn’t respond.”

Asakawa didn’t give her time to cry. “Was there anything different about the room?”

“No,” she said shaking her head. “Only that the telephone was off the hook and making an ear-splitting sound.”

At the moment of death, Ryuji had called Mai. Why? Asakawa pressed further. “He didn’t tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?”

“A videotape?” Mai’s expression showed that she couldn’t see any possible connection between her professor’s death and a videotape. There was no way for Asakawa to know whether or not Ryuji had figured out the true nature of the charm just before he’d died.

But why did he call Mai? He must have done it knowing his death was at hand … Was it just that he wanted to hear a loved one’s voice? Isn’t it possible that he’d figured out the charm and needed her help in carrying it out? And that’s why he called her? In which case, it takes another person to make the charm work.

Asakawa started to leave. Mai walked him to the door.

“Mai, will you be staying here tonight?”

“Yes. I need to take care of his manuscript.”

“Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you when you’re so busy.” He went to leave.

“Um …”

“Yes?”

“Mr Asakawa, I’m afraid you have the wrong idea about the Professor and me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think we were having a relationship … as a man and a woman.”

“No, well, I mean …”

Mai could spot a man who thought they were lovers—the way he looked at them. Asakawa looked at them that way. It bothered Mai.

“The first time I met you, the Professor introduced you as his best friend. That surprised me. I had never heard the Professor talk like that about anyone before. I think you were very special to him. So …” She hesitated before continuing. “So, I wish you could understand him a little better, as his best friend. The Professor … as far as I know he never knew a woman.” She lowered her eyes.

You mean he died a virgin?

Asakawa had nothing to say to that. He remained quiet. The Ryuji that Mai remembered sounded like a completely different person from the one he knew. Were they talking about the same man?

“But …”

But you don’t know what he did as a junior in high school, was what he wanted to say, but he stopped himself. He had no desire to dredge up a dead man’s crimes, and he didn’t feel like destroying Mai’s cherished image of Ryuji.

Not only that, he found himself with new doubts. Asakawa believed in a woman’s intuition. Mai seemed to have been pretty close to Ryuji, and if she said he was a virgin, he had to consider that a credible theory. In other words, maybe the whole thing about raping a college girl in his neighborhood had been nothing more than fiction.

“The Professor was like a child when he was with me. He told me everything. He didn’t hide anything. I know almost everything there is to know about his youth. His pain.”

“Is that so?” was all Asakawa could say in response.

“When he was with me he was as innocent as a ten-year-old boy. When there was a third person around he was the gentleman, and with you I imagine he probably played the scoundrel. Am I right? If he hadn’t …” Mai softly reached out for her white handbag, took out a handkerchief, and dabbed at her eyes. “If he hadn’t put on an act like that, he would never have been able to get along in the world. Do you see what I’m saying? Can you understand that?”

Asakawa was shocked, more than anything. But then something struck him. For a guy who’d been good at his studies and excelled at sports, Ryuji had been quite a loner. He hadn’t had one close friend.

“He was so pure … Not superficial, like those jerks I go to school with. They couldn’t compare to him.”

Mai’s handkerchief was soaked with tears by now.

Standing in the doorway, Asakawa found that he had too much to think about to be able to come up with any suitable words to leave with Mai. The image of the Ryuji he’d known diverged completely from the one Mai had; his view of the man had become so unfocused now as to be unrecognizable. There was a darkness concealed within Ryuji. No matter how he struggled, Asakawa couldn’t completely grasp his personality. Had he really raped that girl in high school? Asakawa had no way of knowing that, nor whether he’d continued doing things like that, as he’d said he had. And right now, with his family’s deadline coming up tomorrow, Asakawa really didn’t want to worry himself with anything else.

So all he said was, “Ryuji was my best friend, too.”

The words must have pleased Mai. Her adorable face broke into an expression that could have been a smile or could have been more weeping, and she bowed ever so slightly. Asakawa shut the door and hurried down the stairs. As he emerged onto the street and put distance between himself and Ryuji’s apartment, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of this friend who’d thrown everything into this dangerous game, even sacrificing his life. Asakawa didn’t bother to wipe away the tears.

5

October 21—Sunday

Midnight passed, and Sunday finally arrived. Asakawa was making notes on a sheet of paper, trying to get his thoughts in order.

Just before his death, Ryuji had figured out the charm. He telephoned Mai, possibly to summon her. Which means that he needed Mai’s help to work the charm. Okay, the important question here is, why am I still alive? There’s only one possible answer. At some point during the week, without even knowing it, I must have carried out the charm! What other explanation is there? The charm must be something anybody can easily do, with the help of another person.

But that brought up another problem. Why did those four kids run out without performing the charm? If it was so easy, why couldn’t at least one of them have played tough when they were together and then gone and done it in secret later? Think. What did I do this week? What did I do that Ryuji clearly didn’t do?

Asakawa let out a yell. “How the hell am I supposed to know? There must have been a thousand things I did this week that he didn’t do! This isn’t funny!”

He punched Sadako’s photo. “Damn you! How long are you going to keep torturing me?” He hit her in the face over and over. But Sadako’s expression never changed; her beauty never diminished.

He went into the kitchen and splashed some whiskey into a glass. All the blood had rushed to a single point in his head and he needed to disperse it. He went to knock it back at one gulp, but then stopped. He just might come up with the answer tonight and have to drive to Ashikaga in the middle of the night, so maybe he’d better not drink. He was mad at the way he always tried to rely on something outside himself. When he’d had to dig Sadako’s bones out from under the cabin, he had given in to fear and nearly lost himself. It was only because he had Ryuji with him that he’d been able to do what he needed to do.

“Ryuji! Hey, Ryuji! I’m begging you, help me out here!”

He knew he’d never be able to go on without his wife and daughter. Never.

“Ryuji! Lend me your strength! Why am I alive? Is it because I was the one to find Sadako’s remains first? If so, then there’s no saving my family. That can’t be right, can it, Ryuji?”

He was devastated. He knew it was no time to be wailing, but he’d lost his cool. After moaning to Ryuji for a while, his calm returned. He started making notes again on the paper. The old woman’s prophecy. Did Sadako really have a baby? Just before her death she had sex with the last smallpox victim in Japan. Does that relate somehow? All of his notes ended with question marks. Nothing was certain. Was this going to lead him to the charm? He couldn’t afford to fail.

Several more hours elapsed. It was beginning to get light outside. Lying on the floor, Asakawa could hear the sound of a man’s breathing. Birds chirped. He didn’t know if he was awake or dreaming. Somehow he’d wound up on the floor, asleep. He squinted against the bright morning light. The figure of a man was slowly fading in the soft light. He wasn’t scared. Asakawa came to himself with a start and stared hard in the direction of the figure.

“Ryuji? Is that you?”

The figure didn’t reply, but suddenly the title of a book came to Asakawa, so vividly that it might have been branded into the wrinkles of his brain.

Epidemics and Man.

The title appeared in white on the back of his eyelids when he closed his eyes, then disappeared; but it still echoed in his head. That book should be in Asakawa’s study. When he’d first started to investigate the case, Asakawa had wondered if it could have been a virus that had caused four people to die simultaneously. He’d bought the book then. He hadn’t read it, but he remembered putting it away on a bookshelf.

Sun was streaming in through the eastern windows, falling on him. He tried to stand up. His head throbbed.

Was it a dream?

He opened the door to his study. He took down the book that whoever-it-was had suggested to him: Epidemics and Man. Of course, Asakawa had a pretty good idea who it was that had made that suggestion. Ryuji. He’d returned just for a brief moment, to teach him the secret of the charm.

So where in this three-hundred-page tome did the answer lie? Asakawa had another flash of intuition. Page 191! The number was insinuated into his brain, though not quite as searingly as the last time. He opened to that page. A single word jumped out at him, and pulsed bigger and bigger.

Reproduction. Reproduction. Reproduction. Reproduction.

A virus’s instinct is to reproduce. A virus usurps living structures in order to reproduce itself.

“Ooooooohhhhh!” Asakawa groaned. He’d finally grasped the nature of the charm.

It’s obvious what I did this week and Ryuji didn’t. I brought the tape home, made a copy, and showed it to Ryuji. The charm is simple. Anybody can do it. Make a copy and show it to somebody. Help it reproduce by showing it to somebody who hasn’t seen it. Those four kids were happy with their prank and stupidly left the tape in the cabin. Nobody went to the effort of going all the way back for it so they could actually perform the charm.

No matter how he thought about it, that was the only possible interpretation. He picked up the phone and dialed Ashikaga. Shizu answered.

“Listen to me. Listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you. There’s something I need your mother and father to see. Right away. I’m on my way now, so don’t let them go anywhere before I get there. Do you understand? This is incredibly important.”

Ah, am I selling my soul to the devil? In order to save my wife and daughter, I’m willing to put my wife’s parents in danger, even if it’s only temporary. But if it’ll save their daughter and granddaughter, I’m sure they’ll gladly cooperate. All they have to do is make copies and show them to somebody else, and they’ll be out of danger. But after that … what then?

“What’s this all about? I don’t understand.”

“Just do as I say. I’m leaving right now. Oh, right—they have a video deck, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Beta or VHS?”

“VHS.”

“Great, I’m on my way. Don’t, I repeat, don’t go anywhere.”

“Hold on a minute. What you want to show my mom and dad is that video, isn’t it?”

He didn’t know what to say, so he shut up.

“Right?”

“… Right.”

“It’s not dangerous?”

Dangerous? You and your daughter are going to be dead in five hours. Give me a break, damnit! Stop asking so many questions. I don’t have time to explain it all to you from the beginning anymore. Asakawa wanted to shout at her, but he managed to restrain himself.

“Just do as I say!”

It was just before seven. If he raced there on the freeway, provided there were no traffic delays, he should get to his in-laws’ house in Ashikaga by nine-thirty. Factoring in the time it would take to make a copy for his wife and another for his daughter, they should just make the eleven o’clock deadline. He hung up, opened the doors to the entertainment center, and unplugged the video deck. They needed two decks to make copies, so he had to take one of his.

As he left, he took one more look at the photo of Sadako.

You sure gave birth to something nasty.

He took the Oi ramp onto the freeway, deciding to skirt Tokyo Bay and get on the Tohoku Highway heading out of town. There wouldn’t be much traffic on the Tohoku Highway. The problem was how to avoid congestion before that. As he paid the toll on the Oi on-ramp and peered at the traffic-information board, he realized for the first time that it was Sunday morning. As a result, there were hardly any cars in the tunnel under the bay, where they were usually lined up like beads on a rosary. There weren’t even any jams in the big merging areas. At this rate he’d get to Ashikaga right on schedule, with plenty of time to start making copies of the video. Asakawa eased up on the accelerator. Now he was more afraid of going too fast and getting into an accident.

He sped north along the Sumida River. Glancing down, he could see neighborhoods just waking up on a Sunday morning. People were walking around with a different air than on weekday mornings. A peaceful Sunday morning.

He couldn’t help but wonder. What effect is this going to have? With my wife’s copy and my daughter’s copy, this virus is going to be set free in two directions—how’s it going to spread from there? He could imagine people making copies and passing them on to people who’d already seen it before, trying to keep the thing contained within a limited circle so it wouldn’t spread. But that would be going against the virus’s will to reproduce. There was no way of knowing yet how that function was incorporated into the video. That would take some experimenting. And it would probably be impossible to find anybody willing to risk their life to find the truth of it until it had spread pretty far and things had become quite serious. It really wasn’t very difficult to make a copy and show it to someone—so that’s what people would do. As the secret traveled by word of mouth, it would be added to: “You have to show it to someone who hasn’t seen it before.” And as the tape propagated, the week’s lag time would probably be shortened. People who were shown the tape wouldn’t wait a week to make a copy and show it to someone else. How far would this ring expand? People would be driven by an instinctual fear of disease, and this pestilential videotape would no doubt spread throughout society in the blink of an eye. And, driven by fear, people would start to spread crazy rumors. Such as: Once you’ve seen it you have to make at least two copies, and show them to at least two different people. It’d turn into a pyramid scheme, spreading incomparably faster than it would just one tape at a time. In the space of half a year, everybody in Japan would have become a carrier, and the infection would spread overseas. In the process, of course, several people would die, and people would realize that the tape’s warning wasn’t a lie, and they’d start making copies even more desperately. There would be panic. Where would it all end? How many victims would this claim? Two years ago, during the boom in interest in the occult, the newsroom had received ten million submissions. Something had gone haywire. And it would happen again, allowing the new virus to run rampant.

A woman’s resentment toward the masses who had hounded her father and mother to their deaths and the smallpox virus’s resentment toward the human ingenuity that had driven it to the brink of extinction had fused together in the body of a singular person named Sadako Yamamura, and had reappeared in the world in an unexpected, unimagined form.

Asakawa, his family, everybody who had seen the video, had been subconsciously infected with this virus. They were carriers. And viruses burrowed directly into the genes, the core of life. There was no telling yet what would result from this, how it would change human history—human evolution.

In order to protect my family, I am about to let loose on the world a plague which could destroy all mankind.

Asakawa was frightened by the essence of what he was trying to do. A voice was whispering to him.

If I let my wife and daughter die, it’ll end right here. If a virus loses its host, it’ll die. I can save mankind.

But the voice was too quiet.

He entered the Tohoku Highway. No congestion. If he kept going, he’d be there in plenty of time. Asakawa drove with his arms taut and both hands clutching the wheel. “I won’t regret it. My family has no obligation to sacrifice themselves. There are some things you just have to protect when they’re threatened.”

He spoke loud enough to be heard over the engine, to renew his determination. If he were Ryuji, what would he do? He felt sure he knew. Ryuji’s spirit had taught him the secret of the video. It was practically telling him to save his family. This gave him courage. He knew what Ryuji would probably say. Be true to what you’re feeling this instant! All we have in front of us is an uncertain future! The future’ll take care of itself. When humanity gets around to applying its ingenuity, who knows if it won’t find a solution? It’s just another trial for the human species. In every age, the Devil reappears in a different guise. You can stamp it out, and stamp it out, and he’ll keep coming back, over and over.

Asakawa kept his foot steady on the accelerator and the car pointed toward Ashikaga. In his rear-view mirror he could see the skies over Tokyo, receding into the distance. Black clouds moved eerily across the skies. They slithered like serpents, hinting at the unleashing of some apocalyptic evil.

SPIRAL

KOJI SUZUKI

Translation

Glynne Walley

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Part One: Dissecting

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part Two: Vanishing

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part Three: Decoding

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Four: Evolving

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part Five: Foreshadowing

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

Mitsuo Ando awoke from a dream in which he was sinking into the sea. The trilling of the telephone insinuated itself into the sound of the surf, and the next minute he was jerked into wakefulness, as though the waves had taken him.

He stretched his arm out over the side of the bed and picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

He waited, but no sound came through the line.

“Hello,” he said again, sternly this time, urging the caller to reply. There came a woman’s voice, so morose it made him shudder.

“Did you get it?”

The voice filled Ando with fatigue. He felt as if he were being dragged into a dark ditch. The dream from which he’d just awakened flashed before his eyes. A huge wave had suddenly sucked him up off a beach: as he sank to the bottom of the sea he lost all sense of up or down, right or left, until he was helpless against the current … As always, he’d felt a tiny hand grasping at his shin. Every time he had the dream, he felt on his feet the touch of that little hand, those anemone-like fingers slipping away to vanish into the depths of the ocean. There was absolutely nothing he could do to prevent it, and it tortured him. He stretched out his arms, sure that he should be able to reach the body, but he just couldn’t get a grip on it. It eluded his grasp every time, leaving behind only a few soft, fine strands of hair.

The woman’s voice reminded him with unpleasant vividness of the soft feel of that hair.

“Yes, it arrived,” Ando answered, annoyed.

The form for their divorce. It had arrived two or three days ago, with his wife’s signature and seal already affixed. All Ando had to do was sign it and stamp his own seal on it, and the paper would have fulfilled the purpose of its existence. But he hadn’t done it yet.

“And?” There was weariness in his wife’s voice as she prodded him. How could she be so blasé about putting an end to seven years of married life?

“And what?”

“I want you to sign it, stamp it, and return it to me.”

Ando shook his head. How many times had he tried to make it clear to her? He wanted to start over. But every time he told her so, she would set terms he couldn’t meet, as if to prove to him the strength of her determination. He’d been perfectly willing to give up all self-respect and grovel, but lately, he was getting a bit tired of even that.

“Alright. I’ll do what you want.” Ando surprised himself, giving in so easily.

His wife was silent for a moment, and then rasped, “I think you owe me an explanation.”

“About what?” It was a stupid response.

“About what you did to me.”

Still clutching the receiver, Ando squeezed his eyes shut. Is she going to harangue me every morning even after she gets her divorce? It was a crushing thought.

“It was my fault.” But he said it too easily, without putting feeling into the words, and that set her off.

“You never cared for him.”

“You’re talking nonsense. Listen to yourself!”

“Well, then, why …”

“Don’t ask. You already know the answer.”

“How could you do such a thing?” Her voice trembled, a harbinger of the frenzy she was warming up to. He wanted to tell her never to call again and then slam down the receiver, but he restrained himself. This was the least he could do. The only reparation he could offer was to silently bear his wife’s recriminations, to allow her to vent her grief.

“Say something.” She was in tears now.

“Like what? For a year and three months now, we’ve talked about nothing else. There’s nothing left to say.”

“Give him back to me!”

It was a cry of pain totally devoid of reason. He didn’t need to ask whom she wanted back. Ando wanted him back, too. It was what he’d been praying for every day knowing full well how useless it was. Bring him back, I beg you! Give him back!

“I can’t,” he said simply, trying to calm her down.

“I want him back!”

He couldn’t bear to hear his wife like this, wrapped up in past misery, unwilling to start a new life. Ando was trying, at least, to live a little more constructively. There was no recovering what was lost, and he’d done his utmost to repair their marriage—to convince her to think about the new life they’d have, if they could. He didn’t want to get divorced over this. He was prepared to do anything. It would be worth it, if only they could again be the happy couple they’d once been. But his wife didn’t want to look to the future, and she blamed him for everything.

“Give him back!”

“What more do you want me to do?”

“You don’t know what you’ve done!”

Ando sighed, loudly enough to be heard on the other end of the line. She was repeating the same barren phrases; her nerves were clearly fraying. He wanted to introduce her to a psychiatrist friend of his. But his wife’s father was a doctor, the head of a hospital; she’d just take it as meddling.

“I’m hanging up now.”

“That’s it, run away like you always do.”

“I want you to forget this. To get over it.” He knew it was useless, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Ando started to put down the receiver. As he did so, a cry of desperation came from the earpiece. “I want you to bring Takanori back …”

Even after he’d hung up, the name kept spilling from the receiver until its echo filled the room. Without knowing it, Ando was now muttering it himself.

Takanori, Takanori, Takanori.

Ando lay unmoving on the bed for a while, curled up in the fetal position, head in his hands. Then he glanced at the clock and knew he couldn’t stay that way forever. It was time to leave for work.

Ando unplugged the phone from the socket so she couldn’t call back, then went to stand by the window. When he opened it to get rid of some of the gloom, he heard the cry of a crow. They always flew over from Yoyogi Park to perch on the power lines, but this one sounded closer than usual—it gave him a start. But the avian cry, airy and expansive, also lightened his mood. It was such a contrast to the black depths of the ocean of his dream, and to the desperate cries of his wife for their son. It was Saturday morning, a clear autumn day.

Maybe it was the wonderful weather rubbing him the wrong way, but tears welled up in his eyes. He blew his nose. He was alone in his studio apartment. He collapsed back onto the bed. He thought he’d managed to fight back the tears, but now they came streaming out of the corners of his eyes.

Soon he was sobbing, hugging his pillow and calling his son’s name. He hated himself for falling apart like that. Grief’s visits weren’t regular; it waited until something set it off, and then it kept on coming. He hadn’t wept for his son for a couple of weeks. Although the hiatus between his crying spells was getting longer, when the sadness did come, it was just as deep as ever. How long was this going to continue? He could hardly bear to wonder.

Ando took an envelope out from between two books on a shelf and withdrew from it several tangled strands of hair. They were all that was left, physically, of his son. His hand had brushed the child’s head, and when he’d tried to pull the boy toward him, these strands had come off. It was some kind of miracle that they’d stayed stuck to his hand all the while he’d been thrashing about in the ocean. They’d gotten twisted around his wedding ring. The body never surfaced. They had been unable to have a proper cremation. The lock of hair was Ando’s only relic of his boy.

Ando held the strands to his cheek and recalled the touch of his son’s skin. When he closed his eyes, Takanori came back to life in his mind. Ando could almost believe the boy was right there …

When he finished brushing his teeth he just stood in front of the mirror, naked from the waist up. He put his hand to his jaw and rubbed it lightly. He felt the back of his teeth with his tongue: there was still a little plaque clinging to them. He saw a spot on his neck, just below his chin, that the razor had missed. He brought the straight razor to his neck and shaved off the little stumps of beard, and then froze, arrested by his own reflection. He raised his jaw and looked at his pale neck outstretched in the mirror. He shifted his grip on the razor and brought the back of it to the base of his throat, then slowly lowered it from his neck to his chest and then down to his midriff, finally resting it near his navel. A white line ran along the surface of his flesh, between his nipples and down his belly. Imagining his razor was a scalpel, he pictured dissecting his own body. Ando spent his days cutting corpses open, so he knew perfectly well what he’d find inside his chest. His fist-size heart sat cradled between his two pink lungs and was beating firmly. If he concentrated, he could almost hear it. But that persistent pain in his chest—where in his innards did sorrow lodge? Was it the heart? He wanted, with his bare hands, to scoop out the clump of remorse.

The razor felt as if it were going to slip on his sweaty skin, so he put it down on the shelf over the sink. He turned his head to see a thin line of blood on the right side of his throat. He’d nicked himself. He should have felt a little stab of pain where the edge of the blade bit into his skin, but as he stared at the blood he felt nothing. He was lately growing numb to physical pain. Several times already he’d only learned he’d been hurt after seeing the wound. Maybe he was losing his passion for life.

He pressed a towel to his neck and picked up his watch. Eight-thirty. He’d better leave for work. His job was his only salvation these days. Only by immersing himself in work could he elude the clutch of his memories. Ando, a Lecturer in Forensic Medicine at Fukuzawa University Medical School, was also a coroner for the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s office. Only when he was conducting an autopsy could he forget the death of his beloved son. Ironically, playing with dead bodies released him from the death that had touched him.

He left his apartment. As he walked through the lobby of his building he looked at his watch. A habit. He was five minutes behind schedule: the five minutes he’d taken to sign and stamp the writ of divorce. In a mere five minutes, the bond that had connected him to his wife had been severed. He was aware of three mailboxes between his apartment and the university. Ando made up his mind to drop the envelope into the first one along the way. He hurried off to the train station.

PART ONE

Dissecting

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 kmowing 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 latexgloved 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. Fulling 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.

17 | R
8 | I
1 | B
3 | D
6 | G

Or:

1 | B
7 | H
8 | I
13 | N
6 | G

Or:

17 | R
8 | I
13 | N
6 | G

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 firewatch 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 café 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 saké 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 saké 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 fare well 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 days 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 dead-liness.

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 autopsied 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 seat belt 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 swinmiing 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.

PART TWO

Vanishing

1

It was already fifteen minutes past the time they were supposed to meet. Ando started to fidget. He took out his planner and checked the schedule again.

There it was: Friday, November 9th, 6:00 pm, in front of the Moai statue at the west exit of Shibuya Station. Meet Mai for dinner. He hadn’t misremembered.

Ando inserted himself into the flow of passersby and made a brief circuit of the area. Each time he saw a woman of roughly Mai’s age he peered at her face, but none were hers. Half an hour had passed now. Thinking maybe she’d forgotten, Ando called Mai’s apartment from a pay phone. He let it ring six or seven times, fancying he could hear from the echoes how small her apartment was.

It’s really tiny, she’d said. Less than five mats!

Ten rings. Obviously, she wasn’t home. He brought the receiver away from his ear. No doubt something had happened to make her late. She was probably on her way. At least he hoped so, as he hung up.

His gaze kept stealing back to his watch. It had been almost an hour now.

At seven I’ll give up.

It had been so long since he’d dated that he didn’t even know if it was proper to wait any longer. Come to think of it, he’d never been stood up before. His wife had been pretty punctual when they were dating. He’d kept her waiting occasionally, but never she him.

He spent a while thinking back over various times he’d waited for people in the past, and as he did so, seven o’clock came and went. But Ando couldn’t make himself leave. He couldn’t give up while there was still some slight ray of hope. As he kept telling himself, Five more minutes … All week long he’d been looking forward to this. He couldn’t give up now.

In the end, Ando waited in the Shibuya throng for an hour and thirty-three minutes, but Mai never appeared.

He entered the hotel lobby and headed straight for the front desk to ask where the farewell party was being held. Funakoshi’s send-off. Now that Mai had stood him up, he had no reason not to come. Plus, after standing in the chilly evening air in a throng of countless young people, he just couldn’t bear to go straight back to his empty apartment. Seeking some way to salvage the evening, he’d hit on the idea of showing up at the party after all. It wouldn’t hurt to kick up his heels with his friends for the first time in a while, he reasoned.

The organized-gathering part of the evening was just ending, and people were getting together in groups of threes and fives to hit the bars. This was how it always worked. The professors would go home after the main party, allowing the younger faculty to speak freely in their informal post-party binge sessions. Ando’s timing was perfect; he’d come just in time to join in on one of those sessions.

Miyashita was the first one to notice him. He came over and put a hand on Ando’s shoulder. “I thought you were out on a date?”

“Oh, she stood me up,” Ando forced himself to say cheerfully.

“Ah, sorry to hear that. Hey, come here a second.” Miyashita grabbed him by the cuff and led him over to the space by a door. He didn’t seem interested in pursuing Ando’s strikeout.

“What is it?” Something seemed fishy.

But before Miyashita could tell him anything, Professor Yasukawa from the Second Internal Medicine Unit walked by. Miyashita whispered, “You’ll come drinking with us, right?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Great. I’ll tell you later.”

And then Miyashita was off to make nice with Yasukawa. As organizer, he thanked the professor for attending. Miyashita smiled and joked, his jowly face glowing. Ando couldn’t but admire the way his friend managed to find favor with all the profs. If anybody else acted in such a way it would have come across as smarmy, but Miyashita knew how to carry it off.

Ando stayed by the door, waiting for Miyashita and Yasukawa’s conversation to end. In the interim, several familiar faces passed by, but none did more than offer a greeting. Nobody cared to stop and talk to Ando.

His circle of friends had narrowed considerably in the time since he’d lost his son to the sea. He bore not a smidgen of a grudge against those who’d distanced themselves from him, though. He knew that the fault lay with him. Right after it had happened, everybody had crowded around him to offer help and comfort, but Ando hadn’t been able to respond appropriately. Instead, he’d just dragged his misery around interminably, acting morose with his friends. “Cheer up,” they’d say, but how could he? Gradually, one by one, they’d deserted him. Before he knew it, Miyashita was the only one left. Miyashita always had a joke ready, no matter how melancholy Ando’s expression. Miyashita knew how to find something to laugh about in misfortune, no matter whose. The only times Ando could forget his sadness were when he was with Miyashita. By now, Ando could put his finger on what it was that set Miyashita apart from his other friends: while everyone else came to him to cheer him up, Miyashita had come to actually have fun. There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than “Cheer up!” The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying “cheer up” had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in the first place.

Ando knew quite well that he hadn’t worn a sunny expression once all year. He tried to imagine, objectively, how he must look from Mai’s perspective. Terribly gloomy, no doubt. No wonder she didn’t want to have dinner with him; he’d only depress her more.

The thought, in turn, depressed him. A year and a half ago he’d been full of confidence. The future had stretched out before him, wide open and full of promise. He had a loving wife and a darling son, a ritzy condo in South Aoyama, a BMW with a leather interior, and a position as chief administrator waiting for him down the road. But he realized now that everything had been in his wife’s name, or her father’s, and a simple twist of fate had made it all slip through his fingers.

Miyashita was still talking with Professor Yasukawa. At a loss for what to do, Ando let his gaze wander idly around the lobby until he noticed a row of three pay phones. He took out a phone card and went over to them, thinking to dial Mai’s number one last time. Cradling the receiver on his shoulder, he looked back over at Miyashita. If he lost track of his friend and missed out on the drinking session, he’d have come all the way in vain. Miyashita was in charge, here. As long as Ando stuck close to his friend, he wouldn’t be stranded.

He let it ring eight times, then hung up and looked casually at his watch. Almost nine o’clock. It was three hours past the time they’d agreed to meet, and Mai still wasn’t home.

I wonder where she went. He was beginning to worry about her.

Miyashita was bowing deeply to Yasukawa. Their conversation seemed to be over. As Miyashita moved away from the professor, Ando went and stood by Miyashita.

“Hey, sorry to keep you waiting.” His tone was informal, a 180 degree reversal from how he’d been speaking to Yasukawa.

“No problem.”

Miyashita took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Ando.

“This is where we’re going. I think you know it—it’s over in the Third District. Would you do me a favor and go on ahead? I have to wrap things up here.” He waved and started away, but Ando touched his elbow.

“Hold on a second.”

“What?”

“What is it you want to tell me?” Miyashita’s tease had been bothering at him.

Miyashita licked his lips with his thick tongue. They’d served roast beef at the party, and he was enjoying the last drops of grease. His lips glistened red as he said, “I found something.”

“What?”

“A virus.”

“A virus?”

“I got a call this afternoon from Yokodai University. Remember the two kids they autopsied over there?”

“The ones who died in a car of simultaneous heart attacks?”

“Yeah. Well, the thing is, a virus was found in their damaged tissue—from both of them.”

“What kind of virus?”

Miyashita frowned and exhaled. “You’re not going to believe it, but it looks identical to the smallpox virus.”

Ando was speechless.

“Seki’s diagnosis was right on the money. All he had to do was look at the ulcerations on the pharynx, and he came up with smallpox.”

“This is unbelievable,” Ando muttered.

“You can say that now. But I have a feeling we’re going to find the same virus in Ryuji’s tissue sample. Then you’ll have no choice but to believe it.”

Miyashita’s complexion was even ruddier than usual due to the alcohol he’d consumed. It made him look vaguely happy about the whole thing. Maybe the appearance of an unknown virus was more exciting than frightening for a student of medicine.

But not for Ando. His mind had already raced ahead to wonder about Mai. The fact that she was not answering her phone bothered him no end. Her absence and the discovery of a virus that resembled smallpox seemed somehow connected. He had a bad feeling about where all of this was going.

Maybe what happened to Ryuji is happening to Mai. Maybe it’s already happened.

The hotel lobby was filled with the clamor of drunken knots of people. Somewhere in the hullabaloo he could hear an infant laughing. A baby here at this hour? Ando wondered, checking the couches. But he didn’t see any baby.

2

Wednesday, November 14th

Ando went to the main campus, to the philosophy department, to ask Mai’s professors if she’d been attending classes recently. But everyone he asked said the same thing: they hadn’t seen her for a week now. As one of the few female students in the department, she stood out like a flower. When she missed class she was conspicuous by her absence.

Ever since last Friday, Ando had been calling her place two or three times a day, but no one was ever there to pick up the phone. He couldn’t imagine her camping out at a boyfriend’s house that whole time, and now his inquiries at her department had only exacerbated his concern.

It occurred to him that she might have gone home, so he went to the registrar’s office. He explained the situation to the person on duty there and managed to get a look at her file. He discovered that her hometown was a place called Toyoda, in Iwata County, Shizuoka Prefecture. It was two or three hours from Tokyo if you took the bullet train. Ando wrote down her phone number, and then her address, too, just in case.

As soon as he got home from work that night he dialed the number. Mai’s mother answered. When Ando explained who and what he was, he heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. Mai’s mother was panicking upon learning that she was talking to someone from the med school at Mai’s university. Even a call from her department would have been alarming, but one from a residing doctor could only mean Mai had fallen seriously ill. Her mother was probably bracing herself for the bad news. Students at the university all got free medical examinations at the university hospital, so Mai wouldn’t have had to ask her mother before going in.

But Mai’s mother couldn’t figure out exactly why Ando had called. She was in touch with her daughter at least two or three times a month. True, she hadn’t spoken with Mai in three weeks now; when she’d called last week, Mai had happened to be out. But she couldn’t understand why a doctor from her daughter’s university would be calling her parents’ house just because he hadn’t seen her for a week. Ando could hear suspicion in the woman’s voice as she carefully probed his every remark.

“So, you say your daughter wasn’t at home when you called last week.” Ando knitted his brow. He’d hoped to find out she’d just gone home for the week. He’d prepared himself for that minor embarrassment, but now, his bit of optimism was gone. Mai hadn’t been around when her mother called the week before, either.

“I’m sure it’s nothing, doctor. We had a stretch last year, too, when we kept missing each other’s calls. We went almost two months without talking then!”

Ando felt antsy. He couldn’t explain the situation even if he wanted to. Just the day before, they’d found in Ryuji’s tissue sample the same virus that had shown up in the two Yokohama kids. They hadn’t been able to establish how the contagion was passed on, or by what route it had traveled. Depending on what they turned up, perhaps the truth had to be withheld from the media. He couldn’t let Mai’s mother know what was going on, either.

“Excuse me for asking, but does your daughter spend the night away from her apartment often?”

“No, I don’t think so,” her mother said firmly.

“Do you happen to remember exactly what day it was you called her last week?”

The woman thought for a moment, then said, “Tuesday.”

So she had already not been answering her phone on Tuesday. Today was Wednesday. Over a week …

“Is it possible that she’s traveling?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Ando wondered how she could be so sure. “Why not?”

“Well, she has a part-time job as a tutor just to pay her daily expenses. She doesn’t want to be a burden on her parents, she says. I simply don’t believe she has enough money to travel.”

All of a sudden Ando was sure that Mai was in some terrible trouble. The Friday before, Mai had stood him up. It wasn’t as if he was difficult to get hold of. If she couldn’t make the date, all she had to do was give him a call the day before and tell him. But she hadn’t done that. And now, he felt sure he knew why. She couldn’t contact him. He recalled the Polaroids of Ryuji’s corpse. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t rid himself of the picture of Ryuji’s limbs splayed out in death. It was still branded on his brain.

“Would it be possible for you to come up to Tokyo tomorrow?” As he made the request, Ando bowed even though he was talking to her over the phone.

“I’m not sure I can get away on such short notice,” she sighed. Then she was silent. Ando supposed he couldn’t expect her to feel a proper sense of urgency when he hadn’t given her the facts of the situation. All the same, though, she seemed a little too unconcerned about the whole thing. Ando wanted to tell her just how easy it was to lose someone you loved. How you could hear her voice, turn around, and find her gone.

Mrs Takano broke the awkward silence. “If I did go to Tokyo, what exactly would you have me do? File a missing person report?”

“I’d at least like you to take a look at her apartment. I’ll accompany you. We can think about a missing person report after that.” But Ando didn’t really believe they’d have to do that. This was—unfortunately—not that kind of case.

“I just don’t know … Does it have to be tomorrow?”

She couldn’t make up her mind. What errand could she have that was important enough to keep her from possibly finding her daughter dead? Ando couldn’t coddle her along any longer.

“Alright, then. I’ll go over to her apartment alone tomorrow. I understand she lives in a small studio. Do you happen to know if the building has a superintendent?”

“Yes, it does. I met him when I helped her move in.”

“Well then, I’m sorry to impose, but could I get you to call him and tell him that Mitsuo Ando will be coming by tomorrow afternoon, between two and three, and that I’d like to take a look at Mai’s room, in his presence of course?”

“Well …”

“Please. I doubt he’ll give me the key if I just show up unannounced.”

“Alright. I’ll make the call and set it up.”

“Thank you. I’ll call you if anything comes up.”

Just as he was about to hang up, Mai’s mother started to say something. “Listen …” Ando waited for her to continue. “Say hello to Mai if you see her.”

She doesn’t understand. Ando didn’t know what to feel as he hung up.

3

Mai’s apartment was only a short train ride from the university, no transfer required. Ando passed through the gate, left the station, and started to search for her apartment, map in one hand and the planner where he’d written the address in the other.

He spotted a little girl in an orange kimono walking down the sidewalk ahead of him with her parents. He was reminded today was the traditional 7-5-3 festival, a celebration for boys of three and five and girls of three and seven. As he overtook and passed the trio he glanced at the child’s face. She seemed a little big, her features too well-developed, for her to be just seven years old. But her festive attire was bright and cheery in the afternoon sunlight. Ando thought her incredibly cute as she wobbled down the street in her unfamiliar lacquer sandals, clutching her mother’s hand. Even after he’d passed them, Ando kept stealing glances back at the three, imagining that in fifteen years the girl would grow up to be as beautiful as Mai.

He eventually located a seven-story apartment building facing a shopping arcade, the address of which matched what he’d written down in his planner. The facade was nice, but even from the outside, he could tell that the units had to be pretty small. They’d kept the rent low by cramming as many tenants as possible onto the property.

He found the superintendent’s office in the lobby and pushed the buzzer. Through the window, he could see him emerge from an inner room. An older gentleman. He opened a small door in the window, and Ando gave his name.

“Oh, yes. Miss Takano’s mother told me you were coming.” Jangling a thick bundle of keys, he came out of the office.

“I appreciate this,” Ando said.

“No, I ought to thank you. I’m afraid things haven’t been going well lately with that girl.”

Ando didn’t know exactly what Mai’s mother had told the man, so he didn’t know how to respond to this, except to say, “I guess not,” and follow him.

On the way to the elevator, they passed a bank of mailboxes. From one of them protruded several newspapers. Guessing it was Mai’s box, Ando had a closer look. As he’d suspected, the nameplate read TAKANO. There were four rows of mailboxes, and hers was in the top row.

“That’s Miss Takano’s. It’s hardly ever like that.”

Ando took the newspapers from where they’d been wedged into the mail slot and checked the dates. The oldest one was the morning edition from Thursday, November 8th. This was the seventh day since. It had been a full week, then, since Mai had last come down to pick up her newspaper. She could be sleeping somewhere else, but he doubted it. She was in her room, alright. It’s just that she couldn’t come down for the paper. All signs pointed in that direction.

The super interrupted Ando’s thoughts. “Okay, then, are you ready?” He sounded as if he thought Ando would back out.

“Yes, let’s go.” Plucking up all the courage he could muster, Ando followed the man into the elevator.

Mai’s apartment was on the third floor, room 303. The super took out his bundle of keys, chose one, and inserted it into the keyhole.

Without realizing it, Ando took a step back. I should have brought surgical gloves. The virus that had brought about Ryuji’s death was probably not airborne. He imagined it to be like AIDS, fairly difficult to catch. Still, it was an unknown quantity, and he should have taken precautions. Not that he was all that attached to life, but he didn’t want to die just yet. At least not until he’d figured out this puzzle.

A click echoed in the hall as the lock sprang open. Ando took another step backwards, but focused his sense of smell on whatever lay beyond the door. He was well-acquainted with the stench of death. It was mid-November, a fairly dry season, but he could expect a decomposing corpse to give off a powerful odor. He steeled himself until he was confident that even if the door opened to reveal what he expected it to, he could defend against the shock.

The door opened a few centimeters, and a gust of air blew out of the room and into the hallway. The window was probably open. Catching the wind full in the face, Ando breathed in, carefully, through his nostrils. He couldn’t detect the unmistakable scent of a dead body. He inhaled and exhaled several times. No smell of decay. His sense of relief was so strong that it threatened to knock him off his feet, and he put his hand against the wall to steady himself.

“After you,” urged the super, waiting in the doorway. Just standing in the entrance, he could see the whole interior of the apartment. There wasn’t really any “looking around” to be done. Mai’s body was nowhere to be seen. So Ando’s premonition had been an idle one; he relaxed and let out a deep sigh.

He took off his shoes and stepped past the super into the room.

“Where’s she gone?” grumbled the super from behind him.

Ando felt a strange sort of gloom steal over him. He should have felt relieved that he hadn’t found what he’d thought he’d find, but instead his heart continued to race. The room had a strange air about it, and he didn’t know why.

So she hasn’t been back here in a week. It was the only conclusion he could draw. Where is she now? He wondered if the answer to the new question he was left with awaited him somewhere in the room.

Directly next to the entrance there was a small bathroom. He opened the door a crack to make sure it was empty, then returned his gaze to the main room.

He could see how she’d tried to make efficient use of her limited space. A futon was neatly folded and stashed in a corner. There wasn’t enough space for a bed, nor was there a proper closet for the futon. Instead of a real desk there was a low table that had an electric space heater attached to its underside. The table was covered with manuscript pages. A discarded page had been folded up to serve as a coaster for a coffee cup, which was a quarter full of milk. Bookshelves covered one wall, and a combination TV/VCR was nestled in among the books. All the other appliances were arranged around the room almost as if they’d been built in, suggesting the care she’d put into choosing what to buy for her tiny apartment.

In front of the table sat an adjustable backrest that rocked unstably. It was covered with a penguin-print cloth. Pajamas, neatly folded, lay on the seat, with a bra and panties wadded up next to them.

Maybe it’s just because I’m in a young woman’s apartment? Ando was trying to figure out why he felt so uncomfortable. His chest was tight and his pulse was pounding. Seeing her underwear made him wonder if he was just an overexcited voyeur.

“What do you think, Doctor?”

The super was still standing in the doorway. He made no move to enter; he hadn’t even taken off his shoes. Since she clearly wasn’t to be found in her room, he seemed to have concluded that their business was finished and that it was time to go.

Ando didn’t reply, walking over to the kitchenette instead. The floor here was wooden, but for some reason it felt like a thick carpet. He looked up: a ten-watt fluorescent light had been left on. He hadn’t noticed it before because of the afternoon sunlight streaming in. Two glasses were in the sink. He turned the tap on, and after a while the water heated up. He pulled the string dangling from the bulb, turning out the light, and walked away from the kitchenette. When the light went out, he felt gooseflesh rising all over his body.

Nothing he saw gave him any clue as to Mai’s whereabouts.

“Shall we go?” Ando said, not looking at the super. He put his shoes back on and left the apartment. He heard the key turn behind him. He finished tying his shoelaces, straightened up, and walked to the elevator ahead of the super.

As they stood there waiting for the elevator, an autopsy Ando had performed the previous summer came back to him all of a sudden. It was on a young female who’d been strangled at home in her apartment. They’d told him she’d been dead for eleven hours, but when he cut her open he found to his surprise that her organs were still at something close to normal body temperature. When a person dies, the body temperature drops at an average of one degree Celsius per hour. Of course, that’s just an average, subject to all sorts of factors, such as the weather and location. All the same, it was extremely unusual to find a body still perfectly warm after eleven hours.

The elevator came up to the third floor and the doors started to open before Ando’s eyes.

“Hold on a minute,” he said. He didn’t want to leave while any doubts lingered. The oppressive feeling he’d gotten as he’d stepped into Mai’s room, the weird sensation of the wooden floor as he walked on it, almost as if it were melting away.

There was only one way he could describe the odd atmosphere of that room. It was like cutting into a body that had been dead for eleven hours and finding its insides still warm.

The elevator doors were fully open, but Ando did not step in. He was blocking the way, so the super couldn’t get in either.

“Aren’t you going to get in?”

Ando answered with a question of his own. “Are you sure you haven’t seen her at all this last week?”

The elevator shut its doors and began its descent to the ground floor.

“If I have, then we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

The super hadn’t seen her. She hadn’t shown up for class for a week, despite a near-perfect attendance record until now. She didn’t answer the phone no matter how many times he called. A week’s worth of newspapers were stuffed in her mailbox. It was clear that she’d been away since last Thursday. And yet, there was something about that place … It didn’t feel like an apartment whose occupant had been away for a week. There was warmth there, and it had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. It was just that something in the air said someone had been there until just a moment ago.

“I want to have another look,” Ando said, turning to the super, who looked first surprised, then troubled, and then, briefly, afraid. This last emotion did not escape Ando’s notice.

The old man’s afraid of something.

The super handed Ando the key ring, saying, “Just drop them off in the office when you’re done.” He gave Ando a look as if to say, If you want to go back, be my guest, but count me out.

Ando wanted to ask the super what his impressions of the place had been. But he’d probably be at a loss for words, even if Ando asked. That kind of thing wasn’t easy to express. Ando wasn’t sure if he himself could explain what he’d felt there.

“Thanks, I will,” Ando said, accepting the keys and turning on his heel. He was afraid that he’d lose his nerve if he hesitated. In any case, he made up his mind to get out of there as soon as he figured out why the place felt so weird.

Once again, he opened the door. He wished he could leave it open while he was in the apartment, but it swung shut automatically when he let go. The moment it shut, air stopped flowing through the room.

Ando took off his shoes again and walked to the window. He closed it and opened the lace curtains as wide as they’d go. It was past three in the afternoon, and the window faced south; rays of sun slanted into the room. Bathed in light, Ando turned to have another look. The décor didn’t strike him as particularly feminine, though it certainly wasn’t masculine. If it hadn’t been for the penguin design on the backrest, he wouldn’t have been able to guess the inhabitant’s gender.

Ando seated himself next to the backrest and picked up Mai’s underwear. He brought them close to his face and sniffed them, then held them away, then sniffed them again. They smelled like milk. Takanori’s undershirts had smelled like that when he was a toddler.

Ando put the underwear back where he’d found it and twisted his body until his eyes came to rest on the television. The power light glowed red: the VCR had been left on. He pushed EJECT and a tape popped out. There was a white label on its spine, with a title on it.

Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr/1989.

This was written in large letters, none too neatly, with a felt-tip pen. It didn’t look like a woman’s writing. He took the tape out and examined it. It was fully rewound. After he’d scrutinized it for a while, he slid it back into the VCR. Ando hadn’t forgotten how this whole series of incidents had something to do with a video. There was the story Mai had told him about Asakawa, then the fact that Asakawa had been carrying a video deck on the passenger seat at the time of the accident.

Ando pressed PLAY.

For two or three seconds the image on the screen looked like ink being mixed with some viscous fluid. Then a point of light appeared amidst the roiling blackness. Flashing, it moved around to the left and right, and then finally started to grow. Ando felt a momentary, but distinct, unpleasantness. Then, just when the point of light looked like it was about to turn into something else, a TV commercial came on. He recognized it as one he’d seen several times already. The contrast, as the darkness gave way to sunny ordinariness, was stunning. Ando felt his shoulder muscles unclench.

The ad was followed by another, and yet another. He fast-forwarded through more of them. Then came a weather report. A smiling woman was pointing to a weather map. He fast-forwarded some more, and got to what looked like a morning talk show. The scene changed again: a reporter was looking into the camera and speaking into a microphone, something about some celebrity getting divorced. Ando kept on fast-forwarding but couldn’t find anything that corresponded to the title on the label. The tape must have been recorded over.

As he watched, Ando began to relax. Of course, he hadn’t been expecting to see American singers, but something altogether more horrifying. Aside from the first few seconds, however, his fears had been misplaced: all the tape contained was mundane TV programming. The talk show came to an end and was followed by a rerun of an old samurai adventure. Ando stopped the tape and rewound it. He wanted to examine the weather report segment.

He found the beginning of the forecast and pressed PLAY. The woman said, “And now here’s a look at the weather for Tuesday, November 13th.”

He pressed PAUSE and the image froze.

November 13th?

Today was the fifteenth. Which meant that this had been recorded the day before yesterday. But who’d been around to press RECORD?

Was Mai here just two mornings ago?

But then how to explain the newspapers in her mailbox? Had she simply forgotten to pick them up?

Or maybe … He opened the front panel of the VCR and tried to see if there was any evidence it had been programmed. It was possible that when she’d left the room a week ago, Mai had set the VCR to record something on the morning of the thirteenth.

At that moment, he heard something. It sounded like the faint splash of a drop of water. Without getting up, he turned his torso until he could see the sink in the kitchenette. But there didn’t seem to be a drip there. He got up and peered into the bathroom.

The door was open a crack, just as it had been the last time he checked. He turned on the light and tried to push open the door. But it would only open halfway; the toilet blocked it. Ando leaned in through the narrow opening and saw a bathtub just large enough for someone to sit in if she drew her knees up to her chin. A nylon curtain draped down into it. He pulled the curtain out of the way and looked inside. Water dripped from the ceiling, landing with a splat; there was water pooled in the bottom of the tub. While Ando gawked, another drop fell, rippling the surface of the water. It was about four inches deep, and in one end of the tub it was swirling gently. Several strands of hair floated on the surface, and a few of them had gotten tangled as they swirled.

Ando wedged his way into the bathroom, leaning down until his head was inside the tub. The drain was a round black hole, that is to say, the plug had been pulled. Ando didn’t immediately realize what that meant. The drainpipes were clogged with soap, or hair, or something, and the water wasn’t draining well. But as Ando stared, he could see that the level was falling, if only gradually.

It finally occurred to Ando to ask himself who had pulled the plug.

It clearly hadn’t been the super. He hadn’t taken one step into the room. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes.

Then who?

Ando took another step into the bathroom and crouched down. He held out his hand and hesitantly touched the surface of the water. It was still slightly warm. A few strands of hair tangled themselves around his fingers. It felt just like … sticking his hands into an eleven-hour-old corpse and finding it had maintained body temperature. The apartment had supposedly been vacant for a week. But only an hour ago, someone had filled the tub with hot water and, even more recently, pulled the plug. It was for ventilation that the window had been left open.

Ando hurriedly pulled his hand back and wiped it on his trousers.

On the other side of the toilet, directly below the toilet paper, he noticed a brownish stain. It wasn’t fecal matter, but rather, like something that had been vomited up. Covered in a thin film, it retained the outline of undigested food. A reddish, square object—perhaps a piece of carrot?

Did Mai vomit this?

Ando was squatting with one foot in the tiny bathroom, but in order to examine the vomit he had to lean over. When he did so, though, he lost his balance.

He came to rest with his face pressed up against the edge of the toilet. The cream-colored porcelain digged coolly into his cheek, and he could only imagine what kind of expression he was making.

At that moment, he thought he heard someone laugh behind him.

Ando fought back the urge to scream, and froze in that ungainly posture.

It wasn’t his imagination. He’d heard a distinct giggle behind him, from a point rather low to the floor. As if it had welled up from the floor, like some plant shoot poking up from the ground, blossoming forth in laughter. Ando tensed his muscles and held his breath.

“Hee-hee.” There! The same giggle. He wasn’t hallucinating. He was absolutely certain someone was behind him. But he could hardly move, much less turn around and look. He couldn’t figure out what to do. With his face still pressed up against the smooth porcelain, he managed to call out, rather stupidly, “Is that you, super?” He couldn’t prevent his voice from trembling. One foot still sticking out of the bathroom door, he thought he felt a current of air on it. Something was moving out there. Now, that something touched him on the patch of exposed skin between the hem of his slacks and the top of his socks, where they’d scrunched down. It brushed against him as it moved past, leaving behind the memory of its slithery touch. The lower half of his body shrank from it, and he let out a cry. He tried to tell himself that it was nothing; maybe a cat that’d been trapped in the room had licked his Achilles tendon. Nothing more. But it didn’t work. Every one of his five senses knew that it was something else. Some unknown thing was behind him.

His face was below the top of the bathtub, so he couldn’t see inside, but he could hear the water inside trying to gurgle out. There was a faint slurping sound as the water swirled down the drain, hair and all. But above that sound, he heard the floorboards creak. The creaky noise receded slowly from him.

He couldn’t stand it any longer. He raised his voice in an inchoate yell, banged the bathroom door with his knee repeatedly, and even flushed the toilet. All the racket he’d caused finally gave him the courage to creep to his feet. Using his hands to steady himself, he raised himself until he was almost fully upright, and then he stopped to listen behind him. He desperately tried to think of a way to step out of the room without turning around. The hair on the nape of his neck stood on end, as if countless tiny spiders were crawling up his back.

He inched backward towards the entrance, making sure that his heel wasn’t touching anything, and then he whirled around, grabbed the doorknob, and stumbled out into the hallway. He banged his shoulder on the wall, but he ignored the pain as he watched the door swing shut.

Gasping for breath, Ando headed for the elevator. The super’s keys jangled in his pocket. Thank God he hadn’t left them in the apartment! He certainly didn’t want to go back in there again. He was sure something was in there, even though he could recall every corner of that room and he couldn’t think of a single place for anything to hide. The futon was folded up neatly. The built-in wardrobe was neither wide nor deep enough. There was no place for any living thing to hide—unless it was pretty small.

An out-of-season mosquito buzzed in his ear. He tried to swat it away, but it kept right on droning about him. Ando coughed weakly and jammed his hands into his pockets. Suddenly he felt cold. The elevator was taking forever to arrive. Finally, frustrated, he looked up, only to see that it was still on the first floor. He’d forgotten to push the button. He pressed it two or three times, just to be sure, and put his hand back in his pocket.

4

“Hey, what’s up?”

Ando didn’t realize he’d been drifting away until Miyashita spoke to him. The sensations of two hours ago had become a tidal wave, threatening to rip his consciousness out by the roots. He resisted frantically, and got gooseflesh for his efforts. Miyashita’s fervent monologue reached his brain only intermittently.

“Are you even listening to me?” Miyashita sounded annoyed.

“Yeah, I’m listening,” Ando replied, but his expression said his mind was elsewhere.

“If there’s something eating at you, maybe you ought to tell me about it.”

Miyashita pulled a stool out from under the table, plopped his feet onto it, and leaned back. He was a visitor in Ando’s office, but he acted as if the place were his own.

Ando and Miyashita were the only ones in the forensic medicine lab at the moment. Despite how dark it was getting outside, it was still not quite six in the evening. After his harrowing experience at Mai’s apartment, Ando had come directly back to the office to meet Miyashita. As a result, he hadn’t had any time to regain his equilibrium. And Miyashita had been telling him about the virus the whole time.

“No, nothing’s bothering me.” He had no intention of telling Miyashita what he’d experienced in Mai’s apartment. He had no words to express it, first of all. He couldn’t think of an appropriate metaphor. Should he compare it to that feeling you sometimes get, standing at the toilet in the middle of the night, that there’s someone behind you? The one where, once you’ve sensed them, the monsters in your imagination just keep growing and growing until you finally turn around and dispel the illusion? But what Ando had experienced was no such run-of-the-mill affair. He was sure there’d been something behind him when he lost his balance in Mai’s bathroom and hit his cheek against the toilet. It wasn’t a product of his imagination. Something had emitted that high-pitched laughter. Something that had made Ando, not normally a coward, too scared even to turn around.

“You look pale, though. Paler than normal, that is,” said Miyashita, wiping his glasses on his lab coat.

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately, that’s all.” It wasn’t a lie. Recently, he’d been waking up in the middle of the night and having trouble getting back to sleep.

“Well, never mind. Just don’t keep asking me the same questions over and over. No one likes to be interrupted.”

“Sorry.”

“Now. May I go on?”

“Please do.”

“About that virus they discovered in those bodies in Yokohama …”

“The one that’s just like smallpox,” Ando volunteered.

“That’s the one.”

“So it resembles smallpox visually?”

Miyashita slapped the tabletop. He flashed Ando a look of exasperation. “So you really weren’t listening. I just told you: they ran the new virus through a DNA sequencer in order to analyze its bases. Then they ran it through a computer. Turns out it corresponds closely to the library data on smallpox.”

“But they’re not identical?”

“No. We’re talking maybe a seventy percent overlap.”

“What about the other thirty percent?”

“Brace yourself. It’s identical to the basal sequence of an enzyme-encoding gene.”

“Enzymes? Of what species?”

“Homo sapiens.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I understand it’s pretty unbelievable. But it’s true. Another specimen of the same virus contained human protein genes. In other words, this new virus is made of smallpox genes and human genes.”

Smallpox was supposedly a DNA virus. If it were a retrovirus, then it would be no surprise to find it had taken human genes into itself. Such a virus would have reverse transcription enzymes. But since DNA viruses didn’t have them, how did this one pick up human genes and incorporate them into itself? Ando couldn’t think of any process. And with one virus containing enzymes and another proteins, it meant that together they contained human genes, but in separate components. It was as if the human body had been broken down into hundreds of thousands of parts, and those parts apportioned out individual specimens of a virus for safekeeping.

“Is the virus from Ryuji’s body the same?”

“Finally, we come to that. Just the other day, we found a nearly identical virus in a frozen sample of Ryuji’s blood.”

“Another smallpox-human combo?”

“I said ‘nearly’.”

“Okay.”

“It’s almost identical. But in one segment, we found a repetition of the same basal sequence.”

Ando waited for Miyashita to continue, and he did.

“No matter where we cut it, we kept coming up with a repetition of the same forty-odd bases.”

Ando didn’t know what to make of it.

“Are you following me? They didn’t find this in the two bodies in Yokohama.”

“So you’re saying that the virus found in their bodies is subtly different from the one that killed Ryuji?”

“That’s right. They look alike, but they’re slightly different. Of course, we really can’t say much until we get data from the other universities.”

At that moment a phone rang two desks over. Miyashita cursed under his breath. “What now?”

“Excuse me a minute, okay?” Ando leaned over and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“I’m Yoshino from the Daily News. I’m calling for a Dr Ando.”

“That’s me.”

Yoshino wasn’t quite satisfied. “Are you Dr Ando the lecturer in forensic medicine?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I understand you performed an autopsy on a Ryuji Takayama at the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s Office on the twentieth last month. Is that correct?”

“That’s right, I was in charge of that one.”

“I see. Well, I’d like to ask you a few questions about that, if I may. Can we meet?”

“Hmm.” While Ando deliberated, Miyashita leaned over and whispered in his ear.

“Who is it?”

Ando covered the mouthpiece with his hand before answering. “A reporter from the Daily News.” Then he quickly brought the receiver back to his mouth and asked, “What is this about?”

“I’d like to ask your opinion regarding a certain series of incidents.”

The man’s phrasing took Ando by surprise. Had the media already caught a whiff, then? It seemed far too early for that. Even the various med schools in charge of the autopsies had only begun to discover a connection among the deaths of the last two weeks.

“What series of incidents do you mean?” Ando decided to play dumb to try to find out how much Yoshino knew.

“I mean the mysterious deaths of Ryuji Takayama, of Tomoko Oishi, Haruko Tsuji, Shuichi Iwata, and Takehiko Nomi—and of Shizu Asakawa and her daughter.”

Ando felt as if he’d been hit on the head with a board. Who’d leaked all that? He didn’t know what to say.

“So how about it, doctor? Think you have time to meet with me?”

Ando wracked his brain. Information always flowed downhill, so to speak, from those who had more of it to those who had less. If this reporter had more information about the case than Ando, then perhaps Ando should try to get it from him. There was no need for Ando to show all his cards. The thing to do was to find out what he needed without giving up his own secrets.

“Alright, let’s do it.”

“When would be best for you?”

Ando took out his planner and looked at his schedule. “I assume you’d like it to be as soon as possible. How about tomorrow? I’m free for two hours after noon.”

There was a pause as Yoshino checked his schedule.

“Okay, good. I’ll come to your office at noon sharp.”

They hung up nearly simultaneously.

“What was that all about?” Miyashita asked, tugging on Ando’s sleeve.

“It was a newspaper reporter.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to meet me.”

“Why?”

“He said he wants to ask me some questions.”

“Hmmph,” sighed Miyashita, thinking.

“It sounds like he knows everything.”

“So what does that mean? A leak?”

“I guess I’ll have to ask him that when I see him tomorrow.”

“Well, don’t tell him anything.”

“I know.”

“Especially that it involves a virus.”

“If he doesn’t know already, you mean.”

Suddenly Ando remembered that Asakawa also worked for the company that published the Daily News. If he and Yoshino knew each other, maybe Yoshino was in pretty deep. Maybe tomorrow’s meeting would turn up some interesting information. Ando’s curiosity was piqued.

5

Yoshino kept reaching for his water glass. He’d pretend like he was going to pick it up, and then look at his wristwatch instead. He seemed to be worried about the time. Maybe he had another appointment right afterwards.

“Excuse me for a moment, will you?” Yoshino bowed and stood up from the table. Threading his way between the tables on the café terrace, he went over to the pay phone next to the cash register. As Yoshino flipped open his notepad and started punching buttons on the phone, Ando was finally able to stop for breath. He leaned back in his chair.

An hour ago, at exactly noon, Yoshino had shown up at his office at the university. Ando had taken him to a café in front of the station. Yoshino’s business card still lay before him on the tabletop.

Kenzo Yoshino. Daily News, Yokosuka Bureau.

What Yoshino had told him, Ando couldn’t believe. It had left his head spinning. Yoshino had come in, sat down, and launched into a monologue that did nothing but seed Ando’s mind with doubts. Now he’d gone off to call God knew who.

According to Yoshino, the whole thing had started on the night of August 29th, at a place called Villa Log Cabin, a property of the South Hakone Pacific Land resort, located where the Izu Peninsula met the mainland. A mixed-gender group of four young people who stayed a night in cabin B-4 had found a videotape recorded psychically by some woman. A videotape that killed anyone who watched it, exactly a week later. What the hell?

It sounded like nonsense no matter how many times Ando went over it in his head. “It’s probably something akin to psychic photography,” Yoshino had said, as if that explained it. Mentally projecting an image onto a videotape? That was out and out impossible. And yet … Suppose he told somebody about the numbers he’d found on the piece of newspaper that poked out of Ryuji’s belly? Or the strange vibes he’d felt in Mai’s apartment? Wouldn’t people think he was talking nonsense? There was just no equating what you’ve experienced yourself with what you’ve heard from someone else; one could never feel as real as the other. But Yoshino had been directly involved, and what he said was substantiated by Ando’s own experience, at least. He’d helped Asakawa and Takayama investigate the case. His words were not entirely lacking in persuasiveness.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Yoshino said, returning to his seat. He quickly wrote something in his notebook, then poked his bearded cheek with the tip of his pen. His beard looked wiry, and it was long and full, as if to compensate for the thinning at the top of his head. “Now, where was I?” He leaned forward, bringing his hirsute visage closer to Ando. He had a certain charisma that came through when he spoke.

“You were starting to tell me how Ryuji got involved.”

“Right. Now, if you don’t mind, what was your relationship with the late professor?”

“We were classmates in med school.”

“Okay, that’s what I’d heard.”

Ando interpreted the remark to mean that Yoshino had run a check on him before contacting him.

“By the way, Mr Yoshino, have you watched the tape yourself?” The question had been weighing on Ando’s mind for a while.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Yoshino said, wide-eyed. “You’d have met me in the autopsy room then. No, I don’t have the guts.” He chuckled.

Of course, Ando had had a sneaking suspicion for some time now that a videotape was involved in these deaths. But never in his wildest dreams did he suspect the existence of a video that killed anybody who watched it in exactly a week’s time. He still couldn’t quite believe it. How could he? He couldn’t accept such a thing, short of watching the video himself. Even then, he’d probably only truly believe it a week later, at the moment death came for him.

Yoshino drank his now-cold coffee, taking his time. He must have gained a little leeway in his schedule, because his movements no longer signaled haste.

“So why is Asakawa still alive? He watched the tape, didn’t he?” There was a note of scorn in Ando’s voice. Asakawa might be catatonic, but he was still alive. That didn’t seem to square with Yoshino’s story.

“You’ve hit the nail on the head, there. That’s exactly what’s bothering me, too,” Yoshino said, leaning forward. “I suppose the best thing to do is to ask the man himself, but I tried that and it got me nowhere.” Yoshino too had visited the hospital in Shinagawa, and he too had failed to communicate with Asakawa.

Then Yoshino seemed to have an idea. “Maybe …” he trailed off portentously.

“Maybe what?”

“I think you know what I’m talking about. If we could just get our hands on it.”

“On what?!”

“Asakawa’s a reporter for our weekly news magazine.”

Ando had no idea what Yoshino was getting at. “I know.”

“Well, he mentioned to me that he was putting together a comprehensive report on all this. I mean, the whole reason he got interested, to begin with, was that he thought he was onto a scoop. He teamed up with Takayama, and the two of them rushed off to Atami, and then to Oshima Island, hoping they’d find clues to unlock the riddle of the videotape. I think they found something. And I’ll bet you anything that it’s all written up and stored on a floppy disk.” Yoshino turned his head, leaving Ando staring at his profile.

“Ah-ha.”

Yoshino faced Ando again, this time with a bitter expression. “I just don’t know where it is. I couldn’t find it in his apartment.” Having said this, he stared off into space.

Asakawa was hospitalized, and his wife and daughter were dead. The apartment was empty. Was Yoshino saying he’d broken in and searched it? “His apartment?”

“Yeah, well, the building manager’s an old softie. All I had to do was come up with a good excuse, and he let me right in with the master key.”

It was the same thing Ando himself had done just the other day, out of concern for Mai, so he knew he couldn’t criticize Yoshino’s behavior. The motives may have been different, but in the end, they had both done the same thing: they had ransacked apartments in their occupants’ absence.

Yoshino didn’t look ashamed in the least, only annoyed. “I searched every corner of that place. Didn’t find anything. Not his word processor, not the floppy disk.” Yoshino bounced his knee with nervous energy. Then he noticed and placed a hand on the knee, flashing Ando a rueful smile.

Ando was recalling the photos he’d been shown of the scene of Asakawa’s accident. He remembered the one that showed the interior of the car from the vantage point of the driver’s side window. The thing he understood to be a video deck sat on the passenger’s seat, wedged under the back of the seat where it had been pushed forward; on the floor on the passenger’s side lay what looked like a laptop. The pair of black objects had made a deep impression on Ando. And now they gave him an idea. He turned his head, desperately trying to think, pretending to watch the crowd flowing out of the station like a human tidal wave.

Ando realized he knew where to find the report that could explain everything. No doubt Yoshino had searched Asakawa’s apartment with great diligence, but the word processor and disk weren’t there at all. Yoshino didn’t know that Asakawa had brought them with him wherever he’d last been to, that they were in the car at the time of his accident.

Ando was now fairly confident he could get his hands on that disk, and he had no intention of sharing the information with Yoshino. He’d decide whether or not to tell the media only after he’d read Asakawa’s report. Right now, all he knew was that this smallpox-like virus had been found in all seven of the corpses in question. They weren’t ready yet to announce their findings in professional circles. In fact, they were only beginning to put together a research team consisting mainly of Shuwa and Yokodai people. If he went and let the media in on it at this stage, there was no telling what kind of panic they’d whip up. He had to proceed with utmost caution to make sure things didn’t get out of hand.

Yoshino spent the rest of their meeting lobbing predictable questions at Ando. What were the results of the autopsy? What did he determine was the cause of death? Was any part of Yoshino’s story suggestive in terms of the results of the autopsy? The reporter kept his face buried in his notebook as he went through his list.

Ando tried to answer each question as politely and as unobjectionably as he could. But all the while, his thoughts were lunging in another direction. He had to get his hands on that floppy disk right away. What did he need to do to make that happen?

6

The next day was Saturday. After finishing two autopsies, Ando took aside the young cop who was there as a witness and asked him what happened to cars that had been in accidents. If a car had been wrecked in an accident near the Oi exit of the Metropolitan Bayside Expressway, for instance, what was done with it?

“Well, first we’d inspect it.” He was a trusty-looking young man with glasses. Ando had seen him several times before, but this was the first time he’d spoken to him.

“Then what?”

“Then we’d return it to the owner.”

“What if it’s a rental?”

“We’d return it to the rentacar agency, of course.”

“Okay. There were three people aboard this car, a young couple and their daughter. They, ah, lived in a condo in Shinagawa, just the three of them. The wife and child died in the accident, and the husband is in critical condition. Now, what happens to the items that were in the car?”

“They’d be kept in temporary storage in the traffic division of the local precinct.”

“For an accident that happened at the Oi off-ramp of the Metropolitan Expressway, what’s the local precinct?”

“The exit?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Near the exit.”

“No, I mean, was it on the expressway or off it? They’re different jurisdictions.”

Ando thought back to the photos of the accident scene. He was certain it had happened on the expressway itself. He seemed to remember seeing the phrase “Tokyo Harbor Tunnel entrance” written in a file somewhere.

“It was definitely on the expressway.”

“Then it’d be the Metropolitan Expressway Traffic Patrol Unit.”

Ando had never heard the name before. “Where’s the headquarters?”

“Shintomi.”

“Alright. So the items would be stored there temporarily. What next?”

“They’d contact the family and have someone come and get the items.”

“Suppose, like I said, everybody in the family’s dead.”

“Even the siblings and parents of the man in the hospital?”

Ando knew nothing about Asakawa’s parents and siblings. Judging from the man’s age, there was a good chance that his parents were still alive. It raised the possibility that they were in possession of whatever was in the car. Asakawa and Ryuji had been classmates in high school. Since Ryuji’s parents lived in Sagami Ohno, Asakawa’s probably lived somewhere in that area, too. In any case, the first thing Ando should do was to look them up and contact them.

“I see. Thank you very much.”

Ando released the young cop and straightaway set about locating Asakawa’s parents.

He determined that they were both alive and living in the Kurihara section of the city of Zama, not far from Sagami Ohno. He placed a call and asked what had happened to the items from their son’s car. Asakawa’s father told him, in a strained voice, to call his eldest son, who lived in Kanda, in Tokyo. Kazuyuki, it turned out, was the youngest of three brothers: the oldest worked in the art book division of Shotoku, a major publisher, while the middle son was a junior high school Japanese teacher. Asakawa’s father said that he had in fact received a call from the police asking him to come down and pick up some items they were keeping at the station, but instead of going to get them himself, he’d told them to contact his son in Kanda. Kanda wasn’t too far from Shintomi, where the Metropolitan Expressway Traffic Patrol Unit had their headquarters, and Asakawa senior hadn’t felt like lugging a word processor and a VCR home at his age—he was over seventy. So he’d arranged with the police for his son to pick up the items.

Ando’s next move, then, was to contact Junichiro Asakawa, who lived with his wife in a Kanda condominium. When he finally managed to get in touch with him that evening, Ando came straight out and told him the situation, or most of it at least. He was afraid that if he aroused Junichiro’s suspicions by slapping together a lie or a clumsy cover-up, he might never get his hands on the disk. On the other hand, he couldn’t simply repeat the story Yoshino had told him. Ando didn’t believe most of it himself, and Junichiro would surely think he was crazy. So he abridged things as he saw fit, ending by emphasizing that there was a possibility that Asakawa had left behind a document that might shed some light on what was happening. Speaking on behalf of the Medical Examiner’s Office, he said he’d really like to get his hands on that document and wondered if he might be allowed to make a copy of it, please and thank you.

“I’m not sure there was anything like that in what I was given.” Junichiro didn’t sound entirely convinced. The way he spoke suggested that he hadn’t yet taken a good look at the items.

“Is there a word processor?”

“Yes. But I think it’s broken.”

“Was there a floppy disk inside it?”

“To be honest, I haven’t checked. I haven’t even taken it out of the cardboard box they handed it to me in.”

“Was there a video deck along with it?”

“Yes, but I threw it away. Was that the wrong thing to do?”

Ando’s breath caught in his throat. “You threw it away?”

“I can see why he’d be carrying around the word processor, because of his job, but why did he have a VCR with him?”

“Excuse me, but did you say you threw it away?”

“Yes. It was a total wreck. I’d arranged garbage pick-up for a TV the other day, so I had them take the VCR away at the same time. It was beyond repair. Anyway, I doubt Kazuyuki’ll mind.”

Ando had almost caught his two quarries, and now, at the last minute, one had eluded him. There’d been a good chance that the videotape that held the key to all this had been inside the VCR, and with luck he’d hoped to get his hands on both it and the floppy disk. He was kicking himself for not having contacted Junichiro sooner.

“Besides the VCR, there wouldn’t happen to have been a videotape, would there?” Ando said a little prayer as he asked.

“I don’t know. All I saw was the word processor, the VCR, and two black leather gym bags that probably belonged to Shizu and little Yoko. I haven’t opened them.”

Ando made sure Junichiro understood that he wanted to see them as soon as possible. “Would you mind if I paid you a visit?”

“That’s fine,” Junichiro agreed, surprisingly quickly.

“How about tomorrow?” Sunday.

“Let’s see. I’m playing golf with one of my writers, but I should be back by seven.”

“Well, then, seven it is.” Ando made a note of the time, and underlined it several times.

At just after seven o’clock on Sunday evening, Ando called at Junichiro’s condo in the Sarugaku section of Kanda. The neighborhood didn’t feel very residential. Junichiro’s building was surrounded by office blocks. The area was eerily quiet on Sunday evenings.

Ando rang the bell and heard a man’s voice from behind the door ask, “Who is it?”

“This is Ando. I called yesterday.”

The door opened immediately, and Ando was ushered inside. Junichiro was lounging around in a sweatsuit and his hair was wet; he must have just arrived home from golf and taken a shower. Somehow, from his voice on the phone, Ando had imagined him as a tall, nervous man, but in person Junichiro was heavyset and wore a genial expression. As Junichiro led the way into the apartment, Ando reflected that, of the three brothers, the eldest was an editor, the second a Japanese teacher, and the third a reporter for a major news organization. They’d all chosen fields that had them dealing with language, with writing, on a daily basis. Most likely, the eldest had been influential in this regard. Ando himself had been inspired to enter medicine by his older brother, who became a high school biology teacher.

Junichiro went to the closet in the hall and took out a cardboard box. The gym bags and the word processor had been stuffed into it.

“So. You’d like to take a look?” Junichiro sat down cross-legged on the floor and pushed the box in Ando’s direction.

“Thanks, I would.”

Ando first took out the word processor, jotting down the make and model. The machine’s shell seemed to have been rather severely damaged in the crash; the top wouldn’t open, and pressing the power button elicited no response. Standing it vertically on his knee, Ando noticed an eject button there on the side. It belonged to a slot, and peering into it he saw a blue floppy disk. He almost shouted for joy as he pressed the eject button. The machine produced a click that sounded to Ando like bingo! He took out the disk and held it on his palm for a moment, examining it back and front. The label hadn’t been affixed, so there was no title to be seen. But Ando knew immediately that this was what he’d been searching for. It had sounded right popping out of the slot.

He wanted to read the disk as soon as he could, and he said to Junichiro, “I’d like to check out what’s on here.”

“I’m afraid this machine isn’t compatible with mine.” Junichiro wouldn’t be able to use his word processor to open the files on the disk.

“In that case, would you mind if I borrowed the disk for two or three days?”

“It’s alright with me, but …”

“I’ll return it to you as soon as I’m done with it.”

“What’s on that disk, anyway?” Ando’s excitement had evidently communicated itself. Junichiro suddenly seemed curious.

Ando shook his head. “I don’t know, exactly.”

“Well, I’d like it back as soon as possible.” Now it appeared that Junichiro wanted to read it, too. Maybe his editorial instinct had been stirred.

Ando dropped the disk into his jacket pocket, and knew a sense of relief, but at the same time he was seized with a new desire. Those gym bags … He knew it was futile to hope, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility that the videotape was in one of them.

“Would it be too much to ask if I could see what’s in there?” He tried to choose his words carefully, somewhat embarrassed at the idea of going through a woman’s belongings.

“I don’t think there’s anything in there,” Junichiro laughed, but he handed over the bags. When he looked inside, Ando’s faint hope of finding the tape was finally dashed. Mostly the bags contained clothes and disposable diapers. Not what he was looking for. Just as he’d feared, the tape had been inside the VCR when it was trashed.

Still, he’d gotten his hands on the floppy disk, and he had to count that a success. He could hardly stand still as he took his leave. He’d check around at work to see if anybody had a machine that could read the disk. He couldn’t wait to see what was on it.

7

Ando poked his head into the Pathology Department office to see if Miyashita was in, but before he had a chance to say anything, Miyashita called out to him.

“Hey, just the man I wanted to see. Tell me what you think of this.” Miyashita was holding a printout of something, and he beckoned to Ando with his other hand. Beside him stood Nemoto, an assistant in the biochem lab. Nemoto and Miyashita were built so alike that anybody who happened to see them together couldn’t help but laugh. From their height and weight—five-three and easily over a hundred and seventy pounds—to the length of their legs, their girth, their faces, even their taste in clothes and their high voices, they were like two peas in a pod.

“Hey, I didn’t know you had a twin.” Ando uttered the same joke he always did as he approached them.

“Please, Dr Ando, don’t lump me together with this guy,” said Nemoto, grimacing. But it couldn’t have been too awful to be told he took after his colleague, two years his senior. After all, Miyashita was liked both for his personality and his learning, and had been pegged as a future candidate for full professor.

“Everybody keeps telling us we look alike, Nemoto. I’m telling you, it’s getting to be a pain in the butt. Why don’t you go on a diet?” Miyashita elbowed the younger man’s paunch.

“Well, if I go on a diet, you have to go on one, too.”

“Then we’ll be right back where we started!”

Then Miyashita offered Ando the printout he was holding, as if to put an end to the stale routine.

Ando spread out the printout he’d been given. He understood its contents at a glance. It showed the results of running a snippet of DNA through a sequencer.

All life on earth consists of one or more cells containing DNA (or, in some cases, RNA). The nuclei of these cells contain molecular compounds known as nucleic acids. There are two types of nucleic acids: DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid). These play different roles. DNA is the compound in which genetic information is stored in the chromosomes: it takes the form of two long threads twisted about one another in a spiral, a shape known as the double helix. The sum total of a life form’s genetic information is inscribed within that double structure. This genetic information is like a set of blueprints for the construction of specialized proteins; each gene is a blueprint. In other words, genes and DNA are not the same thing. A gene is a unit of information.

So what exactly is written on these blueprints? The letters that make up the inscriptions are four chemical compounds known as bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T) or in the case of RNA, uracil (U). These four bases work in sets of three called codons, which are translated into amino acids. For example: the codon AAC makes asparagine, the codon GCA makes alanine, etc.

Proteins are conglomerations of hundreds of these amino acid molecules, of which there are twenty types. This means that the blueprint for one protein must contain an array of bases equal in number to the number of amino acid molecules times three.

The blueprint called the gene can be thought of, then, as basically a long line of letters, looking something like this: TCTCTATACCAGTTGGAAAATTAT … Translated, this signifies a series of amino acids that runs: TCT (serine, or Ser), CTA (leusine, or Leu), TAC (tyrosine, Tyr), CAG (glutamine, Gln), TTG (leusine, Leu), GAA (glutamic acid, Glu), AAT (asparagine, Asn), TAT (tyrosine, Tyr), etc. etc.

Ando glanced again at the base codes covering the printout, the four letters A, T, G, and C lined up seemingly at random across the page. Segments of three rows had been highlighted so as to stand out from the rest.

“What’s this?”

Miyashita winked at Nemoto, as if to say, you tell him.

“This is an analysis of a segment of DNA taken from the virus found in Ryuji Takayama’s blood.”

“Okay … so what’s this?”

“We found a rather strange sequence of bases, something we’ve only seen in Takayama’s virus.”

“And that’s what’s highlighted here?”

“That is correct.”

Ando took a closer look at the first highlighted series of letters.

ATGGAAGAAGAATATCGTTATATTCCTCCTCCTCAACAACAA

He looked at the next highlighted portion, and compared it with the first. He realized it was exactly the same sequence. In a group of not even a thousand bases, the exact same sequence occurred twice.

Above: between #535 and #576, and again between #815 and #856, one can observe the repetition of the 42 bases ATGGAAGAAGAATATCGTTATATTCCTCCTCCTCAACAACAA.

DNA AMINO ACID TRANSLATION CHART

Base triplets (codons) are translated into amino acids according to the principles outlined in the chart above. For example, TCT is serine (Ser), AAT is asparagine (Asn), GAA is glutamic acid (Glu). “Stop” signifies the end of a gene; the beginning code is ATG.

Below are the abbreviated and full names of the twenty amino acids:

Phe | phenylalanine
Leu | leucine
Ile | isoleucine
Met | methionine
Val | valine
Ser | serine
Pro | proline
Thr | threonine
Ala | alanine
Tyr | tyrosine
His | histidine
Gln | glutamine
Asn | asparagine
Lys | lysine
Asp | aspartic acid
Glu | glutamic acid
Cys | cysteine
Trp | tryptophan
Arg | arginine
Gly | glycine

Ando shifted his gaze from the printout to Nemoto’s face.

“No matter where we slice it, we always find this identical sequence.”

“How many of these are there?”

“Bases, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Forty-two.”

“Forty-two. So, fourteen codons, right? That’s not very many.”

“We think it means something,” Nemoto said, shaking his head. “But, Dr Ando, the strange thing is …”

Miyashita interrupted. “This meaningless repetition was only found in the virus collected from Ryuji Takayama’s blood, and not from the other two victims.” He threw up his hands in a gesture of perplexity.

In other words … Ando tried to find a suitable analogy. Suppose three people, one being Ryuji, had copies of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Then suppose that Ryuji’s copy, and only his copy, had meaningless strings of letters sandwiched in between the lines. There were forty-two bases, and they worked in sets of three, each set corresponding to one amino acid. If you assigned each of these sets a letter, you’d have a series of fourteen letters. And these fourteen repeating letters were found on every page of the play, inserted at random. If you knew from the beginning that the play was King Lear, of course, it would be possible to go back and find the meaningless parts that had been interpolated and highlight them.

“So what do you think?” Miyashita looked to be sincerely interested in Ando’s opinion. A true scientist, he was always most excited when confronted with the inexplicable.

“What do I think? I’d have to know more before I could say anything.”

The three of them fell silent, glancing at one another’s faces. Ando felt awkward, still holding the printout.

Something was tugging at his consciousness. In order to figure out what it was, he needed time to sit down and study the meaningless string of bases. He had an unmistakable premonition that there was something here. The question was, what? And if this meaningless base sequence had indeed been interpolated, when had it happened? Was the virus that had invaded Ryuji’s body just different? Or had it mutated in Ryuji’s body, with the fourteen-codon string appearing here and there as a result of that mutation? Was that even possible? And if it was, what did it mean?

An oppressive silence fell over the three men. No amount of speculation at this point could tell them how to interpret these findings.

It was Miyashita who broke the silence. “By the way, did you come here for a reason?”

Ando had been so intrigued by the discovery that his original errand had slipped his mind. “Right, I almost forgot.” He opened up his briefcase, took out his planner, and showed Miyashita and Nemoto a slip of paper.

“I was wondering if anyone here had a word processor of this model.”

Miyashita and Nemoto looked at the model name written on the paper. It was a fairly common machine.

“Does it have to be exactly the same model?”

“As long as it’s the same brand, the model probably isn’t important. Basically, it’s a question of compatibility for a floppy disk.”

“Compatibility?”

“Yes.” Ando took a floppy disk from his briefcase.

“I need to make a hard copy and a soft copy of the files on this disk.”

“It’s not saved in MS-DOS, I take it?”

“I don’t think so.”

Nemoto clapped his hands, as if he’d just remembered something. “Hey, one of the staff members in my department—Ueda, I think—has this very model.”

“Do you suppose he’d let me borrow it?” Ando hesitated. He’d never met this Ueda.

“I don’t imagine there’d be a problem. He’s fresh out of school.” Nemoto spoke with the confidence of a senior staff member who knew that a new resident would do anything he asked.

“Thanks.”

“No problem at all. Why don’t we go over right now? I think he’s there.”

This was music to Ando’s ears. He couldn’t wait to print out whatever was on this disk.

“Great. Let’s go.” Ando dropped the disk back into his jacket pocket. Then, waving to Miyashita, he followed Nemoto out of the Pathology Department.

8

Ando and Nemoto walked side by side down the med school’s dim hallway. Ando wore his lab coat unfastened in front, its tails swept back behind him, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket clutching the disk. Neither Miyashita nor Nemoto had asked about it. Ando wasn’t trying to keep it a secret. Had Miyashita asked, he’d intended to give him an honest answer. If they’d known it might hold the key to this whole mystery, no doubt both men would have been at his heels right now.

Of course, Ando hadn’t seen what was on the disk yet. There was always the possibility that it held something else entirely. He simply wouldn’t know until he managed to bring it up on a monitor. Still, it felt right in his hand: the disk was warm from being in his pocket. It was near body temperature. Its touch seemed to tell him that it held living words.

Nemoto opened the door to the biochemistry lab. Ando took the disk out of his pocket, switched it to his left hand, and held the door open with his right.

“Hey, Ueda.” Nemoto beckoned to a skinny young man seated in a corner of the room.

“Yes?”

Ueda swiveled in his chair to face Nemoto, but didn’t stand up. Nemoto approached him, smiling, and put his hand on Ueda’s shoulder. “Are you using your word processor right now?”

“No, not really.”

“Great. Would you mind if Dr Ando here borrowed it for a while?”

Ueda looked up at Ando and then bowed. “Hello.”

“Sorry about this. I’ve got a disk I need to access and it’s not compatible with my machine.” Ando moved to Nemoto’s side, holding up the disk.

“Go right ahead,” said Ueda, picking up the word processor from where it sat on the floor at his feet and laying it sideways on the desktop.

“Do you mind if I check it right here just to make sure?”

“Not at all.”

He opened the word processor’s lid and turned it on. Soon the initial menu appeared on the screen. From among the options displayed, Ando chose DOCUMENTS, then inserted the disk. The next screen gave him two options: NEW DOCUMENT and OPEN DOCUMENT. Ando moved the cursor to the second option and hit return. With a whir, the machine started to read the disk. Finally, the names of the files stored on the disk appeared on the screen.

RING 9 | 1990/10/21
RING 8 | 1990/10/20
RING 7 | 1990/10/19
RING 6 | 1990/10/17
RING 5 | 1990/10/15
RING 4 | 1990/10/12
RING 3 | 1990/10/07
RING 2 | 1990/10/04
RING 1 | 1990/10/02

Ando read the file names aloud in a delirium. “Ring, ring, ring, ring …”

Ring!

What the hell? The same word that I got from solving the code that popped out of Ryuji’s belly.

“Are you alright?” Nemoto sounded worried. He was peering at Ando’s suddenly dazed expression. Ando could barely manage to nod.

There was no way this could be a coincidence. Asakawa had composed a report detailing this whole strange train of events, saved it in nine parts, and entitled it Ring. And then that title had extruded from Ryuji’s belly.

How to explain this? There is no way.

Ando was in a state of complete denial. Ryuji’s body was completely empty; he was like a tin man. Am I saying he slipped me a message from his abdominal cavity? That he was trying to tell me of the existence of these files?

Ando recalled the way Ryuji’s face had looked right after the autopsy. His square-jawed face had been smiling. Ando had expected that any minute he’d start laughing at him, stark naked on the table, jowls shaking.

Deep down, Ando could feel Yoshino’s outlandish story starting to take on the feel of reality. Maybe it was all true. Maybe there really was a videotape that killed you seven days after you watched it.

9

The word processor buzzed ceaselessly as it printed out page after page. Ando tore each page from the printer as it emerged and read through it quickly.

Each page was single-spaced, but still Ando was able to read faster than the printer could spit them out. Wanting a hard copy, he’d decided to print it all out instead of reading it on the screen. Now he found himself getting frustrated by the two or three minutes it took each page to be printed.

He’d ended up borrowing Ueda’s machine and bringing it home with him. A quick check had revealed that the total report was close to a hundred pages, more than he could reasonably print out there in the lab. He had no choice but to stay up late at home.

Now he was at the end of page twenty-one of the manuscript, alternating between reading it and taking bites of the dinner he’d picked up at the convenience store on the way home. What he’d read so far followed faithfully the outline Yoshino had given him the week before. But it differed from what Yoshino had told him after lunch at the café in that it contained specific times and places. As a result it was a good deal more persuasive. The reporterly style—no frills—also made it harder to disbelieve.

While investigating the simultaneous deaths by heart attack of four young people in Tokyo and Kanagawa prefecture on the evening of September 5th, Asakawa had come up with the idea that the culprit was some kind of virus. Scientifically speaking, it was the obvious conclusion. And since autopsies on the four bodies had indeed revealed a virus that closely resembled smallpox, it turned out that Asakawa’s hunch had been right. It had been Asakawa’s guess that since the four had died at the same moment, they must have picked up the same virus together at the same place. He’d figured that the key to the whole case must lie in figuring out where they were exposed to the virus, that is, in determining the route of transmission.

Asakawa had succeeded in finding out when and where the four had been together: August 29th, exactly a week before their deaths, at South Hakone Pacific Land, in a rented cabin, Villa Log Cabin No. B-4.

The next page, page twenty-two, started with Kazuyuki Asakawa himself heading toward the cabin in question. He took the bullet train to Atami, then rented a car and took the Atami-Kannami highway to the highland resort. Rain and darkness limited the visibility, and the mountain road was awful. He’d made reservations for cabin B-4 at noon, but it was past eight at night when he finally checked in. So this was where those four kids had spent the night: the thought gave Asakawa a jolt of fear. Exactly a week after they’d stayed in this cabin, they were dead. He knew it was possible that the same spectral hand would touch him, too. But he couldn’t overcome his reporterly curiosity and ended up searching B-4 from top to bottom.

From something the kids had written in a notebook on the property, Asakawa determined that they had watched a videotape that night, so he went to the manager’s office to search for that tape. He’d found an unlabelled, unboxed tape lying on the bottom shelf. Was this what he was looking for? With the manager’s permission, he took the tape back to cabin B-4, and, with no way of knowing what it contained, he inserted it into the VCR in the living room and watched it all the way through.

At first, everything was dark. Asakawa described the opening scene like this:

In the middle of the black screen a pinpoint of light began to flicker. It gradually expanded, jumping around to the left and right, before finally coming to rest on the left-hand side. Then it branched out, becoming a frayed bundle of lights, crawling around like worms …

Ando looked up from the page. Based on what he was reading, he was able to get a reasonably clear image of what had been on the screen. Reading Asakawa’s description of the opening, an image popped into his head that he felt he’d seen somewhere before. A firefly flitting around on a dark screen, growing gradually larger … then the point of light splays out like the fibers of a paintbrush. It was a short scene, but one that he could remember seeing, and recently at that.

It didn’t take long for the memory to come to him. It was when he’d gone to Mai’s apartment to try and track her down. He’d found a videotape still in her VCR, and he’d pressed the play button. The one with Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, etc., written on the label in a man’s hand. The first few seconds of that tape had fit this description perfectly.

But on the tape in Mai’s apartment, this scene had only lasted a few seconds, before the screen suddenly became a lot brighter. In what had evidently been an attempt to erase whatever was on the tape, Mai had recorded morning variety shows, samurai melodrama reruns, whatever, until the tape ran out. Ando immediately figured out what this meant. Somehow, probably through Ryuji, Mai had acquired the problem tape and watched it in her apartment. Then, when she’d finished, she’d eradicated it, whatever it was, from the tape. She must have had her reasons. But she hadn’t been able to erase the very beginning of the tape, so those first few seconds had remained there, lurking. Did it mean that the tape Asakawa had found in Villa Log Cabin had somehow made its way into Mai’s hands?

Ando tried to organize his thoughts. No, that can’t be it. The tape Asakawa found and the tape Mai had were clearly two different things. According to the report, the one in the cabin was unlabelled. But the one in Mai’s VCR had a title written on it in black marker. Which meant it must have been a copy.

The one in the cabin was the original, and the one in Mai’s place a copy. So that tape had been copied, erased, disguised, transported—a dizzying series of changes. In Ando’s mind, the tape, occupying a point between the animate and the inanimate, began to resemble a virus.

So, was Mai’s disappearance a result of her having watched that tape? The possibility worried him. She hadn’t been back to her room since then. She hadn’t been showing up at school, and she hadn’t even called her mother. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard anything about a young woman found dead from unexplained causes.

Ando let his mind wander for a while, considering all the things that could have befallen her. Maybe she’d died alone someplace unbeknownst to anybody. The thought pained him—she was only twenty-two. The fact that he could feel the first twinges of a crush on her only made it harder to bear.

The printer finally came to the end of another page, with a noise that snapped Ando out of his reverie. In any case, now was no time to be borrowing trouble. At the moment, he’d be better off finding out what was on that tape first.

10

The next few pages contained a thorough description of the contents of the videotape. As he read, Ando could see a TV screen in his mind, filled with shifting images.

Something red and viscous spurted across the screen. This was followed by a view of a mountain that he could tell at a glance was an active volcano. Lava flowed from its mouth; the earth rumbled. The eruption lit up the night sky. Then this scene was suddenly cut off, replaced by a white background, in front of which the character for “mountain”, written in black, faded in and out of view. Then a scene of two dice bouncing around on the bottom of a bowl.

Finally a human figure appeared onscreen. A wrinkled old woman sat on a tatami mat. She was facing the camera and saying something. She spoke in a nearly incomprehensible dialect, but he could tell, more or less from the sound of her words, that she was predicting somebody’s future, warning him or her.

Next, a newborn baby, wailing. There was no discernible link between scenes. One followed another with all the abruptness and randomness of someone flipping over cards.

The infant disappeared, replaced by hundreds of faces, filling the screen and multiplying as if by cellular division, all against the background of a multitude of voices intoning accusations: Liar! Fraud! Then an old television set, displaying the character sada.

Then a man’s face appeared. He was gasping for breath and dripping with sweat. Behind him could be seen a lush thicket of trees. His eyes were red and full of bloodlust; his mouth was contorted with screams and drool. His bare shoulder was deeply gouged, and blood flowed from the wound. Then came again, from nowhere in particular, the cry of a baby. In the center of the screen was a full moon, from which fell fist-sized stones, landing with dull thuds.

Finally, more words appeared on the screen.

Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly …

And then the scene changed entirely. Instead of the prescribed method for avoiding certain death, the screen now showed a common television commercial for mosquito coils. The ad ended and the previous eerieness returned, or rather, the memory of it.

At the end of this series of bizarre visions, Asakawa had managed to understand exactly two things. First, whoever watched this tape was doomed to die in exactly a week. And, second, there was a way to avoid this fate, but it had been deliberately recorded over. The four kids who’d watched the video first had erased it in a fit of malice or mischief. It was all Asakawa could do to slip the tape into his bag and flee cabin B-4.

Ando took a deep breath and lay the manuscript aside.

Holy shit.

In his report Asakawa had given a painstakingly elaborate account of the strange twenty minutes of images on the tape. He’d made every effort to recreate, using only words, what the video conveyed directly through sound and visuals, and he’d largely succeeded. The scenes still swirled around in Ando’s mind, as vividly as if he’d seen and heard them himself. He sighed again, suddenly exhausted. Or maybe it wasn’t fatigue. Perhaps it was that he now felt Asakawa’s fear as his own, and wanted somehow to push it away.

But even a moment’s pause only whetted his desire to know more. Taking a sip of tea, he picked up the next page of the report, and started reading ahead, even faster than before.

The first thing Asakawa did upon returning to Tokyo was to call Ryuji Takayama and tell him what had happened. Asakawa had neither the time nor the courage to solve this thing alone. He needed a reliable partner, and so naturally his thoughts turned to Ryuji, whom he’d known since high school. He also approached Yoshino, but Yoshino refused to watch the video. Regardless of whether or not he actually believed in it, if there was even a slim chance that calamity would befall him as a result of watching the video, he wanted to avoid doing so.

But not Ryuji. As soon as he heard about this video that’d kill in a week’s time anyone who watched it, the first words out of his mouth were, First let’s have a look at this video.

So Ryuji watched the video in Asakawa’s apartment, fascinated. And when it was over he asked Asakawa to make him a copy.

The word “copy” made Ando sit up and take notice. Now he thought he could figure out the route the tape had traveled. The original tape from Villa Log Cabin had most likely stayed in Asakawa’s possession. It had been in the VCR in Asakawa’s car at the time of the wreck, had passed to Asakawa’s brother Junichiro, and been thrown away. There was one more tape, the one in Mai’s apartment, the one with only the very beginning remaining. This was probably the copy Asakawa had made for Ryuji that first night. It had a title on the label, written in thick letters in a man’s hand. It was probably Asakawa’s handwriting. When Ryuji had asked Asakawa to make him a copy, instead of using a brand-new tape, Asakawa had recycled an old tape on which he’d originally recorded a music program. This had passed through Ryuji’s hands into Mai’s. That much made sense. But when had Mai received it? Mai had never mentioned having the tape to Ando. Which meant, Ando supposed, that she’d come across it by chance, several days after Ryuji’s death, and watched it not knowing it was dangerous.

In any case, the tape had been replicated in Asakawa’s apartment. Ando felt he needed to keep that in mind.

So Ryuji took the copy of the tape back to his apartment and started working on figuring out the erased message (he and Asakawa called this “the charm”). Both men wondered what this weird recording was doing in Villa Log Cabin B-4. At first they thought that it had been shot with a video camera and then left there, but that turned out not to be the case. Three days before the unfortunate youths, a family had stayed in B-4: they’d put a tape in the VCR and set it to RECORD. They’d then forgotten about it and left it there when they went home. So the images on the tape had not been shot elsewhere and the tape brought to the cabin: rather, some sort of unknown transmission had been captured on the tape when the machine was recording. The next people on the scene had been the four young victims. With time on their hands, they’d decided to watch a video; when they went to turn on the VCR, out popped a tape. They’d watched it. The threat at the end must have amused them. Like we’re really going to die in a week if we don’t do what it says? So they decided to play a trick by erasing the solution; that should scare the next guests. Of course, the kids never really believed in the tape’s curse. If they had, they never could have pulled such a stunt. In any case, the tape was found the next day by the manager, who put it on the shelf in the office, where it stayed unnoticed by anyone until Asakawa’s arrival.

So: how had those images gotten into the deck while it was recording? It occurred to Asakawa that some maniac might have hijacked the airwaves, so he tried to pinpoint the source of such a broadcast. Meanwhile, when Asakawa was out of the house his wife and daughter found the video still in the VCR and watched it. Now Asakawa was urged on by the desire to save not only his own life, but also those of his family.

Then Ryuji made a startling discovery. Watching the tape over and over at home, he had a flash of inspiration. He made a chart and found that the tape could be broken down into twelve scenes, which fell into two groups: abstract scenes that seemed to consist of what might be called mental imagery, and real scenes that seemed to have been seen through an actual pair of eyes. For example, the volcanic eruption and the man’s face were clearly things that had really been seen, while the firefly-like light in the darkness at the beginning of the tape looked like something conjured up by the mind—like something out of a dream. So Ryuji called the two groups “real” and “abstract”, for comparison’s sake. Upon further investigation, he noticed that in the “real” scenes, there were instants in which the screen was covered by what looked like a black veil, just for a split second. In the “real” scenes, these instants occurred at the rate of about fifteen per minute, while in the “abstract” scenes, they didn’t appear at all. What did this mean? Ryuji concluded that the black veil was in reality a blink. It appeared in the scenes that were seen with actual eyes, and not in the sequences that were only seen in the mind’s eye. Not only that, the frequency of the blackouts matched the average eye-blinking frequency of a female. It seemed safe, then, to consider them eyeblinks. Which led naturally to the conclusion that the images on the videotape had not been captured by exposure in a video camera, but rather taken from the vision and imagination of an individual and placed on the tape by thought-projection.

Ando had real trouble believing this part. The idea that a person could mentally imprint images onto a videotape was simply preposterous. He might be willing, just barely, to allow the possibility of mentally imprinting photographic film, but moving images? That was an entirely different set-up, first of all. In order to press on, Ando had to lay this point aside for the moment, even as he admired Ryuji’s perspicacity.

Assuming that someone had recorded the tape paranormally, the next question was: who? Asakawa and Ryuji concentrated on that point, heading to the Tetsuzo Miura Memorial Hall in Kamakura. A researcher into parapsychological phenomena, Miura had devoted his life to tracking down paranormals from all over Japan. The files containing his findings were now housed in his memorial. The two men got permission to examine those files, over a thousand in number, thinking that a psychic with powers strong enough to project moving images onto a videotape couldn’t have escaped Professor Miura’s notice. And, after several hours of searching, they’d found a likely candidate.

Her name was Sadako Yamamura. She’d been born in the town of Sashikiji, on Izu Oshima Island.

According to an entry in her file, at the age of ten she was already able to project the characters yama (mountain) and sada, elements from her name, onto a piece of film. These very characters had appeared on the video. Certain that this Sadako Yamamura was who they were looking for, Ryuji and Asakawa boarded a boat for Izu Oshima the next morning. They hoped that learning more about her upbringing and personality would illuminate some of the secrets of the videotape. Sadako was threatening whoever looked at her images with death in order to get the viewer to do something. The tape itself embodied her wish for that action to be undertaken. Which made it crucial that they find out what Sadako desired. At this point, Ryuji already had an inkling that Sadako Yamamura was no longer alive. It was his belief that on the brink of death she’d unleashed her final, unfulfilled desire in the form of a psychic projection, meaning to relay her wish to someone else. Her deepseated hatred had ended up on the videotape.

Between the assistance of the Oshima stringer for the Daily News and the help of Yoshino in Tokyo, with whom they stayed in frequent contact, Asakawa and Ryuji managed to piece together a profile of Sadako Yamamura.

She was born in 1947, the daughter of Shizuko Yamamura, a one-time paranormal who had made a big but temporary splash in the national media, and Heihachiro Ikuma, an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Taido University who had gotten into research on parapsychology with Shizuko as his subject. At first, the trio of Ikuma, Shizuko, and Sadako had been received by the public with simple curiosity, and in fact had become media darlings after a fashion. But once a certain prestigious academic society had pronounced Shizuko’s powers fake, the masses turned on them, and they became subject to violent attacks in the media. Heihachiro was hounded out of the university, and eventually came down with tuberculosis, while Shizuko suffered nervous attacks and finally threw herself into Mt Mihara, the volcano on Izu Oshima.

Sadako was taken in by some relatives on the island, where she lived until she graduated from high school. Once in fourth grade she gained some notoriety within the school by predicting an eruption of Mt Mihara, but aside from that she didn’t display any of the powers she’d inherited from her mother. On leaving high school she moved to Tokyo, where she joined a theater troupe in hopes of making it as an actress. It was Yoshino who picked up her trail from there.

Asakawa called Yoshino from the island and asked him to find the troupe’s rehearsal space in Yotsuya, Tokyo. He did, and once there, he found out more about Sadako’s true nature from a man named Arima, a leader of the troupe. It had been twenty-five years since Sadako had been a member of his company, but he recalled her very well. She seemed to have some sort of supernatural power; she could project images at will onto the screen of an unplugged television. If this was true, then Sadako’s powers far outstripped her mother’s. While at the rehearsal space, Yoshino succeeded in obtaining a photo of Sadako. They still had her resume on file, and it contained two black-and-white photos from when she joined. One was from the waist up, while the other was a full-length shot. Both revealed Sadako to have perfectly balanced features that went beyond even the word “beautiful”.

Yoshino was unable to determine what became of Sadako after she left the theater troupe, so he faxed the photos and the other information he’d gathered to Asakawa at the Daily News’s Izu Oshima bureau.

When he read the fax and found out that Sadako’s trail had gone cold, Asakawa was devastated. If they couldn’t find her, how could they hope to figure out the charm?

Once again it was Ryuji who had a flash of inspiration. He realized that it might not be necessary to follow Sadako’s every move. Instead, maybe they should turn their attention to the scene—Villa Log Cabin No. B-4—and try to figure out why the images had shown up there. She had to have some sort of connection with the place.

They realized that all of the buildings at South Hakone Pacific Land were new. It wasn’t impossible that something else had once stood there. Asakawa contacted Yoshino in Tokyo and asked him to try a new line of investigation: find out what had occupied that ground before the resort.

Yoshino faxed him the next morning. It turned out that there had once been a tuberculosis sanatorium on the site. He even managed to send them a plan of the facility’s layout. He also attached a file with the name, address, and resume of one Jotaro Nagao, age 57, a GP and pediatrician with a practice in Atami. For a period of five years, from 1962 to 1967, he had worked at the South Hakone Sanatorium. The suggestion seemed to be that any further information about the sanatorium would best be gleaned from Nagao.

So, armed only with what they’d learned from Yoshino, Asakawa and Ryuji took a high-speed ferry for Atami. It was one week to the day since Asakawa had watched the video. If they didn’t figure out the “charm” by ten that evening, Asakawa would die. Ryuji’s deadline was ten o’clock the next night. And Asakawa’s wife and daughter’s time would be up at eleven on the morning after.

The two men climbed back into their rented car and headed off to find Dr Nagao’s office. Their hopes to gain even a tidbit of information from him were granted, in spades. When they finally came face to face with the doctor, both Asakawa and Ryuji recognized him. Near the end of the tape there was a part in which a man was seen from the waist up, panting and sweating, blood streaming from a gouge in his shoulder. Although he’d aged and lost some hair, Nagao was unmistakably that man. Sadako had seen his face up close. Not only that, in her “eyes” he was something wicked.

With typical brashness, Ryuji pressured Nagao until he confessed everything. He told them all about that hot summer afternoon twenty-five years ago …

Nagao had contracted smallpox from a patient while on a call to the sanatorium’s isolation ward in the mountains, and that afternoon, the early symptoms of the illness were starting to show. But in spite of his headache and fever, he didn’t recognize at first that he had smallpox, and went on treating tuberculosis patients as usual. He thought it was simply a cold. Then he met Sadako Yamamura in the courtyard. She often came to the sanatorium to visit her father, who was a patient there. Having just left the theater troupe, Sadako had nowhere else to go, and she was often up to see her father.

One glance at Sadako and Nagao was overwhelmed by her beauty. He approached her and they began to talk, and then, as if guided by something beyond himself, he took her to an abandoned house deep in the woods. There, in front of an old well, he raped her. It was then that Sadako, in her desperate attempts to resist him, bit his shoulder. Between the bleeding and his feverish delirium, it took him some time to notice Sadako’s uniqueness. She had testicular feminization syndrome, an extremely rare condition in which one had both male and female genitalia. A person with this syndrome usually has breasts and a vagina but lacks a uterus and fallopian tubes. Externally, the person would appear quite female, but chromosomally would be XY—a male—and unable to bear children.

Nagao strangled Sadako and threw her body in the well. He then threw rocks into the well after her.

After hearing out Nagao’s confession, Asakawa showed him the plan of the resort and asked the doctor to show him on the map the location of the well. Nagao was able to indicate the general area—namely, where Villa Log Cabin was located now. Asakawa and Ryuji immediately sped off to Pacific Land.

Once there, they began to search for the well in the vicinity of the cabins. They found it beneath cabin B-4. The cabin stood on a gentle slope, and when they investigated the space beneath the porch they saw the rim of an old well, covered with a concrete lid. If Sadako’s hatred had radiated straight up out of the well, it would have run smack into the TV and VCR in the cabin above. The videotape was in the perfect position to pick up her psychic projections.

Asakawa and Ryuji broke a few boards, crawled under the cabin, pried the lid off the well, and set about the task of finding Sadako’s remains. That’s what both Asakawa and Ryuji now interpreted the missing “charm” to be: Sadako wanted whoever watched the videotape to release her from that cramped, dark space. The two men took turns descending into the well and scooping water out of the bottom of it with buckets. And when they finally, thankfully, fished from the mud a skull that they took to be Sadako’s, it was already after ten o’clock. Asakawa’s deadline had come and gone, and he wasn’t dead. They were satisfied that they’d figured out the secret of the videotape.

After that, Asakawa took Sadako’s remains back to Izu Oshima, while Ryuji returned to his apartment in Tokyo to work on an article. The case had been put to rest. The bones of Sadako Yamamura, possessor of fearsome psychic powers, had been rescued from the depths of the earth. She had been appeased. Neither Asakawa nor Ryuji had any doubt about that.

11

Having read that far, Ando now stood up, still holding the report, and opened the window. Imagining climbing down a rope into a well had given him the feeling that he was suffocating. It was a doubly restricted space; under the cabin it would be dark even in the daytime, and then there was the well, not even a yard across. It gave him a flash of claustrophobia; he had to breathe outside air. Directly beneath his window he could see the dark woods of Meiji Shrine swaying in the breeze. The pages in his hand fluttered too, stirred by the same current of air. The last page of the manuscript was in the printer now. One more page and Asakawa’s account would be finished. Ando heard the sound of the printer finishing its task. He glanced back at the word processor only to find a mostly blank piece of paper staring back at him.

He picked up the final page. It said:

Sunday, October 21

The nature of a virus is to reproduce itself.

The charm: make a copy of the video.

And that was all. But it had to be of the utmost importance.

October 21st was the day of Asakawa’s accident. The previous morning, Ando had dissected Ryuji’s body and met Mai at the medical examiner’s office. Although the manuscript ended abruptly, Ando could more or less fill in the rest himself.

On October 19th, Sadako Yamamura’s remains had been delivered into the custody of her relatives back home. But that hadn’t been the end of things after all. Even as Asakawa sat in a hotel on Oshima composing his detailed report, Ryuji was dying in his apartment in East Nakano. Upon returning to Tokyo and learning of Ryuji’s death, Asakawa had rushed to Ryuji’s apartment. There he’d encountered Mai Takano and peppered her with what seemed to her strangely inappropriate questions.

Ryuji really didn’t tell you anything at the end? Nothing, say, about a videotape?

It was easy to see why Asakawa had been in a panic. He’d been convinced that he’d escaped death by figuring out the riddle of the videotape, and now he’d found out he was wrong. The curse still lived. And Asakawa was left without a clue. Why was Ryuji dead and Asakawa alive? Not only that, Asakawa’s wife and child had a deadline of their own coming, at eleven the next morning. So Asakawa had to figure out the charm all over again, alone this time and with only a few hours to do it in. Logically, he realized that whatever it was the videotape had wanted him to do, he must have done it at some point in the past week without realizing it. Something that he could be sure Ryuji hadn’t done. What could it be? Perhaps he spent the whole night wondering. And then finally, on the morning of the twenty-first, he’d had a spark of intuition, maybe, and hit upon what he was sure was the solution. He’d made a quick note of it on his word processor.

Sunday, October 21

The nature of a virus is to reproduce itself.

The charm: make a copy of the video.

What Asakawa meant here had to be none other than the smallpox virus. Just before her death, Sadako Yamamura had had physical relations with the last smallpox victim in Japan, Jotaro Nagao. It was natural to assume that the virus had invaded her body. Driven to the brink of extinction, the smallpox virus had borrowed Sadako’s extraordinary power to accomplish the purpose of its existence, which was to reproduce itself. But once it took the form of a videotape, the virus couldn’t reproduce on its own. It had to work through human beings, forcing them to make copies of it. If one were to fill in the missing part at the end of the tape, it would run like this:

Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly. Make a copy of this videotape and show it to someone else.

In that light, things made sense. The day after he’d watched the videotape, Asakawa showed it to Ryuji, and he also made a copy for him. Without realizing it, he’d helped the virus propagate. But Ryuji never made a copy.

Sure he had the answer, Asakawa had loaded a VCR into the rented car and driven off somewhere. Undoubtedly he’d planned to make two copies of the video and show them to two other people—one for his wife, and one for his baby girl. The people he showed it to would then have to find new prey, someone else to give a copy of the video to. But that wasn’t the immediate problem. The important thing was to save the lives of his wife and child.

But just at the height of his relief at having saved the lives of his loved ones, Asakawa had reached into the back seat and touched his wife and daughter and found them cold. He lost control of the car.

Ando felt he could understand Asakawa’s catatonic state now. Not only was he devastated at the loss of his family, but he was no doubt also tormented by a question: what was the true nature of the charm? Every time he thought he had it figured out, the answer slipped through his fingers, transforming itself, claiming another life. Rage and sorrow, and an endless repetition of the question: Why? Why was he still alive?

Ando put the manuscript pages in a pile on the table. Then he asked himself:

Do you really believe this cock-and-bull story?

He shook his head.

I just don’t know.

He didn’t know what else to say. He’d seen the unnatural sarcoma on Ryuji’s coronary artery with his own eyes. Seven people were dead of the same cause. In their blood had been found a virus that closely resembled smallpox. And where had Mai disappeared to? What about that odd ambience in her apartment, which she had seemingly vacated? That hair-raising intimation he’d had that something was there? The traces left on the videotape still in her VCR? Was the tape still propagating? Would it continue to claim new victims? The more he thought, the more questions Ando had.

He turned off the word processor and reached for the whiskey on the sideboard. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight without the help of alcohol.

12

Ando first dropped by the biochem lab and returned the word processor to Ueda, and then headed to the Pathology Department. Under his arm he carried the report he’d printed out the night before. He intended to let Miyashita read it.

Miyashita sat with his head down low to the table, scratching away with a ballpoint pen. Ando dropped the report on the tabletop next to him, and Miyashita looked up in surprise.

“Listen, would you do me a favor and read this?”

Miyashita just stared back at Ando in amazement.

“What’s going on?”

“I want to know what you think of that.”

Miyashita picked up the document. “It’s pretty long.”

“It is, but there are things in there that will interest you. It won’t take long to read.”

“You’re not about to tell me you’ve been writing a novel in your spare time, are you?”

“Kazuyuki Asakawa wrote up a report about the deaths.”

“You mean, our Asakawa?”

“Right.”

Miyashita looked interested now as he flipped through some of the pages. “Hmm.”

“So, there it is. Let me know what you think when you’re done.”

Ando started to leave, but Miyashita called him back. “Hold on a minute.”

“What?”

Miyashita rested his cheek on his hand and tapped the table with the tip of his pen. “You’re pretty good at codes, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m particularly good at them. In med school, some friends of mine played around with them, but that’s about it.”

“Hmm,” said Miyashita, still tapping on the table.

“Why?”

Miyashita took his elbow off the printout he’d been looking at and slid it over to Ando. “This is why.” He started tapping his pen on the center of the page. It was the printout he’d seen the day before, the results of sequencing the virus found in Ryuji’s blood.

“You showed me this yesterday.”

“I know, but I just can’t get over it.”

Ando picked up the piece of paper and held it up in front of his face. Into several points in an otherwise unordered sequence of bases, a string of bases in the same order had been inserted.

ATGGAAGAAGAATATCGTTATATTCCTCCTCCTCAACAACAA

No question, it was strange for the same string of forty-two bases to appear several times at appropriate intervals.

“And Ryuji’s virus is the only one like this?”

“Right. His is the only one with these extra forty-two bases,” Miyashita said, his gaze not wavering from Ando’s. “Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”

“Of course it does.”

The tap-tap of the ballpoint pen ceased.

“The thought crossed my mind that it might be a sort of code.”

Ando gulped. He couldn’t remember having told Miyashita anything about what had happened after Ryuji’s autopsy. Not about the corner of newspaper, and certainly not about the fact that he’d come up with the word “ring” from it. And yet now Miyashita was talking about codes.

“Assuming it is a code, who’s sending it?”

“Ryuji.”

Ando screwed his eyes shut. The idea was one he’d been desperately trying to avoid entertaining, and now Miyashita was shoving it in his face.

“Ryuji’s dead. I performed the autopsy myself.”

Miyashita didn’t seem fazed in the least. “Well, whatever. Just see if you can decipher this, okay?”

Was it really possible that the sequence of bases could be somehow turned into a word? Just as the digits 178136 had quickly yielded RING, maybe these forty-two letters could be made to form words. Maybe they did carry some important message. Had Ryuji himself, from beyond the grave, inscribed this over and over in his own remains?

Ando’s hand, clutching the printout, trembled as he felt himself being driven into the same blind alley as Asakawa. But there was no way he could refuse Miyashita’s outright request. The idea that it might be a code had occurred to Ando, too, the first time he’d seen the sequence, but he’d buried the thought in the depths of his brain. He was afraid that if he didn’t, the scientific framework on which he’d hung his life would be bent further out of shape. Things were threatening to go beyond his ability to absorb them.

“You can keep that. Take your time and see what you can do with it.”

Miyashita was supposed to be a scientist. Ando couldn’t understand how he could bandy about these unscientific ideas so readily.

“I have faith in you. You’ll figure it out,” said Miyashita, giving Ando a pat on the butt.

PART THREE

Decoding

1

Ando and Miyashita followed the waitress to a table by the window. The restaurant was on the top floor of the university hospital and boasted a fantastic view of the Outer Gardens of Meiji Shrine. In addition, university employees got a discount. Both men had taken off their lab coats before coming, but still the waitress could tell at a glance that they weren’t members of the general public visiting a patient. She handed them the special employees’ lunch menu. Merely glancing at it, both Ando and Miyashita ordered the special of the day and coffee.

As soon as the waitress left, Miyashita said, with a portentous air, “I read it.” From the moment Miyashita had asked him to lunch, Ando had known he’d start out with that phrase. Miyashita had read Asakawa’s Ring report and was now ready to comment on it.

“So what did you think?” Ando leaned forward.

“I won’t lie. I was amazed.”

“But do you believe it?”

“Hell, it’s not a question of belief. It all adds up. The names of the victims and the times of death he gives check out. We’ve seen the incident reports and the autopsy records ourselves, you and I.”

He was right, of course. They had copies of the coroner’s reports and associated documents for the four victims who’d been at Villa Log Cabin. The times of death given therein accurately reflected what Asakawa had written. There were no inconsistencies to be found. But what took Ando aback was how a pathologist as sharp as Miyashita showed no apparent resistance to the idea of curses and supernatural powers playing a role in all this.

“So you just accept it?”

“Well, it’s not as if I don’t have reservations. But, you know, when you really think about it, modern science hasn’t managed to come up with answers to any of the most basic questions. How did life first appear on earth? How does evolution work? Is it a series of random events, or does it have a set teleological direction? There are all kinds of theories, but we haven’t been able to prove one of them. The structure of the atom is not a miniature of the solar system, it’s something much more difficult to grasp, full of what you might call latent power. And when we try to observe the subatomic world, we find that the mind of the observer comes into play in subtle ways. The mind, my friend! The very same mind which, ever since Descartes, proponents of the mechanistic view of the universe considered subordinate to the body-machine. And now we find that the mind influences observed results. So I give up. Nothing surprises me. I’m prepared to accept anything that happens in this world. I actually kind of envy people who can still believe in the omnipotence of modern science.”

Ando himself had at least a few doubts about the so-called omnipotence of modern science, but evidently they weren’t as grave as Miyashita’s. How could one feel comfortable in the scientific community if one harbored that kind of skepticism?

“That’s pretty extreme.”

“I’ve never told you this, but I’m actually a philosophical idealist.”

“An idealist, huh?”

“Like the Buddha said, form is empty and emptiness is form.”

Ando wasn’t quite sure what Miyashita was trying to say. He was sure that between philosophical idealism and reality is empty there was a lot being left unsaid, but now wasn’t the time to pursue the finer points of Miyashita’s worldview.

“Anyway, was there anything that particularly bothered you about the report?” Ando wanted to see if he and Miyashita harbored the same doubts about it.

“Oh, any number of things bothered me.” The coffee arrived, and Miyashita stirred his full of cream and sugar. His ruddy face caught the sun full-on through the window. “First, why is Asakawa and only Asakawa still alive after having seen that videotape?”

Miyashita took a sip of coffee.

“It’s because he figured out the charm, no?”

“The charm?”

“You know, the part that had been erased at the end of the tape.”

“The bit that wanted to force the viewer to do something.”

“So if Asakawa did it without realizing it …”

“Did what?”

“It was right there at the end of the report, wasn’t it? The nature of a virus is to reproduce itself. The charm: make a copy of the video.’”

Then Ando explained to Miyashita a few things he didn’t know. There had been a video deck in Asakawa’s car at the time of the accident, and Ando had found a taped-over copy of the videotape in Mai’s apartment.

A light seemed to go on in Miyashita’s head. “A-ha, so that’s what he meant. Asakawa thought the charm was to make a copy of the video and to show it to someone who hadn’t seen it yet.”

“I have no doubt that’s what he thought.”

“So, where was he heading with the VCR on the morning of the accident?”

“Someplace where he could find two people who would watch the tape, of course. He must have been desperate to save his wife and young daughter.”

“But he’d have had a hard time showing such a dangerous tape to a complete stranger.”

“I imagine he went to his wife’s parents. It couldn’t have been his own parents, since his father’s still alive and well. I spoke to him on the phone just the other day.”

“So her parents exposed themselves to a temporary risk in order to save their daughter and granddaughter.”

“Looks like we need to find out where they live and check with the local police.”

If the video, complete with extortionate addendum, had been reproduced and circulated, then there might well be more victims in the area around Shizu Asakawa’s parents’ house. But if there were, the media hadn’t picked up on them yet. The video’s progress was still below the surface, out of the public eye.

Miyashita, too, seemed to have arrived at the thought that the videotape had the ability to spread like a virus. He spoke mockingly. “Looks like you’ll be cutting up a lot of bodies.”

This jolted Ando into a realization. Judging from the situation, it was more than likely that Mai had watched the tape. It was now almost two weeks since she’d disappeared. Perhaps he’d end up dissecting her himself. He imagined her beautiful form on the operating table, and it horrified him.

“But Asakawa’s still alive.” He said it like a prayer.

“The biggest problem we have is this: if Asakawa did manage to make two copies of the videotape, why did his wife and daughter die?”

“Put another way, why is Asakawa himself still alive?”

“I don’t know. The smallpox virus is tangled up in this, right? In light of that, it makes perfect sense for this ‘charm’ to be copying the video to help it propagate.”

“It makes sense up through Ryuji’s death. But the deaths of Asakawa’s wife and daughter throw the question wide open all over again.”

“So, being copied wasn’t what the tape wanted?”

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t know how to interpret the situation. Either the charm had aimed at something else, or something untoward had happened in the copying process. Or maybe the tape killed people who watched it regardless of whether or not they enacted the charm. But that would make it even harder to explain why Asakawa survived.

Lunch arrived, and the two men fell into silence for a while, absorbed in eating.

Finally, Miyashita rested his fork and said, “I find myself in a dilemma.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if there is such a videotape, I’d want to watch it. But it might kill me. I’d say that’s a dilemma. A week’s not much time.”

“Not much time?”

“To figure it out. It’s really intrigued me. Scientifically speaking, what we have here is a video, a medium that attacks the human brain through its sense of sight and sound, which can somehow implant a smallpox-like virus inside the body.”

“Maybe it wasn’t that it implanted it. Maybe the images on the video somehow influenced the victim’s cellular DNA so that it metamorphosed into the mystery virus.”

“You might have something there. I’m thinking of the AIDS virus. We don’t know its origins for sure yet, but it’s thought that something caused human and simian viruses that had existed all along to evolve, and that’s what gave birth to the AIDS virus as we know it. In any case, AIDS is not a virus that has been around for hundreds of years. Analysis of its base sequences clearly shows that it’s something that branched into two strains only about a hundred and fifty years ago. Through some chance event.”

“And you want to find out what that chance event is in this case.”

“Me, I think it involves the mind.” Miyashita leaned forward until his nose almost touched Ando’s.

It was, of course, common knowledge that the mind, as abstract and immaterial as it was, could influence the body in various ways. Ando was well aware of this. One only had to think of how stress could eat holes in the stomach lining. Now Ando and Miyashita were thinking along the same lines. First, the video created in the viewer a particular psychological state that somehow influenced the viewer’s own DNA to metamorphose until the mystery virus which resembled smallpox was born. Then, this smallpox-like virus caused a cancer inside the coronary artery that surrounds the heart, resulting in a tumor. In a week’s time the tumor reached its peak size, cutting off the flow of blood and stopping the heart. But the virus itself was like a cancer virus—its function was to worm its way into the DNA and cause cellular mutation in the coronary artery’s tunica media—and wasn’t very contagious. At least, that was what their analysis so far had led them to think.

“Come on, don’t you want to see it?” challenged Miyashita.

“Well …”

“I just want to get my hands on that tape.”

“No, I think it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. You’d end up like Ryuji.”

“Speaking of Ryuji, did you manage to break the code?”

“Not yet. Even if it is a code, forty-two bases is too small a number to work with. It could only contain a few words at most.”

This was an excuse. Ando had in fact tried several times to decipher the code, but every attempt had ended in failure.

“I guess I know how you’ll be spending your holiday.”

That was when Ando first realized that the next day was a national holiday, Labor Thanksgiving Day. And since he didn’t have to work the following day, Saturday, it meant he had a three-day weekend coming up. Ever since losing his son and his wife, he hadn’t paid much attention to holidays. It was nothing but misery to be home alone, and three-day weekends that he had no plans for made him particularly depressed.

“Yeah, well, I’ll give it a shot.”

But spending the holiday trying to read a coded message from a dead man sounded pretty dismal. On the other hand, if he succeeded, then maybe it’d give him some sense of accomplishment. At least it would provide a distraction.

So he promised Miyashita that he’d have it figured out by the end of the weekend. “On Monday, I’ll tell you what Ryuji’s trying to say.”

Miyashita reached across the table and clapped a hand on Ando’s left shoulder. “It’s up to you now.”

2

After lunch, Ando went back to his office and put in a call to the Forensic Medicine Department of Joji University Hospital, in Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture. A little research had turned up the information that Asakawa’s wife’s parents lived in Ashikaga, Tochigi. Any unexplained deaths in that region would fall under the jurisdiction of the doctors at Joji.

An assistant professor came to the phone, and Ando asked him if there had been any patients who’d died late last month from heart attacks caused by blockage of the coronary artery. The man responded with a curt question of his own.

“Sorry, but what are you getting at?”

Ando explained to him that they had seen seven deaths from the same cause in the greater Tokyo area, and there were indications that there could be many more victims. He avoided any mention of paranormal phenomena.

This didn’t seem to have assuaged the man’s doubts. “So you’re contacting medical schools across the region?”

“No, not exactly.”

“So why are you calling us?”

“Because your area is at risk.”

“Are you saying we’re going to find bodies in Utsunomiya?”

“No, in Ashikaga.”

“Ashikaga?” The mention of the name startled the man. He fell silent, and Ando could almost sense his grip on the receiver tightening.

“This is a shock. I can’t imagine how you know about it. As a matter of fact, on October 28th, the bodies of an elderly couple were discovered there. We did autopsies on them the next day.”

“Can you tell me their names?”

“Their last name was Oda, I think, and the wife’s name was Setsuko. I forget the husband’s name.”

Ando had already checked on Shizu Asakawa’s parents’ names: Toru and Setsuko Oda. It had to be them. Now they had proof. On the morning of October 21st, Asakawa had loaded a VCR into his rented car and driven to his in-laws’ house in Ashikaga, where he’d had two copies made of the tape and shown to the old couple. No doubt he’d assured them that if they made more copies and showed them to other people within a week, their lives wouldn’t be in any danger. They probably hadn’t needed much convincing, regardless of whether or not they fully believed in their son-in-law’s outlandish story. If there was any chance that their daughter and granddaughter’s lives were on the line, they must have been more than willing to acquiesce. And so Asakawa had had copies made, believing that by doing so he’d saved his wife and child. But on the way home he lost them both at once, and then a week later, the old couple died, too.

“I’ll bet you were pretty surprised by what you found in the autopsy.” Ando could well imagine the staff’s shock at finding the same symptoms in both bodies.

“You can say that again. I mean, given the simultaneous time of death, plus the fact that they left a note, we naturally assumed it was a double suicide. But then we cut them open, and found, instead of poison, strange tumors in their coronary arteries. Surprised isn’t the word.”

“Hold on a minute,” Ando broke in.

“What?”

“You say they left a note?”

“Yes. It wasn’t much of one, but a note was found next to their pillows. It looked like they’d written it right before they died.”

Ando was disconcerted by this development. What did this mean? Why did they leave a note?

“Can you tell me what the note said?”

“Hang on.” The assistant professor put down the receiver, but was back a few seconds later. “It’s going to take me a while to locate it. Shall I fax it to you later?”

“I’d appreciate that.”

Ando told the man his fax number and then hung up.

He couldn’t leave his desk after that. The fax machine was on the middle shelf of a computer cabinet two desks away. He swiveled in his chair forty-five degrees to face the fax machine, and then waited for the transmission to arrive.

He couldn’t relax; he couldn’t even lean back in his chair. Instead, while he waited, he went over the course of events up to now in his head. Reviewing the past was all he could do. He was too distracted wondering when the fax machine would come to life to start a new train of thought.

Finally, the machine started to buzz and a fax began to roll out. He waited until it was finished, then got up and tore it off. He returned to his seat, spread the fax open on his desktop, and read:

To: Dr Ando, Fukuzawa University Medical School

Here’s the note Mr and Mrs Oda left. Please let me know of any new developments.

Dr Yokota
Medical School
Joji University

Under the professor’s scrawled note were a few lines of text accompanied by the Odas’ names. The handwriting wasn’t Yokota’s; he must have made a photocopy of the original.

October 28, morning

We took it upon ourselves to dispose of the videotapes. There’s nothing more to worry about. We’re tired. Yoshimi and Kazuko, please take care of everything.

Toru Oda    Setsuko Oda

The message was short, but even so it was enough to make it clear that they knew they were facing death. Yoshimi and Kazuko were probably their other two daughters. But who had the previous sentence been addressed to?

What did they mean, they’d disposed of the videotapes?

Did it mean they’d gotten rid of them? It certainly couldn’t be taken to mean that they’d copied them.

Ando decided to try and recreate the Odas’ state of mind from the beginning.

On Sunday, October 21st, their son-in-law showed up on their doorstep and told them that Shizu and Yoko’s lives were threatened by a curse embedded in a videotape. The Odas agreed to copy the tape. But then, that same day, Shizu and Yoko died at the time foretold. Even if the Odas had been skeptical about Asakawa’s story at first, now they surely had to believe in the video’s power. Then, after the funeral, they had learned the results of the autopsies: inexplicable heart attacks. At this point the Odas must have decided to give up hope of saving themselves. Their daughter and granddaughter had lost their lives in spite of the fact that they’d followed the videotape’s demands. The Odas must have thought that they couldn’t escape death no matter what they did. Exhausted from all the effort that had gone into the funerals, and perhaps weary of life in general, they decided to refrain from copying the videotape and meekly awaited the approach of death. But if their note was to be believed, while waiting, they had “disposed” of the videotapes that were the source of all this misery.

There was no way for Ando to know how they had disposed of the tapes. They might have erased them completely and then thrown them away, or they might have buried them in the yard. In any case, as Ando now attempted to diagram the video’s path on a piece of scratch paper, he decided to grant for the moment that those two copies had been obliterated.

First there had been the one in Villa Log Cabin No. B-4, the source of all the evil, created when a VCR left to record had captured the images on tape. Asakawa had taken that back to his apartment and made a copy for Ryuji. At this point there were two copies, two strains as it were. However, it seemed that Ryuji’s copy had found its way into Mai’s hands, and had then been erased, all except for the first ten seconds. Asakawa’s copy, meanwhile, had passed to his brother Junichiro, who had discarded it along with the damaged VCR. Asakawa’s original had begotten two further strains in the form of copies given to the Odas, but these too had been disposed of. In short, the videotapes born of Sadako Yamamura’s wrath had now vanished from the face of the earth.

Ando went over the tree he’d constructed again and again, to make sure he had it right. But the tape did indeed seem to have gone extinct. A mere two months after it had come to life at the end of August, having claimed only nine victims, the scourge had died out. But … Ando thought. If the videotape killed everybody who watched it regardless of whether or not they copied it, it was obvious that it was going to go extinct sooner or later. Only by virtue of its threat would it be able to reproduce itself, to adapt to its environment and survive. Once the threat was exposed as a lie, the tape would inevitably be driven into a corner.

If it was extinct, that would mean they’d seen the last of these mysterious deaths. If nobody else could be exposed to those images, then there was no fear of anybody dying from inexplicable heart attacks. But a fundamental point now stole back into Ando’s mind.

Why is Asakawa still alive?

This was followed by another question.

Where is Mai Takano?

Logically, the videotape seemed to have died out. But Ando’s intuition denied it. This wasn’t going to be over that easily. Something didn’t sit right.

3

Ando picked up a locker key at the front desk of the library, and then took off his jacket on his way to the lockers. It was almost winter. Anybody who saw him, wearing nothing but a shirt, would shiver in sympathy. But Ando perspired easily, and even in his shirtsleeves, he felt hot in the climate-controlled library. He took a pen and a notebook out of his briefcase, then wrapped his jacket around it and stuffed it in a locker.

The notebook was where he’d put the page containing the DNA analysis of the virus found in Ryuji’s blood. Ando was determined to have a go at cracking the code today, which was why he was here in the library first thing in the morning, but the moment he looked at the meaningless array of letters on the printout, his eyes glazed over. There was no way he’d be able to figure this out. But when he thought about it, he recalled that he was doing this partly to kill time. He couldn’t think of anything better to get him through the empty three-day weekend.

So he tucked the notebook under his arm and headed up to the third-floor reading room, where he took a seat by the window.

As a student playing at cipher-cracking with Ryuji, he’d had quite a collection of books on cryptography at home. But what with getting married and then getting divorced, he’d moved three times since then, not to mention the fact that he’d lost interest in the subject; all those books had disappeared somewhere along the line. There were certain types of codes that he couldn’t hope to decipher without the help of character substitution charts and letter-frequency graphs of the kind found in specialist works, and he doubted he’d be able to get anywhere on this one without their help. And since it just seemed foolish to buy them all over again, he’d ended up at the library.

At one point he’d had a good grasp of the basics of constructing and unscrambling codes, but it had been ten years, so he first took a quick glance through a primer on the subject. He decided that his first step should be to decide just what class of code was contained in the smallpox-like virus’s base sequence.

Codes can be generally divided into three types: substitution ciphers, in which the letters of the message are replaced by other letters, symbols, or numbers; transposition ciphers, in which the order of the words of the message is changed; and insertion ciphers, in which extraneous words are inserted between the words of the message. The numbers that popped out of Ryuji’s belly after the autopsy, which Ando was able to link to the English word “ring”, was a good example of a simple substitution cipher.

It didn’t take him long to guess that the virus’s code had to be of the substitution variety. What he had to work with was a group of four letters, ATGC, corresponding to the four bases, so it was most likely that the code consisted of assigning a particular character to a predetermined grouping of letters. That was most code-like.

Code-like. When the thought occurred to him, it made him sit up and think. The essential purpose of a code is to convey information from one party to another without any third party being able to figure it out. As students, codes had been nothing but a game to them, brain-teasers. But in, say, times of war, when a code’s susceptibility to deciphering could sway the tide of a conflict, a “codelike” code would mean one which was, in effect, too dangerous to use. In other words, one way to keep the enemy from breaking your codes was to make sure they didn’t look like codes at first glance. If you caught an enemy spy and found he was carrying a notebook filled with suspicious-looking strings of numbers, it would be a safe bet that it was top-secret information, encrypted. Even allowing for the possibility of decoys, when a code is identified as such, the chances of it being broken rise significantly.

Ando tried to think logically. If the purpose of a code is to keep information from the hands of a third party, then a code should only seem “codelike” to the person for whom the information is intended. Staring at the forty-two letters interpolated into the base sequence of the virus, Ando found them extremely code-like. That had been his impression from the very first time he’d looked at the chart.

Now why would that be?

He tried to analyze the source of that impression. Why did it seem code-like to him? It wasn’t as if there had never been puzzling repetitions found in the course of DNA sequencing. But in spite of that, this particular repetition seemed meaningful. It popped up everywhere they looked in the sequence, no matter where they sliced it. It was as if it was trying to call attention to itself, saying, I’m a code, dummy. The sequence of letters seemed particularly code-like to Ando in light of his experience with the numbers that had popped out of Ryuji’s belly. In other words, maybe there had been two purposes to the word “ring” squeezing its way out just then: not only was it meant to alert Ando to the existence of the Ring report, but it was also a form of warning. It was as if Ryuji were telling him, I may use codes again as the situation warrants, so keep your eyes peeled and don’t miss them. And maybe he’d used the simplest kind of substitution cipher as a hint, too.

Given that the mysterious string of bases had only been found in the virus drawn from Ryuji, it was safe to assume that he was the one sending the code. It was an undeniable fact, of course, that Ryuji had died and his body been reduced to ashes, but a sample of his tissue still remained in the lab. A countless number of instances of his DNA, the blueprint for the individual entity that was Ryuji, still remained in the cells in that tissue sample. What if that DNA had inherited Ryuji’s will, and was trying to express something in words?

It was a nonsensical theory completely unworthy of an anatomist like Ando. But if he did succeed in making the string of letters yield words by means of substitution, then that would trump all other readings of the situation. Theoretically, it was possible to take DNA from Ryuji’s blood sample and use it to make an individual exactly like Ryuji—a clone. This assemblage of DNA sharing the same will had exerted an influence over the virus that had entered its bloodstream, inserting a word or words. Ando could suddenly sense Ryuji’s cunning and sheer genius behind this. Why had he inserted the message only into the virus, an invader, and not into his red blood cells? Because, with his medical background, Ryuji knew that there was no chance that DNA from the other cells would be sequenced. He’d known that he could only count on the virus responsible for the cluster of deaths being run through a sequencer, and so he’d concentrated his efforts on the virus’s DNA. So that the words he sent would be received.

All of which finally led Ando to one conclusion. Since this code looked to him like a code, it was no longer functioning, in essence, as a code should. Rather, it was just that Ryuji’s DNA had no other way to communicate with the outside. The DNA double helix was composed of four bases represented by the letters ATGC. Ando couldn’t think of any other way for it to make its will known but by combining those four letters in various ways. It had chosen this way because there was no other available to it. It was the only means Ryuji had at his disposal.

Suddenly all the despair Ando had felt a few moments ago was gone, replaced by a buoying confidence.

Maybe I’ll be able to decipher this after all.

He felt like shouting. If Ryuji’s will, lingering in his DNA, was trying to speak to Ando, then it stood to reason that the words it used would be ones easy for Ando to decode. Why should they be more difficult than they needed to be? Ando went back and checked his line of reasoning to see if there were any holes in his deductions. If he started off on the wrong foot, he could wander around forever without finding the answer.

He no longer saw what he was doing as merely a way of killing time. Now that he felt that he would actually be able to decipher the message, he couldn’t wait to find out what it said.

The rest of the morning, until lunchtime, Ando spent working on two approaches.

The sequence he had to work with was:

ATGGAAGAAGAATATCGTTATATTCCTCCTCCTCAACAACAA

The first question was how to divide the letters up. He tried dividing them up in twos and in threes.

First, by twos:

Taking a pair of letters as one unit, the four letters available yielded a possible sixteen different combinations. He wondered if each combination might represent one letter.

But this immediately led him to another problem: what language was this message written in?

It probably wasn’t the Japanese syllabary. There were nearly fifty characters in that, far more than the sixteen allowed by the pair method. The English and French alphabets both had twenty-six letters, while Italian only used twenty. But he also knew he couldn’t overlook the possibility that the message was in romanized Japanese. Identifying the language of a code is sometimes half the battle.

But this was a problem that had already been solved for Ando. The fact that he’d been able to replace the numerals 178136 with the word “ring” could probably be taken as a hint from Ryuji that the present code would also yield something in English. Ando was sure of this point. And so the question of language was as good as settled.

The forty-two base letters could be split into twenty-one pairs. But several pairs were identical: there were four AA’s, three TA’s, three TC’s, and two CC’s. There were only thirteen unique pairings. Ando jotted these numbers down on a piece of paper and then paged through a book on code-solving until he found a chart showing the frequency of appearance in English of different letters of the alphabet.

He knew that although the English alphabet contains twenty-six letters, not all of them occur in equal numbers in everyday use. E, T, and A, for example, are common, while Q and Z might appear only once or twice per page. Most handbooks on code-breaking will include various kinds of letter frequency charts in the back, among other statistical references. Using such tables and statistics made it easier to determine the language a coded message was in.

In this case, what the figures told him was that in an English phrase of twenty-one letters, the average number of different letters used was twelve. Ando clicked his heels. What he had was thirteen different letters, not far off the average at all. This told him that, statistically speaking, there was nothing wrong with him dividing the sequence into twenty-one pairs and assuming that each pair stood for a letter.

Putting that possibility on hold for a moment, Ando next tried dividing up the sequence into sets of three:

ATG GAA GAA GAA TAT CGT TAT ATT CCT
CCT CCT CAA CAA CAA

This produced fourteen trios, or seven unique varieties: GAA, TAT, CGT, ATT, CCT, and CAA. The charts told him that an English phrase of fourteen letters contained an average of nine different letters. Not far off from the seven he had.

Ando immediately noticed that there was a lot of overlap produced by this system. GAA, CCT, and CAA each occurred three times, and TAT appeared twice. But what really bothered Ando was the fact that GAA, CCT, and CAA each appeared three times in a row. If he assigned each triplet a single letter of the alphabet, there were three separate cases in this short passage of the same letter being repeated three times. He knew enough English to know that double letters were not at all uncommon. But he couldn’t think of any English words with triple letters. The only possibility he could think of was situations in which one word ended with a double letter and the next word began with the same letter, e.g., “too old” or “will link”.

He picked up an English book he happened to spy nearby and started examining a page at random to see just how often the same letter occurred three times in succession. He’d gone through four or five pages before he found a single instance. The chances of it happening three times in one fourteen-letter sequence were basically nil, he concluded. By contrast, dividing up the forty-two letters into pairs produced just one double letter. As a result, he decided that statistically it made more sense to go with the first option and divide the bases into pairs of letters.

He’d narrowed down the possibilities. From here he could proceed through trial and error.

The AA pair appeared four times, which meant it must correspond to a letter used with great frequency. Consulting another chart, Ando confirmed that the most frequently used letter in English is, of course, E. So he hypothesized that AA stood for the letter E. The second most common pairs in his sequence were TA and TC, occurring three times each. He also noticed that AA was followed by TA once, while TC was followed by AA once. This might be important, since there were also statistics for various combinations of letters. He started trying out various possibilities for TA and TC, constantly referring to his charts.

As far as letters which often follow the letter E and which are also common in and of themselves, the letter A seemed like the best candidate, which meant that TA could stand for A. By the same logic, he thought that TC might correspond to the letter T. Further, by the way it combined with other letters, he guessed that CC might be N. Thus far the statistics seemed to be serving him well. At least, he hadn’t run into any problems.

This is what he had:

_ _E_ _EAT_AA_NT_ NTE_ _E

What had once seemed a random jumble of letters now seemed to be taking on the aura of English. Next he tried filling in the blanks based on what he knew of consonant-vowel combinations, always consulting the charts.

SHERDE ATYAALNTINTE CME

The first three letters seemed to form the word “she”, but the rest of it didn’t form words no matter how he divided it up. He tried switching the positions of the E’s, A’s, T’s, and N’s, and changed other letters around on hunches. When it became too time-consuming to write down the possibilities on paper, he tore sheets out of his notebook, first to make twenty-six cards, one for each letter. It was beginning to feel like a game.

THEYWERBORRLNBINBECME

When he hit on this combination, the first thing that popped into Ando’s mind was the phrase “they were born”. He knew the spelling was a bit off, but maybe it wasn’t too much of a stretch. And the meaning struck a chord with him somehow. But he had a feeling there was a better match out there somewhere, so he kept at the game.

After about ten minutes of playing around, Ando thought he could guess what the result would be, and he stopped. If he had a computer with him, things would be much easier, he thought. The third, sixth, eighteenth, and twenty-first letters were the same. The seventh, tenth, and eleventh were the same. The eighth, fourteenth, and seventeenth were the same. The thirteenth and the sixteenth were the same. The phrase was twenty-one letters long. If he fed those conditions into a computer it would probably come up with the answer, provided he made the proper adjustments for frequency of letter usage. But the computer would undoubtedly come up with several possible solutions. There had to be an infinite number of meaningful phrases in English that satisfied those conditions. How would he be able to tell which one was Ryuji’s message to him? Only if there was something about the right answer that would tell him at first glance that it was from Ryuji, like a signature at the end of a letter. But if there wasn’t, he’d be lost.

Ando realized he was at a dead end. He hung his head, feeling stupid that it had taken him this long to notice. Back in his student days, when his code-breaking intuition had been more finely honed, he would have caught on to this impasse in a minute or two. He’d have to change the way he thought about this. He needed a new hypothesis.

Ando was so absorbed he hadn’t noticed the passage of time. He looked at his watch now to find it was nearly one in the afternoon. He realized he was hungry. He stood up, thinking to go have lunch in the cafeteria on the fourth floor. A change of surroundings would do him good. Trial-and-error and inspiration: he was going to need both if he was going to come up with a solution. And he often got his inspirations while he ate.

The answer to this is going to have to be obvious.

He whispered it almost like an incantation as he headed for the fourth floor.

4

As he ate the set lunch, Ando gazed out the window at the trees down below, and at the kids playing on the swings and the seesaws in the park. It was past one now. The cafeteria had been packed when he arrived, but now there were empty seats here and there. The printout with the base sequence sat on the table next to his aluminum tray, but he wasn’t looking at it.

One wall of the cafeteria had floor-to-ceiling windows, so there was nothing to obstruct his view of the children playing. It was like watching a silent movie. Whenever he saw a boy of about five, Ando’s gaze was riveted to him. Without even realizing it, he’d stare at the child, and it would take him several minutes to snap out of it.

He’d come to this library with his son once. It was a Sunday afternoon two years before, when they were living in the South Aoyama condo. Ando had suddenly realized he needed to look up some data for a presentation he was scheduled to give at a research conference, so he decided to come to the library. He took Takanori along for the walk. But when they got there, a sign at the entrance said NO ONE UNDER 18 ADMITTED. He couldn’t very well make the boy wait outside while he did his research, so he gave up and they played in the park instead. He could remember standing behind the swings, pushing Takanori; he could remember the rhythm of the swing. That same swing was in motion now, under the golden gingko leaves. He couldn’t hear a sound, couldn’t even see the expressions on the faces of the children as they alternately stretched out their legs and tucked them in. But in his mind’s ear he could hear his son’s voice.

But he was getting off track. He brought his gaze back to the page and picked up his pen.

It was time to get back to the basics of code-breaking. There was no other way to crack this kind of code but to come up with several hypotheses, and then pursue each one of them in turn. When it became clear that one theory wasn’t working out, the best thing to do was abandon it with alacrity and move on to the next one. For a message of only twenty-one letters, he wouldn’t be able to rely solely on frequency charts and letter-combination rules. In fact, if the code was complicated enough to require a specific conversion key, it ran the risk of being too hard, in which case it wouldn’t be able to convey what it wanted to. No, he needed to simply work through a bunch of theories by trial and error. If an idea wasn’t working, he needed to abandon it, that was all.

There was one hypothesis that Ando thought he had abandoned too soon, though. It occurred to him that the code might be an anagram.

He returned to the reading room and once again split the forty-two letters into groups of three.

ATG GAA GAA GAA TAT CGT TAT ATT CCT CCT CCT CAA CAA CAA

He’d abandoned this approach because it resulted in triple repetitions of the same letter, a very unusual thing in English. But what if the letters themselves needed to be rearranged? He thought of an example he’d read once, where the phrase “Bob opened the door” had been encoded as OOOOEEEBBDDTPNHR. As it was, the sequence contained far too many letter repetitions to make sense as English, but when rearranged according to a certain set of rules, it yielded a perfectly normal sentence.

This might work, he thought.

But just as he was about to get to work, he stopped. He could see where this was going, too. If he not only had to decide what letters each triplet stood for, but also had to figure out how to rearrange the letters, the task suddenly became a mammoth one. And it wasn’t just a question of time. Without a key of some sort, he’d end up with the same sort of problem he had run into earlier: a plethora of possible solutions with no way to choose among them. He thought of the numbers that had led him to “ring” and wondered if they might somehow be that key, pointing him toward the right order in which to arrange the letters now. But first he’d have to figure out what letters the triplets stood for.

Another dead end.

You need a fresh angle on this, Ando told himself. He was trying to proceed by trial and error, but he felt like he was just trying the same thing over and over. Maybe he was too fixated on the idea of making each set of two or three bases correspond to one English letter.

The solution has to be something unambiguous, something that I can figure out without going through a long, complicated process.

He felt his concentration faltering, his eyes wandering away from the page. He suddenly realized he was staring at the hair of a young woman seated at the other end of the same table. With her head down like that, she looked like Mai Takano, especially her forehead.

Where is she now?

He worried about her safety, especially when he considered that she used to be Ryuji’s lover.

Could Ryuji be trying to tell me where she is with this code?

He considered the possibility for a moment, but then discarded it with a derisive laugh as being too comic-book. How adolescent, to imagine himself as the famous detective out to save the heroine from mortal danger. Suddenly the whole thing seemed foolish to Ando. This probably wasn’t a code at all. There was probably a perfectly scientific explanation for how that sequence of bases got into the virus’s DNA. And once Ando admitted that possibility, he could feel his passion for code-breaking vanish. He was just killing time anyway, right? He was working awfully hard at it.

The setting sun was turning the hairs on his upper arm golden. All the intensity he’d had that morning was gone now. He thought about moving to another seat, where the sun didn’t hit him, and started to get up. Looking around, though, he saw he was surrounded by kids, college students or high school kids studying for entrance exams, all dozing behind mountains of books. Moving wouldn’t help him get his concentration back. The entire reading room was enveloped in drowsiness. Ando sat back down where he was.

Think about it logically, he told himself. There has to be a formula.

He sat up straight. He’d been trying to assign letters of the alphabet to trios of bases, but that didn’t work out to a formula. If he could get it down to a one-to-one function, or even a several-to-one function, then the answer would become obvious. One-to-one, perhaps several-to-one … There had to be a formula like that to be discovered.

He stood up. Logically speaking, there was no other way. His intuition told him that he’d moved one step closer to a solution, and the realization blew away his torpor, spurring him to action.

He went to the natural sciences section, found a book on DNA, and started flipping madly through the pages. As his excitement mounted, his palms grew sweaty. What he was looking for was a chart that gave what amino acid each trio of bases formed.

Eventually he found one. He took the book back to his table and laid it out flat, opened to the chart, next to the coded message.

When a trio of bases, a codon, forms a protein, the codon is translated into an amino acid. The principles by which the translation takes place were contained in the chart Ando had found. There are twenty varieties of amino acid. There are four bases, meaning there are sixty-four separate combinations of three that can be formed. With sixty-four combinations standing for only twenty amino acids, it meant there was quite a bit of overlap. It was several-to-one mapping. Each trio of bases signified one amino acid or another (or a stop).

Consulting the chart, Ando wrote the abbreviated names of the amino acids below the forty-two bases of the code.

ATG | GAA | GAA | GAA
(Met) | (Glu) | (Glu) | (Glu)
TAT | CGT | TAT | ATT
(Tyr) | (Arg) | (Tyr) | (Ile)
CCT | CCT | CCT | CAA
(Pro) | (Pro) | (Pro) | (Gln)
CAA | CAA | |
(Gln) | (Gln) | |

Next he took the first letter of the name of each acid and lined them up:

MGGGTATIPPPGGG

But this meant nothing. And he was still faced with triple letter combinations. It seemed he’d have to figure out what to do with them no matter what. There had to be another interpretation. For example, maybe a third straight repetition of the same letter meant that the first two should be interpreted as a space between words.

He tried that:

MG TATIP G

That wasn’t English either.

But all the same, Ando felt he was getting somewhere. He could tell he was closing in on the solution. He didn’t know why, but he felt that any minute now he’d come up with a word that made sense.

Met, Pro, and Gln were the ones that were repeated three times. He tried writing them out a different way:

Met

Glu (x3)

Tyr

Arg

Tyr

Ile

Pro (x3)

Gln (x3)

He stared at this list for about a minute, and then he saw an English word he knew.

It occurred to him that the codons repeated three times might signify not “three” but “third”. As in, the third letter of the abbreviation for the amino acid.

In other words:

Which meant the solution was: Mutation.

Forgetting where he was, Ando let out a groan. The only answer he’d been able to come up with, as a result of logic, method, and trial and error, was this. It was a simple, clear answer, and it had to be right.

But still he had to hang his head. He knew the meaning of the English word “mutation”—that is, he knew what it meant in an evolutionary biological sense. But he had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to take it in this context.

Just what the hell are you trying to say, Ryuji? He didn’t speak the question aloud. But even in his own head, Ando could hear his voice tremble with excitement at having decoded the message.

5

He went to the hall, found a pay phone, and dialed Miyashita’s number. He doubted his friend would be in, given it was a Saturday evening in the middle of a three-day weekend, but lo and behold, Miyashita was at home with his family. Ando was able to tell him that he thought he’d deciphered the code.

Ando figured Miyashita was probably in his living/dining room; in fact, he could practically see Miyashita’s wife and children getting ready for dinner. Miyashita himself was cupping a hand around the mouthpiece to keep out the background noise but was unable to keep his halcyon home life from filtering through.

“Good show! That’s excellent. What did it say?”

Miyashita had a loud voice to begin with, and with his hand cupped around the mouthpiece it rang even louder in Ando’s ears.

“Well, it wasn’t a sentence. It was just a single word.”

“Okay, so it was only one word. What was it?”

“Mutation.”

“Mutation?” Miyashita repeated the word several times, as if trying it on for size.

“Do you have any idea what it might mean?” Ando asked.

“I don’t know. How about you? Any ideas?”

“Not an inkling.”

“Listen. Why don’t you come over?”

Miyashita lived in a tasteful condo in North Terao, in Tsurumi Ward in Yokohama. Ando would have to take the train to Shinagawa and transfer to the Keihin Express Line, but he’d be able to get there in less than an hour.

“Alright, I guess.”

“Call me when you get to the station. I know a good bar near the station where we can knock one back and talk it over.”

Miyashita’s kindergarten-age daughter seemed to have guessed he was planning to go out. She clung to his waist and whined, “Stay home, Daddy!” Out of respect for Ando, Miyashita clapped his hand over the receiver and scolded her. Ando could hear him wandering around the house with the phone, trying to get away from her. Ando felt guilty, even though it hadn’t been his idea to go out in the first place. At the same time, he felt an ineffable sense of loss and envy.

“We can do it another time if you want.”

But Miyashita wouldn’t hear of it. “No way. I want to hear all the details. Anyway, give me a call from the station, and I’ll be right there.”

He hung up, not waiting for Ando’s reply. With a sigh of despair, Ando left the library and headed for the subway station, the harmonious sounds of his friend’s household still echoing in his ears.

Ando hadn’t taken the Keihin Express Line since visiting Mai’s apartment eight days before. From somewhere near Kita Shinagawa Station the train ran on elevated tracks. He found himself looking down on houses and the neon signs. At six on a late-November evening it was already nearly pitch-dark. Turning his gaze toward the harbor he saw the Yashio high-rise apartments straddling the canal, their lit and unlit windows forming a checkerboard pattern. A surprising number of the windows were dark for a weekend evening. Ando found himself trying to find words in the patterns of light and dark; he’d had codes too much on the brain lately. On one among the forest of buildings he thought he saw the phonetic syllable ko— child?—but of course it meant nothing.

Mutation, mutation.

He kept muttering the word under his breath as he stared into the distance. He hoped that maybe the more he intoned it the clearer Ryuji’s intent would become.

In the distance he heard a foghorn. The train slid into a station and stayed there; an announcement said they were waiting for an express to pass. Ando was on the last carriage. He stuck his head out the door to see the name of the station. Sure enough, this was where Mai lived. From the train he could see the street outside the station, lined with shops, and he started looking for Mai’s apartment, relying on his eight-day-old memories. He remembered that when he’d stood in her room and looked out the window, he’d seen the Keihin Express station at right about eye level. He could see people waiting on the platform, which meant that he should be able to see her apartment from here.

But he couldn’t see very well from inside the train, so he got off. He walked down to the end of the platform and stuck his head out over the fence. The shopping street stretched east at a right angle to the train tracks. Less than a few hundred feet away, he saw a seven-story apartment building he recognized.

Abruptly, he heard the sound of the express approaching from the direction of Shinagawa. Once it had passed, the local Ando was riding would shut its doors and continue on toward Kawasaki. Ando hurriedly looked for her window. He knew she lived in room 303, and that was the third window from the right. By now the express had passed, and the bell was ringing to announce the departure of the local. Ando looked at his watch. It was just past six. Miyashita would be eating dinner with his family right now. Ando was reluctant to arrive too early and disturb their precious family time. He figured he was about thirty minutes earlier than he wanted to be, so he decided to take the next train down. He let the local leave without him.

The third floor windows were more or less level with the platform where he was standing. He looked carefully at each of them in turn, but there was no light in any of them.

So she’s not there after all.

It had been a faint hope, easily dashed. Then, just as he was about to look away, his gaze was arrested by a band of pale blue light emanating from the third window from the right. He squinted, wondering if he was imagining it, but there it was, fluttering like a bluish-white flag. It glowed so faintly, flickering in and out of view, that he would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking so carefully. He leaned even farther forward, but it was too far away. He couldn’t quite make it out.

He wanted to go back to her apartment. It should only take twenty minutes or so, which would put him right on schedule for the next train. Without hesitating another minute, he went through the ticket gate and out into the street below.

It was only when he was standing directly below her window, looking up at it, that he was able to figure out the strange light. Her window was open, and her white lace curtain had been blown outside the window, where it was dancing in the breeze, and the neon sign of a car-rental agency across the street was reflecting off the pure white of the lace. Sometimes the primary colors shining on the white cloth showed up like fluorescent paint, which explained the pale blue tinge that was just barely visible from the station. Still, there was a lot about the scene that didn’t sit right with Ando. The window had been open and the curtain half closed when he visited eight days ago, but he could distinctly remember closing the window and pulling the curtain to the side before he left. He knew he hadn’t left that window open. But there was something that bothered him even more. There was no wind to speak of on this early-winter evening. And yet the curtain had been blown beyond the railing until it was nearly horizontal. Where was that current of air coming from? He couldn’t hear any wind. The leaves of the trees lining the street weren’t moving. And yet, just above those motionless branches, the curtain danced. The scene was eerily off-kilter. But none of the passersby so much as glanced upward; nobody seemed to notice the odd phenomenon.

The only explanation Ando could think of was a mechanical one. Perhaps a powerful fan was blowing in the room, creating an artificial current flowing outward. But why? His curiosity was aroused.

He went around to the lobby. The only way he’d be able to find out would be to confront that room again.

The superintendent seemed to have the day off. The curtain was drawn at the counter of his office. The whole building felt quiet, with no signs anybody was about.

He took the elevator to the third floor and then walked toward room 303. The closer he got, the smaller and slower his steps became. His instincts were telling him to turn back, but he just had to know. The door to the outside hallway was open, and beyond it he could see a spiral staircase for emergency use. If something happens, maybe I shouldn’t use the elevator. Maybe I should just run down the stairs … Without knowing what exactly he was afraid of, Ando found himself planning an escape route.

He came to the door marked 303. Below the doorbell was a red sticker on which was written TAKANO. Everything was just as before. Ando went to ring the bell, but then thought better of it. Checking to see that the hall was deserted, he put his ear to the door. He couldn’t detect a sound, certainly not the motor of an electric fan. He wondered if the lace curtain was still waving outside the window at this very moment. From what he heard beyond the door, he had a hard time believing it was.

“Mai.”

Instead of ringing the bell, he called her name, gently, and knocked. No answer.

Mai watched the video, he reminded himself. And she, or someone, had taped over it, only two days before Ando’s visit. The fifth day of her disappearance. Who had done it, and why?

Suddenly, Ando could feel again on his skin the strange atmosphere of the room, like the inside of a body. The water at the bottom of the tub, the dripping, the feeling of something brushing against his Achilles tendon.

Ando backed away from the door. In any case, all four copies of that demon video had been wiped from the face of the earth. The crisis was over. No doubt Mai’s body would be found soon. No amount of screwing around here was going to bring him any closer to turning things around, Ando told himself as he started back toward the elevator. He was eager to get out of this place again, even at the expense of leaving without an explanation. He wasn’t sure why, but he seemed to feel like this every time he came here.

He pushed the elevator call button. While he waited, he kept repeating to himself, mutation, mutation. He wanted to keep his mind on something else, anything. The elevator was taking forever.

From the hallway to his right he heard a resounding snap as a dead-bolt clicked. Ando’s body stiffened. Instead of spinning completely around to look, he turned his head just far enough to see out of the corner of his eye. He saw the door to room 303 open slowly outward. He could see the red sticker: there was no doubt which door it was. Unconsciously, Ando pressed the elevator button again and again. The elevator was spending an agonizingly long time on the ground floor.

Seeing a figure emerge from the doorway, Ando braced himself. It was a woman in a summery green one-piece dress. She took a key from her handbag and locked the door, her face visible to Ando in profile. Ando studied the face. She was wearing sunglasses, but even so, it was clear to him that it wasn’t Mai. It was someone else. There was no reason for him to be afraid, but his body was running far ahead of his mind at this point.

The elevator doors opened and Ando slipped inside. He went to push CLOSE but accidentally pushed OPEN instead. Finally, a few beats late, the doors started to close. Then, at the last second, a white hand insinuated itself into the crack between the doors, which reacted by springing wide open again. The woman was standing there. Her sunglasses hid any expression her eyes might have had, but Ando could see that she was around twenty-five, with perfectly regular features. With one hand against the edge of the doors, she stepped smoothly onto the elevator and pressed the close button, and then the one for the ground floor. Ando inched nervously backwards until his back and elbows were pressed against the elevator wall and he was standing on tiptoe. From that position, he stared at this strange woman, this woman who had come out of apartment 303, and directed a single question at her from behind:

Who are you?

An odd smell, different from the scent of perfume, tickled his nose, and he made a face and held his breath. What could it be? It smelled like it contained iron, like blood. The woman’s hair reached down to the middle of her back, and her hand on the wall was so white it was almost transparent. A closer look revealed that the nail on her index finger was split. Her sleeveless dress was much too light for the season. She had to be freezing. On her legs she wore no stockings, and on her feet just a pair of pumps. He could see purplish bruises on her legs. This shocked him, but he didn’t know why. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t stifle the trembling that welled up from deep within him.

Shut up in that tiny box of an elevator alone with that woman, time seemed to drag for Ando. Finally they arrived at the ground floor, and Ando held his breath until the door opened. The woman walked straight across the lobby and disappeared into the street outside.

She looked to be about five feet tall, with a well-balanced figure. Her tight dress ended a few inches above the knees and showed off her derriere nicely, and she had a lithe walk. With no stockings to cover them, the backs of her legs showed up especially white, making the bruises on her calves stand out even more. The night was so cold that every other person on the street was wearing a coat, and yet off she went wearing nothing but a sleeveless summer dress.

Ando got off the elevator and then just stood there for a while, staring into the darkness after her.

6

Ando waited for Miyashita in front of the bank like he was told. It was a weekend evening, and the bank was closed. With its metal shutters down, the area in front of it looked curiously orderly. The darkness here was cozy, but as he waited for Miyashita to emerge from it, he couldn’t rid his mind of the image of that woman from apartment 303.

He tried, but she was burned onto his retinas. The whole time he’d half-sleepwalked back to the station from Mai’s building, and then the whole way here to Tsurumi Station, he’d been seeing her in his mind.

Who was she?

The most sensible explanation that occurred to him was that Mai’s sister had gotten concerned about her sibling and come to check on her apartment. Ando himself had called Mai’s mother and told her in simple terms what he’d found. If Mai did have a sister, and if she too lived in Tokyo, there wasn’t anything in the least strange about running into her at Mai’s apartment.

But there was something in the indescribable aura that the woman had exuded that negated such an easy answer. Riding in the same elevator with her had shaken Ando to the depths of his soul. She didn’t seem to be of this world, and yet, she didn’t look like a ghost, either. She’d definitely been there with him in the flesh. But Ando thought he would have had an easier time accepting her if she had been a ghost.

He saw a bead of light emerge from behind a mixed-occupancy office building and head straight for him.

“Hey, Ando!”

Ando squinted toward the light, and realized it was Miyashita, hurtling toward him on a small ladies’ bike, complete with shopping basket. He must have borrowed his wife’s bicycle.

With a squeal of brakes, he came to a stop in front of Ando. At first, Miyashita was too out of breath to speak. He just stood there, straddling the bike, elbows on the handlebars, head bobbing up and down as he gasped for air. Ando never thought he’d see Miyashita on a bike. The slightest exertion usually left him panting.

“That was quick.” Ando thought he’d be waiting for at least ten minutes. Miyashita was never early for anything.

Having parked the bike on the sidewalk in front of the station, Miyashita put a hand on Ando’s back and guided him into an alley where every building seemed to have a red lantern hanging from its eaves. His breathing had finally calmed a bit, and as they walked, he spoke to Ando.

“I think I know what ‘mutation’ might mean.”

That explained why Miyashita had come on a bike. He was dying to tell Ando his ideas.

“What does it mean?”

“Let’s have a beer first.”

As they ducked under a shop curtain, Ando noticed that it said Beef Tongue. Miyashita didn’t trouble to ask what Ando wanted; instead, the moment they were inside he called for two draft beers and an order of salted tongue. Miyashita seemed to know the proprietor. They exchanged glances of recognition as Miyashita and Ando headed for two counter seats in the back. Those were the quietest seats in the house.

First, Miyashita asked Ando what he had done to figure out the code embedded in Ryuji’s virus. Ando took the printout from his briefcase and began to explain the steps he’d gone through. Miyashita nodded repeatedly. Before Ando was half finished, Miyashita seemed to be convinced of the soundness of his method.

“It looks like ‘mutation’ has to be the answer, alright. The proof of your approach is that it yields exactly one solution.” Miyashita patted Ando on the shoulder. “By the way, I’m sure you’ve noticed what all this is analogous to?”

“What do you mean?”

Miyashita took a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. It had something drawn on it. Whatever it was, it had been done roughly, merely to illustrate a spur-of-the-moment idea.

“Have a look at this,” Miyashita said, handing him the paper. Ando took it and flattened it out on the bar in front of him.

He understood immediately. It was an illustration of how the DNA double helix inside a cell replicates itself. The strands of the double helix are complementary: when the structure of one is determined, the other one is automatically determined, too. When a cell divides, the two strands separate, each one faithfully creating next-generation copies of the original. This process of copying a gene and passing it down from parent to child can be thought of as the basics of heredity.

This was, of course, elementary to Ando. “What about it?” he asked.

“Think for a minute about the mechanism behind the evolution of species.”

There was a lot that still wasn’t known about evolution. For example, the basic concepts of Kinji Imanishi’s theory differed from those of Neo-Darwinism, but it was impossible to determine, definitively, who was right. All in all, it was “let a hundred flowers bloom” in the world of evolutionary theory; everybody, qualified or not, weighed in with strongly held opinions. But even without decisive evidence to settle the question, Ando knew that recent developments in molecular biology had come close to showing that sudden genetic mutations were a driving force in evolution.

So he answered by saying, with some confidence, “It probably begins with genetic mutation.” He felt he could guess where the conversation was going.

“Right. Mutation is the trigger that moves evolution forward. So, how do mutations happen?” Miyashita took a long swig of his beer, and then pulled a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. Before Ando had a chance to reply to his question, Miyashita was writing again on the illustration. The reason mutations occur. Ando tried to peer past his hand at the sketch.

“An error arises in the genetic code—some chance damage or displacement to the genes—and that error is copied and passed down. Thus, a mutation. Are you with me? This is the current thinking on the mechanism of mutation.”

Miyashita pointed at his diagram with his pen to emphasize his points, but this wasn’t anything that had to be explained to Ando. Genetic damage can be caused on purpose in a laboratory using X-rays or ultraviolet radiation. But, usually, mutations occur at random. The DNA sequence, which theoretically should be faithfully copied and transmitted to future generations, sometimes mutates due to a copying error, so to speak, and as enough of these mutations accumulate through replication, gradually a new species arises. A given mutation can be looked at as one small step toward evolution.

“Remember that analogy I mentioned, my friend?” Miyashita murmured. Finally it dawned on Ando what Miyashita was getting at. X was like Y. Now that Ando considered it, there was indeed a resemblance.

“You’re talking about duplicating videos, aren’t you?” Ando finally said.

“Don’t you think it’s basically the same thing?” Miyashita shoved two slices of tongue into his mouth and washed them down with beer.

Ando turned the paper over and spread it out on the counter, and then borrowed Miyashita’s pen and began to make a diagram of his own. He needed to take stock of the points of similarity. Even if it was something he thought he already knew inside out, he knew it often helped him to map a thing out on paper.

On the 26th of August, a videotape came into the world in Villa Log Cabin. On the twenty-ninth, four young people lodging in that same cabin erased part of the end of the tape—the part that said, Whoever watches this video must make a copy of it and show it to someone else within a week. The kids taped commercials over this section of the video. To the videotape, it was as if an unforeseen, random event had damaged its genetic sequence, the chain of images. An error was introduced. The tape, now containing the error, was then copied by Asakawa. Naturally, the error was copied as well. Thus far, the process was exactly like the one DNA uses to replicate itself. Not only that, but the erased section of the tape, the message, was meant to play a critical role in the tape’s ability to reproduce. In genetic terms, it was a regulator gene. Shock to a regulator gene can make it easier for mutation to occur. Had a trauma to the end of the tape caused the video to mutate?

Ando let the pen come to rest. “Hold on a second. We’re not talking about a living thing here.”

Miyashita didn’t miss a beat. It was as if he’d prepared his response ahead of time.

“If someone asked you to define life, what’s your answer?”

Life, in Ando’s view, basically boiled down to two things: the ability of an entity to reproduce itself, and its possession of a physical form. Taking a single cell as an example, it had DNA to oversee its self-reproduction, while it had protein to give it external shape. But a videotape? To be sure, it had a physical form—its plastic shell, usually black and rectangular. But it couldn’t be said to have the ability to reproduce itself.

“A video doesn’t have the ability to reproduce on its own.”

“So?” Miyashita sounded impatient now.

“So you’re saying it’s just like a virus …”

Ando felt like groaning. Viruses are a strange form of life: they lack the power to reproduce on their own. On that score, they actually fall somewhere between the animate and the inanimate. What a virus can do is burrow into the cells of another living creature and use them to help it reproduce. Just as the videotape in question had held its watchers in thrall by means of its threat to destroy them unless they copied it. The tape had used people in its reproductive process.

“But …” Ando felt compelled to object at this point. He wasn’t even sure what he wanted to deny. He just felt that if he didn’t, something catastrophic would happen.

“But all copies of the video have been neutralized.”

There shouldn’t be any more danger, in other words. Even if the videotape had been alive in the limited way a virus is, it was extinct now. All four specimens that had been introduced into the world had now been removed from it.

“You’re right. The videotape is extinct. But that’s the old strain.” The beads of sweat on Miyashita’s face grew larger with every swallow of beer he took.

“What do you mean, old?” asked Ando.

“The video mutated. Through copying, it evolved until a new strain emerged. It’s still lurking out there somewhere. And it’s taken a completely different form. That’s what I think, anyway.”

Ando could only stare open-mouthed. His mug was empty, but he wanted something stronger than beer now. He tried to order some shochu gin on the rocks, but his voice faltered and he couldn’t make himself heard to the bartender. Miyashita took over, holding up two fingers and calling out, “Shochu!” Two glasses of the liquor were set on the bar before them, and Ando immediately reached out and drank about a third of his in one gulp. Miyashita watched him out of the corner of his eyes, and then said:

“If the videotape did mutate and evolve into a new form during the process of multiple copying, then it wouldn’t matter at all to the new species if the old one died out. Think about it. Ryuji went to all the trouble of manipulating a DNA sequence so he could talk to us from the world of the dead. I can’t think of any other explanation for why he’d send us the word ‘mutation’. Can you?”

Of course Ando couldn’t. How could he? He brought the liquor to his lips time and again, but intoxication seemed still a long way off. His head was distressingly clear.

It might be true. Ando found himself gradually leaning toward Miyashita’s viewpoint. Ryuji probably meant the word “mutation” as a warning. Ando could almost see Ryuji’s face as he sneered, You think you’re safe. You think it’s extinct. But you won’t get off that easy. It’s mutated, and a new version is rearing its head.

Ando was reminded of the AIDS virus. It was thought that several hundred years ago some preexisting virus mutated and became what is now known as the AIDS virus. The previous virus didn’t infect humans, and may well have been harmless. But through mutation, it took on the power to wreak havoc with the human immune system. What if the same thing happened with this videotape? Ando could only pray that the opposite happened, that a harmful thing was now innocuous. But the facts suggested otherwise. Far from becoming harmless, the mutated videotape had turned into something that killed anybody who watched it regardless of whether or not they made a copy of it. If that was any indication, the thing was getting even nastier. And with Ando unable to form any conclusions yet about Mai’s disappearance, that left Asakawa as the only anomaly.

“Why is Asakawa still alive?” Ando asked Miyashita the same thing he’d asked him the day before.

“That’s the question, isn’t it? He’s the only clue as to what that videotape has turned into.”

“Well, actually … there is one other person.”

Ando gave Miyashita a brief rundown on Mai: how the video had made its way through Ryuji to her, how there was evidence that she’d watched it, and how she’d been missing for nearly three weeks now.

“Which means there are two people who saw the tape and are still alive.”

“Asakawa’s still alive, although just barely. I’m not sure about Mai.”

“I hope she’s alive.”

“Why?”

“Well, why not? We’re better off with two clues than with one.”

He had a point. If Mai was still alive, they might be able to figure out what she and Asakawa had in common. It might give them an answer. But for his part, Ando just hoped she was safe.

PART FOUR

Evolving

1

Monday afternoon, November 26th

Ando had finished an autopsy on a boy who’d drowned in a river, and now he was filling out a report while listening to the boy’s father explain the circumstances.

Ando was trying to ascertain the boy’s date of birth and his movements on the day of the accident, but the man’s answers were vague and confused, making Ando’s job difficult. Sometimes the father would gaze out the window when the conversation flagged, and sometimes Ando caught him stifling a yawn. He looked sapped of strength, drowsy. Ando wanted to finish up as quickly as he could and release the man.

Then the M.E.’s office rang with a sudden commotion. They’d just been notified by the police that another body was coming in, that of an unidentified female. At the moment, they were simultaneously preparing to treat the body and to dissect it. Dr Nakayama, an older colleague of Ando’s, would be in charge of the autopsy. The police had said she’d been discovered in an exhaust shaft on the roof of an office building. This meant the team would have to do two autopsies back to back, so assistants and policemen were running in and out now getting ready.

“The body has arrived, Doctor.”

The autopsy assistant’s voice rang out. Ando jumped involuntarily and looked toward the sound. Ikeda, the assistant, was standing by the half-open door, facing Nakayama. For some reason, though, Ando felt as though he were the one being summoned.

“Alright,” said Nakayama, getting slowly to his feet. “Get it ready, would you?” Nakayama had joined the M.E.’s office two years before Ando; he belonged to the Forensic Medicine Department of Joji University Medical School.

The assistant disappeared, and in his place a policeman came in and approached Nakayama. After a couple of words of greeting, the cop pulled up a chair and sat down next to Nakayama.

Ando looked back down at his own work. But he could overhear the policeman’s conversation with Nakayama behind him, and it interested him. He could only catch fragments, words here and there. The officer seemed to be explaining the circumstances in which the body had been found.

Ando stopped writing and listened. The words “unidentified” and “young female” cropped up again and again.

Nakayama asked, “But why was she on the roof?”

“We don’t know why she went up there. Maybe she was thinking of jumping.”

“Was there a note of any kind?”

“We haven’t found one yet.”

“I imagine, from inside an exhaust shaft nobody would have heard her cries for help.”

“It’s not a residential area.”

“Where is it?”

“East Oi, in Shinagawa Ward. It’s an old fourteen-story building along the Shore Road.”

Ando looked up in shock. He recalled the view from the Keihin Express tracks. Beyond the residential district, one could see the Shore Road where it passed through a district lined with warehouses and office buildings. It was just a stone’s throw from Mai’s apartment. An unidentified young female on the roof of a building on the Shore Road …

“I think that’ll do. If I have any more questions I’ll give you a call.” Ando thanked the boy’s father and wrapped up what he was doing. He was too interested in the conversation behind him to be able to put together a report right now. There were still some things he knew he needed to find out, but he decided he’d take care of them later.

Ando slipped his papers into a folder and got to his feet. Nakayama and the policeman stood up at the same time. Ando went over and clapped a hand on Nakayama’s shoulder. Bowing slightly to the officer, whom he recognized, Ando said, “The female you’re doing next—she hasn’t been identified?”

The three of them left the office and headed down the hall toward the autopsy room.

It was the policeman who answered Ando. “That’s right. She didn’t have anything on her to help us peg her.”

“How old is she?”

“She’s young, twenty or thereabouts. She’d be quite a looker, if she weren’t dead.”

Twenty or thereabouts. Mai was twenty-two, but she could easily pass for a woman in her teens. Ando could feel himself starting to choke.

“Any distinguishing features?”

He’d know immediately if he saw the body. But he needed to prepare himself first. Of course he’d much rather hear something that proved it wasn’t her. Then he could leave without having to check.

“What’s the matter, Dr Ando?” Nakayama grinned. “Are you more interested now that you know she’s a knockout?”

“No, it’s not that,” said Ando, refusing to play along. “There’s just something that bothers me about it.” Seeing his expression, Nakayama quickly wiped the leer off his face.

“Now that you mention it, there was something strange about her. Dr Nakayama should hear this, too.”

“What’s that?”

“She wasn’t wearing any underwear.”

“Really? Top or bottom?”

“She was wearing a bra, but no panties.”

“Were her clothes in disarray when she was found?”

Ando and Nakayama were both thinking the same thing: maybe she’d been raped on the rooftop, and then thrown down the exhaust shaft.

“No disturbance of her clothes, and at least on visual inspection, no evidence of rape.”

“What was she wearing?”

“A skirt, knee socks, blouse, sweatshirt. A normal outfit. You might even say conservative.”

But she hadn’t been wearing panties. November, and she was wearing a skirt and no panties. Was that normal for her?

“Excuse me, but I’m not sure exactly what you mean when you say she was found in an exhaust shaft on a roof,” Ando said. He was having trouble imagining the scene.

“We’re talking a shaft about ten feet deep and about three feet wide, next to the machine rooms on the roof. It’s usually covered with wire mesh, but it’d been partially removed.”

“Enough for her to fall through.”

“Probably.”

“Is it the kind of place you just trip and fall into?”

“No. It’s not easy even to get close to. First of all, the door from the elevator hall to the roof is locked.”

“So how did she get there?”

“There’s a ladder up to the roof from the top of the fire escape. It’s built into the outside wall. We think she went up that. It’s the only way she could have gotten up there.”

Ando didn’t see what she could have been doing up there.

“About the underwear. Do you think she could have taken it off herself, intentionally, inside the exhaust shaft?” The shaft was three yards deep. If she’d fallen, she would have hurt herself. Maybe she’d taken off her panties to use as a bandage. Or maybe she thought she could somehow use them to help her escape.

“We looked for them. In the shaft, and all over the roof. And then, just to be sure, we checked around the perimeter of the building, too.”

“Why the perimeter?” Nakayama interjected.

“We thought maybe she’d wrapped them around a piece of metal or something and tossed them. Inside the shaft, there was no chance anybody’d be able to hear her cries for help. The only way to let the outside world know where she was would have been to throw something down that might catch people’s attention. But that turned out to be impossible, too.”

“And why’s that?”

“From the bottom of that shaft, there was no way she could’ve thrown anything past the fence on the roof.”

Assuming it had something to do with the angle, Ando didn’t press the point further.

“So, it’s most natural to assume that she wasn’t wearing any panties when she left.”

“At the moment, that’s the only explanation we can think of.”

They stopped in front of the autopsy room.

“Would you like to join me, Dr Ando?” asked Nakayama.

“Maybe just for a little while.” It was an honest enough answer. If it wasn’t Mai, he’d sigh with relief and leave. And if it was her … he’d probably leave anyway, entrusting the autopsy to Nakayama. In any event, the thing to do now was check to see if it was her.

Beyond the door, he could hear water gushing from the faucet, as usual. As he listened for other sounds, Ando was suddenly overcome with the urge to flee. His stomach churned, and his extremities quivered. He prayed it wasn’t her. It was all he could do.

Before Ando was really prepared, Nakayama opened the door and led the way into the autopsy room. The officer was next to enter. Ando didn’t go in, but only peered through the open doorway at the naked, pale corpse on the operating table.

2

He’d had a sneaking suspicion that the day would come, but seeing the young woman’s body up close sent a deathly chill through his body nonetheless. Ando finally approached the table in Nakayama and the officer’s wake. He looked at the face from every angle, still unwilling to recognize it. There was mud, dried and hardened, in the hair on the back of her head. Her ankle was twisted unnaturally; the skin over it showed the only discoloration on her body. He figured the ankle was broken, or at least badly sprained. No signs that she’d been strangled. In fact, there were no external wounds at all. The body was well past the rigor mortis stage. Over ninety hours had elapsed since death.

Ando knew the healthy glow her flesh had displayed in life. How many times had he fantasized about holding her and feeling that skin against his? Now he’d never have the opportunity. Now she was a wasted, waxen corpse. The woman he’d been about to fall in love with now lay cruelly exposed on the table, changed into this. Ando couldn’t bear the reality, and anger welled up in him.

“Goddamnit,” he sighed. Nakayama and the officer turned simultaneously to look at him.

The policeman couldn’t hide his astonishment. “Do you know her?” Ando gave a barely perceptible nod.

“I’m sorry,” Nakayama mumbled, not being able to tell exactly how close Ando had been to the woman.

The policeman spoke next, slowly and deliberately. “Would you know who we should contact?” Behind the polite tone, Ando could hear a hint of expectation. If he knew who she was, it would save the officer from the drudgery of having to identify her.

Wordlessly, Ando took out his planner and paged through it. He was sure he’d written her parents’ phone number in it. He found the number, wrote it on another piece of paper, and handed it over. The officer read it back to Ando.

“You’re sure about this, then?” The man’s tone was almost obsequious.

“I’m sure. It’s Mai Takano, alright.”

The policeman rushed out of the room to call Mai’s parents and notify them of her death. Ando imagined the scene at their house: the phone ringing, her mother picking up the receiver, an ostentatious voice on the other end identifying itself as Officer So-and-so from the police department, then, Your daughter is dead … Ando shuddered. He felt sorry for her mother, about to experience that moment. She wouldn’t collapse, she wouldn’t break down crying. The world around her would simply recede.

He couldn’t stand to be in the autopsy room a moment longer. When the scalpel entered Mai’s body, the air would be filled with an odor much worse than what greeted them now. And when the organ wall was cut so that the contents of her stomach and intestines could be examined, the stench would be positively horrific. Ando knew how surprisingly long olfactory memories could last, and he didn’t want this one. He knew very well that it was the fate of all living beings, no matter how pure and beautiful, to finally leave an unbearable stench. But just this once, he felt like giving in to sentimentality. He wanted to keep his memories of Mai from being sullied by that smell.

He whispered in Nakayama’s ear, “I’m going to leave now.”

Nakayama gave him a suspicious look. “You don’t want to participate, after all?”

“I still have some work I need to finish up in the lab. But I want to hear the details later.”

“Understood.”

Ando put his hand on Nakayama’s shoulder and whispered to him again. “Pay attention to the coronary artery. Make sure you get a tissue sample from it.”

Nakayama was puzzled that Ando had a hypothesis regarding the cause of death. “Did she have angina?”

Ando didn’t answer. Instead, he squeezed Nakayama’s shoulder and, with a look that warned against asking why, said, “Just do it, alright?”

Nakayama nodded twice.

3

Back at the office, Ando pulled out the chair from the desk next to Nakayama’s and sat down in it backwards, hugging the backrest. He waited like that for Nakayama to finish his paperwork.

“You seem rather concerned,” Nakayama said, looking up from the report he was writing.

“Sort of.”

“Want to see the autopsy report?” Nakayama indicated a sheaf of documents in front of Ando.

“No. All I need is a summary.”

Nakayama turned to face Ando.

“Let me get right to the point, then. The cause of death was not a heart attack due to blockage of the coronary artery.”

So the hypothesis Ando had shared with Nakayama before the autopsy had been wrong. Ando fell silent for a time, wondering how to interpret this. So Mai didn’t watch the video after all? Perhaps the tumor didn’t get big enough to block the flow of blood.

He decided he needed to check further. “So there was no sarcoma in the coronary artery?”

“None that I could see.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Well. I’ll have to wait for the tissue sample to come back before I can say for sure.”

For the moment, the telltale tumor seemed to be missing from Mai’s artery.

“In that case, what killed her?”

“Probably the cold. She was in an extremely weakened state.”

“How about injuries?”

“Her left ankle was broken, and she had lacerations on both elbows. Most likely from when she fell. There were particles of concrete ground into the wounds.”

So she’d fallen in feet first, broken her ankle, and was unable to get out of there. The shaft was a yard wide and over three deep, too deep for her to escape on her own. She would have been stuck there, with only rainwater to quench her thirst. Even so, she would have survived for several days.

“I wonder how long she was alive in there.” It wasn’t really a question. He was merely thinking aloud as he imagined her fear and despair at being left all alone at the bottom of a hole on a rooftop.

“I’d estimate about ten days.” Her stomach and intestines were empty, and her subcutaneous fat was largely depleted.

“Ten days.” Ando took out his planner. Assuming she survived for ten days in the exhaust shaft, and assuming five more for her body to be discovered, she would have vanished on or about the 10th of November. Ando’s date with her had been scheduled for the ninth; the fact that she hadn’t answered the phone all day that day pushed the date of her disappearance back at least that far. Indeed, her mailbox had contained newspapers going back to the eighth. Which meant that something had happened to her on the eighth or ninth to make her leave her apartment.

Ando marked those two dates on his calendar.

Something had happened to her between the eighth and tenth of November.

He tried to imagine himself in her place. When she was found, she had on a skirt and a sweatshirt. Her attire suggested she’d just stepped out for a moment, maybe for a breath of fresh air. But, strangely, she hadn’t been wearing any panties.

He thought again about the things he’d felt when he visited her apartment. They were still vivid in his mind. That had been the 15th of November. If the results of the autopsy were to be believed, at that point she was already trapped on the roof, waiting to be rescued. In other words, she’d been gone from her apartment for several days. Yet, Ando was sure he’d sensed something in the apartment. It should have been empty, but he had definitely felt something that breathed.

“Oh, and …” said Nakayama, holding up an index finger as if he’d just remembered something important.

“What?”

“You were pretty close to her, weren’t you, Dr Ando?”

“I wouldn’t say close. I’d only met her twice.”

“Oh. When had you last seen her?”

“The end of last month, I guess.”

“That would be about three weeks before her death.” Nakayama looked as if he were holding back something important. Ando fixed his older colleague with a stare that said, Come on, say it.

“She was pregnant, wasn’t she?” Nakayama finally blurted out. For a moment, Ando wasn’t sure who he was talking about.

“Who was?” he said.

“Mai, of course.” Nakayama was keeping a close eye on Ando’s confused reaction. “Didn’t you know?”

Ando didn’t answer.

“You don’t mean to tell me you overlooked the obvious signs of a woman nearing term.”

“Nearing term?”

Ando could only parrot Nakayama’s words. He looked at the ceiling and tried to recall the exact lines of Mai’s figure. He’d seen her once in mourning clothes and once in a bright dress. Both outfits had been tight around her waist and hips, showing off her slim contours. Her wasp waist had been one of her most attractive features. But it wasn’t just that. Ando had sensed something virginal about her. And now Nakayama was trying to tell him she’d been pregnant? Nearing term, in fact?

Not that he’d ever observed her that closely. In fact, the more he thought about her the blurrier his image of her became. His memory was hazy. But no, it couldn’t be. There was no way she’d been nine months pregnant. For one thing, he’d seen her corpse with his own eyes. Her belly had been so flat it almost touched her spine.

“She couldn’t have been nearing term.”

“Some women are like that, though. They don’t get very big even in the last trimester.”

“It’s not a question of degrees, though. I saw her dead body myself.”

“You misunderstand,” Nakayama said, waving his hands. Then he carefully arrayed the evidence before Ando.

“The uterus was greatly enlarged and she had wounds where the placenta had been torn away. The vagina was full of a brownish secretion. And inside the vagina I found tiny pieces of flesh that I believe are from an umbilical cord.”

You’re out of your mind, thought Ando. But he couldn’t imagine an experienced forensic surgeon like Nakayama making such an elementary mistake. Those three pieces of evidence presented by Mai’s body could only lead to one conclusion: she’d given birth shortly before falling into the shaft.

Assuming the delivery was fact, could it explain her movements? Perhaps, on or about the seventh, she had gone into labor, and had accordingly headed for an obstetrician. She’d given birth, spent five or six days in the hospital, and then checked out on the twelfth or thirteenth. Maybe the baby had been stillborn. In her grief, the mother had wandered about until she found herself on the roof of the building, where she’d fallen into the exhaust shaft. She’d survived for ten days. And then this morning, her body had been discovered.

It worked out, time-wise. The birth offered a plausible explanation for her disappearance. And naturally she would have kept it all secret from her mother.

But Ando didn’t buy it. Leaving aside the fact that, even allowing for individual variation, she just hadn’t looked pregnant, he couldn’t forget the impression their first encounter had made on him.

He’d first laid eyes on Mai right in the same office. Just before he was to dissect Ryuji, she’d been escorted in by a detective who wanted her to tell Ando all she knew about the circumstances of Ryuji’s death. She had tried to sit down, then lost balance and steadied herself with a hand on a nearby desk. Ando had known at a glance that she was anemic. He had picked up the faint scent of blood on her and deduced that her anemia was due to her menstruating. His conclusion had been bolstered by her embarrassed expression as she apologized: “Sorry, it’s just that …” Their eyes had met, and they’d had a moment of nonverbal communication.

Please don’t worry. It’s just the monthly thing.

Gotcha.

Mai had informed him only with her eyes, afraid to create a fuss given the location. The memory of how she’d made her meaning clear without words was still strangely vivid for Ando. He’d performed Ryuji’s autopsy on the twentieth of the previous month. That meant Mai had been menstruating less than a month before supposedly giving birth. It was impossible, of course.

Maybe I misunderstood the whole thing. All along I thought there’d been a silent exchange, but maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe I got it all wrong. But the more he thought about it, the less he was able to believe it. He was confident he’d taken her meaning.

However, the facts revealed by the autopsy flatly contradicted his view of the matter.

Ando stood up and said, pointing to the autopsy report, “Would you mind if I made a copy of this?” He wanted to take it home and read it carefully.

Nakayama held the stack of papers out to him. “Go right ahead.”

“Oh, and one more thing,” Ando added. “You took a blood sample, I assume?”

“Of course.”

“Can I have a little of it?”

“A little, sure.”

Ando realized that he had to confirm immediately whether or not Mai had been carrying the smallpox-like virus. If he found it in her blood, it would be proof that she’d watched the video. He needed to determine if the tragedy that had befallen her had its source in the video or was the result of something entirely unrelated. At the moment, all he could do was amass data, little by little. If he could illuminate the video’s role in this, perhaps he’d come one step closer to solving that “mutation” riddle.

4

Soon after he’d encountered Mai’s corpse, Ando was notified of the death of Kazuyuki Asakawa. As Asakawa’s condition had deteriorated, he’d been transferred from Shinagawa Saisei Hospital to Shuwa University Hospital, but he’d died almost immediately. Ando had been notified about the change in Asakawa’s condition, but he hadn’t imagined the patient would go so quickly. According to the attending physician, the death came about as the result of an infection, and the patient had passed away peacefully, as if from old age. Asakawa had never regained consciousness after losing it in the accident.

Ando went to the Shuwa hospital and told the doctors in charge of the case to look out for something during the autopsy: a sarcoma blocking the coronary artery, a smallpox-like virus in the tumor. Ando figured these points were crucial in terms of forecasting the future. He made sure the attending physician understood the importance of the situation and then left.

As he walked back to the station, he felt renewed disappointment that Asakawa had never awoken. He’d possessed essential information, and he’d died having imparted it to no one. If only Ando knew what Asakawa knew, he’d have a much better idea what to expect. The future was maddeningly opaque now. Ando didn’t know what to prepare for.

The biggest thing worrying Ando right now was whether Asakawa’s death had been bad luck or a necessary outcome. The same question applied to Mai, for that matter. Both of them had wasted away and died after accidents—a traffic accident in Asakawa’s case, a fall in Mai’s. Their deaths seemed to have something in common. But Ando had no way of knowing if it had anything to do with their having watched the video.

As he walked, he suddenly realized that the building where Mai’s body had been found was not far from the hospital he’d just left. He’d been wondering why she had chosen to climb to the roof of a shabby old office building; now was his chance to have a look and maybe find out. He needed to go soon, before any of the evidence disappeared.

He decided to go back to Nakahara Street and catch a cab. He’d be there in ten minutes.

After stopping once on the way to buy some flowers, Ando had the taxi let him off in front of a warehouse belonging to a shipping company. All he’d been told at the M.E.’s office was the name of the company and the instruction that the building was to be found to the south of the warehouse; he didn’t know the name of the building itself.

Standing on the sidewalk, he stared south at a building. There was no mistaking it. It had fourteen stories, and an exposed staircase spiraled up the narrow space between its outer wall and the warehouse.

Ando moved toward the front door and then stopped. He walked around to the outside staircase. He thought he’d try to figure out how Mai had gone up. She could have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor, gone out to the fire escape landing from there, and climbed the ladder to the roof, or she could have taken the fire escape stairs all the way up from the street to the ladder. At night, the front door was probably locked and protected by a metal shutter, so she’d have had to go in through the service entrance, which was surely guarded. And if it was too late, even the service entrance might have been locked, the guard gone. If she’d gone up at night, she must have used the fire escape.

But there was a gate at the edge of the second-floor landing, and it looked impassable. Ando climbed up to it to take a look. It was an iron gate, with a knob. He tried to turn it; it wouldn’t budge. It had to be locked from the other side to prevent entry. The gate, however, was only six feet high or so, and a light and agile person could scale it without much problem. Mai had been on the track team in junior high; she’d have been able to get over it with little trouble.

Next to him on the landing was a door leading into the building. He tried turning the knob, but, unsurprisingly, this door too was locked. He wondered what time of day Mai had come here. If it had been day-time, she probably would have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor. If it was night then she must have climbed over the gate and taken the stairs.

Ando returned to the front door of the building, entered, and went to the elevators. There were two of them, and both were waiting at the ground floor. Each floor of the building seemed to be occupied by a different business or businesses, whose names were all written, floor by floor, on a board by the elevators. But nearly half of them had been crossed out. They must have moved without the landlord being able to find new tenants to take their places. The building was quiet and felt rather abandoned.

On the fourteenth floor he stepped off the elevator into a dark hallway, where he started looking for stairs to the roof. After walking the length of the hall once, he hadn’t found anything. Mai would have had to go outside. Indeed, there was a door at the end of the hall, and Ando opened it and stepped outside. The wind off the ocean was so strong that he had to turn up the collar of his coat. It was only here, on the top floor, that he realized how close Tokyo Bay was. There was the Keihin Canal, beyond it Oi Pier, and then finally the Tokyo Harbor Tunnel, which was quickly swallowed up by the sea. From his vantage point, the two black holes of the tunnel entrance looked unnatural. He thought they looked like the nostrils of a drowned man floating face-up in the water.

From here, he also realized why the fourteenth floor had seemed so cramped despite the size of the building. The architects had made the square footage of this story about half that of the other floors, using the rest of the space for the outdoor balcony that encircled the building on all four sides. Stepping out, Ando saw that the landing for the fire escape was actually a corner of this balcony. But Mai’s body had been found yet another level up.

Right next to the door there was a ladder built right into the wall, leading up. It looked to be about ten feet to the top.

Trying to imagine what Mai could have been feeling, Ando put the flowers in his mouth, grasped a rung on the ladder, and started climbing.

What made her want to come up here anyway? wondered Ando, as he pulled himself up rung by rung. It wasn’t because she wanted to jump. That was clear enough from the way the building had been designed. A jump from the roof would only have landed her a dozen feet below on the balcony. To fall to the ground, she’d have had to leap from the fire escape landing on the fourteenth floor instead.

It wasn’t the kind of roof you went up to for the view, either. The water-resistant paint was peeling and cracking, and it gave way unpleasantly under his feet as he walked across it. There was no railing around the perimeter, and he wasn’t going near the edge even if there was a balcony not far below.

There were concrete protrusions lined up at regular intervals, and they were shaped like the tetrapode used as breakwaters on beaches. Ando had no idea what they were for, but they were just the right height for him to sit on. Instead of going to the edge of the roof, he climbed up on top of one and had a look around. It was just before five o’clock, and it was the time of year when the sun set earliest. Lights had come on already in the surrounding buildings and the shops down below. Across the canal he could see a red Keihin Express train going by on the elevated tracks. It was actually an express train; it sped past the station platform that seemed to hover in the air. He knew that platform. He’d been on it a couple of times to visit Mai’s apartment. Swathed in a diffuse white light, it was relatively empty for the time of day.

Using the station as a reference point, he tried to locate Mai’s apartment. He found it only about four hundred yards away as the crow flies; it was right in front of his nose, so to speak. His gaze followed a path along the shopping street, turning right on the Shore Road. Another hundred yards brought him back to the building where he now stood.

Why this roof? There were any number of other tall buildings in the neighborhood. In fact, she could have gone up to the roof of the very building she lived in. He looked around until he found it again. Perhaps because the rooms were all low-ceilinged studio apartments, the seven-storied building was less than half the height of the one atop which Ando now stood. Still, Mai’s had a flat space on the roof where one could walk around. At the same time, it was right on the shopping street, so it was surrounded by tall buildings. In particular, there was a nine-story commercial building on its west side from which the roof was easily observed. That was what distinguished the building Ando was on now. Located on a stretch of the Shore Road full of warehouses, there weren’t many tall buildings in its immediate environs. No fear that someone might be looking down on you from above.

Ando descended from the concrete protrusion and went to stand between two equipment houses that jutted upward. One was for elevator machinery, while the other seemed to house a ventilation system. There was a large water tank on top of the southern machine house.

Between them was a deep groove that functioned as an exhaust shaft. Walking carefully, testing each step, Ando progressed until he stood right by it. It was cordoned off with a steel mesh, but this had holes in it. The maintenance crew must have decided to ignore the holes on the assumption that nobody but them ever came up here. Ando couldn’t bring himself to step any closer. Just one foot on the lip of that dark rectangular crevice and already he felt he’d be sucked in. But he leaned forward and, with trepidation, tossed the bouquet he was holding through one of the holes in the meshing. He pressed his palms together and prayed for her eternal repose. If a technician hadn’t come up here to inspect the elevator the day before, Mai would have lain undiscovered for even longer.

Night came quickly. The rooftop was veiled in darkness now, and the ocean breeze swirled in the narrow space Ando occupied, surrounded by concrete on three sides. He shivered. He ought to have come earlier in the day, when the sun would have been directly overhead. Yet, he knew he wouldn’t have the courage, even in broad daylight, to peer into the shaft, this hole which had had a dead body in it until just the day before. And it wasn’t just the thought of the corpse that was covering him in goosebumps. The idea of awaiting death down in that hemmed-in place filled him with terror. How many days had Mai spent down there, having twisted her ankle in the fall and unable to stand, staring at the small slice of sky just three yards above her, gradually losing hope, until she died? It must have felt like being sealed alive in a coffin floating in the air. Ando felt short of breath. The situation was too unnatural to call it an accident.

From inside one of the machine houses he heard a groan that sounded like cable being reeled in by a winch. One of the elevators was apparently on the move. Ando began taking small steps backward to get out from between the machine houses. Their walls were rough and blackened in places, with the paint chipping off, testifying to how seldom people came here.

He got away as fast as he could, rushing to the ladder and climbing down to the balcony of the fourteenth floor. The bottom rung was three feet above the surface, so he had to jump. Ando missed his footing on the landing. The back of his leg went momentarily numb; he crouched over and found himself at eye level with the bottom rung of the rusty ladder.

He went back inside and headed for the elevators. One of them was slowly making its way upward. He pushed the button for that elevator and waited in front of it.

As he waited, he tried to figure out why Mai had gone up to the roof of this building. He considered the possibility that she was being pursued. The warehouse district would be mostly deserted at night, and perhaps, walking along, she realized she was being stalked. She saw those stairs outside, with the iron gate. Judging that she could climb it but not the stranger, she might indeed have gone for them. Perhaps the person managed to scale the gate after all, and Mai had no place to go but up. Her first mistake, as it were, put her in a cul-desac. The ladder leading to the roof would have been her last lifeline. The bottom rung was a yard off the floor. Hoping that her assailant would give up at last, Mai had climbed to the roof. Well? Had the stranger been able to follow her up? Ando tried to imagine what sort of person would have a hard time with a ladder, set perpendicular to the ground, and the image that came to his mind was of some four-footed beast.

The elevator doors opened as the thought occurred to him. The elevator was not empty. Ando had been staring at his toes; he raised his eyes to meet those of a young woman. She stared at him as if she’d been lying in wait for him. There could be no mistake, he’d encountered this woman before, under similar circumstances. She was the one who had come out of Mai’s room and shared an elevator with him. The cracked nails, and that odor, the likes of which he’d never smelled before—he couldn’t forget her if he tried.

Now he stood directly in front of her, facing her, and he couldn’t move a muscle. He was confused. His mind couldn’t process what he was seeing and his body escaped his command.

Why. Is. She. Here? Ando flailed about for a reason, which he was doomed not to find. The absence of any conceivable reason was what truly frightened him. As long as an explanation could be found, terror could be dispelled.

As they stared at each other, the elevator doors started to close between them. The woman reached out a hand and held them open. The motion was smooth, dexterous. She wore a blue polka-dot skirt, beneath which he could see her legs, bare, unstockinged despite the early winter weather. It was with her right hand that she had stopped the doors; in her other was a small bouquet of flowers.

Flowers! Ando’s sight rested on the bouquet.

“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” She had spoken first, and her voice drew him in. It was deeper than her willowy proportions had led him to expect.

Ando’s mouth hung open until he finally managed to dredge some words out of the parched depths of his throat. “Are you Mai’s sister?”

That was what he wanted her to be. If that was who she was, it made sense: her emerging from Mai’s room, her coming to this building with a bouquet. Everything would stand to be explained.

The woman made a slight, indecipherable movement with her head. It wasn’t quite a nod, nor quite a shake. It could have been affirmation or denial, but Ando decided she’d intended a yes.

She’s Mai’s older sister, come to leave flowers on the roof of the building where her sister died. It was most natural, quite fitting. People only ever believe what they can understand.

The moment he got that straight, all of his previous cowering struck him as funny. What had he been so afraid of? He couldn’t make sense of his own psychology. The first time he’d met her, this woman had given him a strong otherworldly impression. But now that the riddle was solved, that impression faded away like a lie, while her beauty alone came to dominate his view of her. Her long, slender nose, the gentle, round line of her cheeks, her ever-so-slightly slanted eyes with their heavy eyelids. They didn’t stare directly at him; rather, they seemed intentionally unfocussed. Within them lurked a seductive glow.

Those eyes. When he’d encountered her the other day at Mai’s apartment, she’d been wearing sunglasses. This was the first time he’d been able to see her eyes. Their gaze, full upon him, exerted a strong gravitational pull. He found it hard to breathe, and his chest pounded.

“Excuse me, but …” From the tone of her voice and her expression it was clear that she wanted to know his relationship with Mai.

“My name is Ando. Fukuzawa University Medical School.” He knew this didn’t exactly answer her question.

The woman stepped out of the elevator and, still holding the door open, motioned him in with her eyes. He had to obey. Her elegant movements left him powerless to refuse. As though enchanted, Ando entered the elevator in her place. They stared at each other again from their reversed positions.

“I’ll call on you soon with a request.”

She said this just before the door closed. Ando heard her clearly and there was no mistaking her words. The doors as they closed were like a camera shutter, removing her from his field of vision but leaving her image imprinted on Ando’s brain.

As the elevator descended slowly, Ando found himself overcome with uncontrollable lust. Mai had been the object of the first sexual fantasies he’d had since his family had ceased to be, but this was far more intense. He’d only been with the woman for a few seconds, and yet he could remember every detail of her body, from the curve of her ankles, bare above her pumps, to the corners of her eyes. And his image of her remained sharp, even as the moments passed. Flustered by the sudden flood of sexual desire, Ando rushed out of the building, hailed a taxi, and hurried home.

In the cab, he thought about the last words she’d said.

I’ll call on you soon with a request.

What was her request? Where did she mean to “call on” him? Was that supposed to be some sort of social pleasantry?

He’d rushed out of the building and into a taxi as if pursued by her gaze. He regretted not asking her for her name and number at least. Why hadn’t he? He ought to have waited for her to come down from the roof. But he hadn’t. Or rather, he couldn’t. It was as though his every movement had been controlled by that woman. He had acted against his will.

5

A week had passed since Mai’s autopsy. It was December, and the weather had suddenly turned wintry. Ando had never liked winter—he much preferred late spring to early summer—but ever since the death of his son he’d stopped paying much attention to the changing seasons. The morning’s drastic chill had forced him, nonetheless, to recognize the advent of winter. On the way to the university he’d stopped in his tracks several times to go back and get a sweater, but in the end he’d simply continued on his way. He didn’t feel like going all the way back, and the walking was warming him up.

His apartment in Sangubashi was close enough to the university that he could walk to work if he felt like it. And though he usually went by train, the transfer he had to make despite the short distance never went smoothly. As a result, and because he knew he needed the exercise, Ando sometimes ended up half-walking, half-jogging to and from work. The day had started out as one of those days, but halfway to campus he changed his mind and caught the JR train at Yoyogi Station. He wanted to get to the university sooner than later.

With just two stations to go, he didn’t have the time to organize his thoughts in the rocking cradle of the train carriage. This morning he was supposed to look at samples of Mai’s cells and Ryuji’s through the electron microscope. Miyashita was going to be there, as well as Nemoto, an electron microscopy expert. The thought of what lay ahead made Ando want to hurry.

Up until then, the smallpox-like virus hadn’t been found in anybody who hadn’t watched the video. There had been no reports of the virus being spread by physical contact. In Mai’s room he’d found a copy of the video, already erased. These two facts meant that if Mai’s blood cells revealed the presence of the virus, it would be safe to conclude that she had actually watched the tape. The calamity that had befallen her would have been the video’s doing.

He was so deep in thought that he almost missed his station, but he managed to jump off the train just before the doors closed. He allowed himself to be swept along with the rest of the crowd toward the ticket gates. The university hospital stood in all its grandeur right outside the station.

Ando poked his head into the lab, and Miyashita turned his ruddy face toward him.

“Finally he shows up!”

Miyashita and Nemoto had spent the previous week making preparations for today’s session with the electron microscope. A virus wasn’t something one could just pop into a microscope and take a gander at when the mood struck. There were a lot of things that had to be done first, applying a centrifuge, cell sectioning, and so on. The procedure was beyond the skill of a non-specialist like Ando. Given all the preparation it took, Miyashita could hardly wait for the moment. He’d been up since early morning getting ready.

“Lower the lights,” Nemoto said.

“Yessum!” replied Miyashita, who quickly turned them off. Although they’d completed the base sequencing some time ago, this was their first chance to see the virus directly, with their own eyes. The virus that had been found in the blood of Ryuji and possibly Mai.

Nemoto went into the darkroom alone and fixed the ultrathin section on the holder. Ando and Miyashita sat in front of the console, staring at the screen in utter silence. Though it was still blank, both men’s eyes were active as they chased mental images of what they would soon be seeing.

Nemoto came back and turned off the last overhead light. All set. Holding their breath, the three men watched the screen. Gradually, as the ultrathin section of cellular matter was illuminated by an electron beam, a microscopic world began to open up before them.

“Which one are we looking at?” Miyashita asked Nemoto.

“This is Takayama’s.”

The green pattern on the screen before them was a universe unto itself. A twist of a dial sent their field of view racing across the surface of the cells. Somewhere in there lurked the virus.

“Try increasing the magnification,” Miyashita instructed. Nemoto responded immediately, taking the machine up to x9000. Another pass over the surface gave them a clear view of the dying cells. The cyctoplasm gleamed brightly, while the organelles had collapsed into black clumps.

“Home in on the cytoplasm on the top right and increase the magnification.” As he spoke, Miyashita’s face caught the reflection of the dying cells’ mottled appearance and had the dull glow of a bronze bust. Nemoto increased the magnification to x16000.

“More.”

x21000.

“There. Stop.” Miyashita’s voice rose, and he shot a glance at Ando, who leaned forward so that his face was right near the screen.

There they were … swarms of them!

The strands writhed around in the dying cells like so many snakes, biting and clinging to the surface of the chromatin.

A chill ran down Ando’s spine. This was a new virus, the likes of which had never been seen before. He’d never seen the smallpox virus through an electron microscope, yet he did know it from medical textbooks. The differences between that and this were obvious at a glance.

“Oh my God.”

Miyashita sat there sighing, his mouth hanging open.

Ando understood the workings of the virus: how it was carried along inside the blood vessels to the coronary artery, where it affixed itself to the inner wall of the anterior descending branch and caused mutations in the cells of that area until they formed a tumor. What he couldn’t understand was how this virus he was looking at now could have been created via the victim’s consciousness. This virus didn’t invade the body from outside. Rather, it was born within the body as a result of watching a videotape; it was a function of the mind. That went beyond mysterious and Ando was dumbfounded. It represented a leap from nothingness to being, from concept to matter. In all earth’s history such a thing happened only once, when life first came to be.

Does it mean, then, that life emerged due to the workings of some consciousness?

Ando’s thoughts were veering off track. Miyashita brought him back with his next comment.

“‘Ring’, anyone?”

The ring virus (21000x)

Ando returned his gaze to the electron microscope screen. It didn’t take long to figure out Miyashita’s remark; he was angling for something with which to compare the shape of the virus. Some specimens were twisted and some were u-shaped, but most of them looked like a slightly distorted ring, the kind one wears on a finger. “Ring” hit the nail on the head. There was even a protrusion at one point that resembled nothing so much as a stone on a setting. The screen looked like a view of a floor across which tangled-up rings and snakes and rubber bands had been strewn indiscriminately.

It fell to Ando and Miyashita, who discovered it, to name this strange new virus, and Miyashita’s comment was by way of a suggestion. The ring virus.

“How about it?”

Miyashita wanted Ando’s opinion. The name was perfect, but Ando felt uneasy for precisely that reason. It was too perfect and made him wonder if a God-like being were making itself felt. How did all this begin? Ando had no trouble remembering: it was with the numbers on the newspaper that had been sticking out of Ryuji’s sutures. 178, 136. They’d given him the English word “ring”. Then he’d found that astonishing report, and it was entitled Ring. And now, this, which he beheld—a virus shaped like a ring. It was as if some will, changing form with each rebirth as it strove to grow into something ever larger, had chosen this shape as its symbol.

The microscopic universe contained kinds of beauty that came from cyclic repetition, but what Ando saw now was an ugliness that mirrored such beauty. And it wasn’t just the abstract knowledge that this virus brought evil to humanity that made it appear ugly to Ando. What he felt was closer to an instinctive hatred of serpentine creatures. Any human being shown the image, with absolutely no prior knowledge, would probably react with revulsion.

As if to prove this, Nemoto, who had little idea of the origin of the virus, was visibly shaken. His hands on the controls trembled. Only the machine remained unaffected, emotionlessly spitting out negatives. Once he’d taken seven photographs, Nemoto gathered them up and went to the darkroom. While he waited for them to develop, he set the ultrathin section from Mai’s blood cells in the holder. Then he resumed his place in front of the console and flipped the switch without ado.

“Next we’ll be looking at Takano’s.”

They gradually increased the magnification, just as they’d done with Ryuji’s sample. They had no trouble finding what they were looking for. Without question, it was the same virus. They were writhing just like the other ones.

“Identical,” Ando and Miyashita stated at the same time. Neither of them could see anything to prevent them from reaching that conclusion. But Nemoto, the electron microscopy expert, was more sensitive to minor inconsistencies.

“That’s strange.”

Miyashita watched him tilt his head and stroke his chin, then asked, “What is?”

“I’d rather not say anything until I get a chance to compare the photographs.”

Ever cautious in all things, Nemoto hesitated to draw a conclusion based solely on his impressions of Ryuji’s virus. Science was about proof, not impressions, was his motto. That aside, Nemoto could swear he saw a quantitative difference. It wasn’t a variation in the overall number of specimens of the virus present in each sample. What struck him was that, in Mai’s sample, there were more broken rings. In Ryuji’s sample, too, of course, some of the virus specimens had come undone, making u-shapes, or snake coils, but most of them were whole and looked like rings. In Mai’s case, more of the rings were broken, and stretched out like threads.

Broken ring virus (100000x)

In order to confirm his suspicions, Nemoto homed in on a likely-looking specimen and adjusted the focus until the specimen filled the screen. If the normal virus looked like a ring, then this specimen looked like a ring which had broken just on one side of the stone. The “stone” and its “setting” now looked like a head with a flagellum wiggling behind it.

The result was a shape that Ando, Miyashita, and Nemoto were quite familiar with. All three men were reminded of the same thing at the same time, but none dared say it.

6

Nemoto’s first impression was borne out when he compared the photos he’d taken of the ring virus. In any given area of Mai’s sample, there were more virus specimens that looked like broken rings or threads than in a comparable area of Ryuji’s sample. Statistically speaking, roughly one in ten of Ryuji’s viruses were broken, while in Mai’s case, the distribution was around fifty percent. Such a manifest difference was unlikely to occur without a reason. Ando requested that samples from all the videotape’s victims be put under the electron microscope.

It wasn’t until the Friday after the New Year’s holiday that all the results were in.

Glancing out the window in the lab, he could see that some of the previous night’s snowfall still lingered among the dead trees of the Outer Gardens of Meiji Shrine. When he grew tired of analyzing the photos, Ando went to the windowsill to feast his eyes on the scene outside the window. Miyashita never rested though, carefully comparing the photos spread out on the desktop.

Including Asakawa and Mai, eleven people had died after coming into contact with the video. The same virus had been found in each victim’s blood, and there was no more doubt the virus had been the cause of death. But regarding broken rings, the victims fell into two groups. In Mai’s case and Asakawa’s, broken rings made up fully half of what was found in their blood, while in everybody else’s samples, only one specimen in ten was broken. It was not a particularly surprising result. It seemed that the fate of the infected person hinged on the degree of presence of the broken-ring virus.

The statistics indicated that once the broken-ring specimens exceeded a certain percentage, the host was spared death by cardiac arrest, though it wasn’t clear yet exactly what that percentage was.

Mai and Asakawa had watched the video. The ring virus had appeared in their bodies. Up to that point, they were no different from the nine other victims. But something had caused some of the viruses to come apart into a thread shape, and the broken particles had surpassed a certain level. And that was why, even though they had watched the video, neither Mai nor Asakawa had died of a heart attack. The question was, what had caused the viruses in their bloodstreams to come apart? What set them apart from the other nine?

“Some form of immunity?” Ando wondered aloud.

“That’s a possibility,” Miyashita said, cocking his head.

“Or maybe …” Ando trailed off.

“Maybe what?”

“Is it something about the virus itself?”

“I lean more in that direction personally,” said Miyashita, propping his feet on the chair in front of him and sticking out his great belly. “Thanks to the mischief of the four kids who watched it first, the video was doomed to extinction in the not-too-distant future. To find a way out, the virus had to mutate. All of this is just as Ryuji told us in his message. Now, then: how exactly did it mutate, and what did it evolve into? The answer to that, I believe, lies in the ring virus that Mai Takano and Kazuyuki Asakawa carried. In its irregular shape, to be precise.”

“A virus borrows its host’s cells in order to reproduce itself, by definition.”

“Right.”

“And sometimes that reproduction takes place at an explosive rate.”

This, too, was common knowledge. One only had to think of the Black Death that ran rampant in the Middle Ages, or the Spanish influenza of modern times, to find examples of a virus proliferating wildly.

“So?” Miyashita urged Ando to continue.

“So think about it. The video tells people, ‘Make a copy within a week or you die.’ Even if the viewer did so, that’s just one tape turning into two. That’s a pretty slow growth rate. Assuming the subsequent viewers repeat the process, that’s still only four tapes after a month.”

“You’ve got a point, I guess.”

“That’s nothing to be scared of.”

“It’s not very virus-like, you mean. Right?”

“If it doesn’t increase at a geometric rate, then it’s hardly spreading at all.”

Miyashita fixed Ando with a glare. “What exactly is it you’re trying to get at?”

“It’s just that …”

Ando wasn’t sure himself what he wanted to say. Was he trying to put a worse spin on things? Certainly there were cases when a single virus spread virtually overnight to thousands, tens of thousands of victims. That was the raison d’être of a virus, to replicate itself simultaneously in large numbers. Having copies made of a videotape, one at a time, was simply too inefficient. The results said as much; only three months after its birth, the tape was now extinct. Unless it had been reborn through mutation …

“It’s just that I have a bad feeling about this.”

Ando looked again at the photos of the ring virus. Vast numbers of them, piled up on one another. When several specimens overlapped, they looked like unspooled, tangled-up videotape. The psychic Sadako Yamamura, on the brink of death, had converted information into images, leaving some sort of energy at the bottom of that well. The video had been born as a result of the detonation of that energy. It wasn’t matter that was spreading, but information, as recorded on videotape and DNA.

He couldn’t shake the suspicion that some terrible mutation was taking place somewhere he wasn’t aware of. Ando had visited Mai’s apartment, and he’d also been to the rooftop exhaust shaft into which she’d fallen. He’d sensed the strangeness of her room and had felt the weirdness of that roof underfoot. Maybe that was why he sensed danger bearing down on him more than Miyashita seemed to. He could almost hear the writhing, of something, accelerate under the earth.

“Do you sense some catastrophe?” Miyashita still sounded pretty relaxed.

“It’s just that it’s all so grotesque.”

Ever since Ryuji’s autopsy, Ando had been plunged into the world of the bizarre. Concrete felt soft and clingy under his footsteps, the scent of life pervaded an uninhabited room. One inexplicable phenomenon after another. And then there was the thing Mai had given birth to; the very thought made him shudder. Mai had been dead for a month and a half, and they still had no clue concerning whatever it was she had delivered. Ando doubted that what she’d had was just a cute little baby.

“Don’t be so gloomy. Even if it did manage to mutate, there’s no guarantee that it succeeded in adapting to the environment.”

“So you think the mutated virus might be extinct, too?”

“We can’t rule out the possibility.”

“Ever the optimist.”

“Recall the Spanish influenza virus, the one that swept the world in 1918. They found the same virus in America in 1977, but nobody died then. The first time around it slaughtered between twenty to forty million people worldwide, and sixty years later, it was basically harmless.”

“I guess a virus can weaken through mutation.”

It was true that since the discovery of Mai’s body, no more suspicious deaths had come to light. He’d kept a close watch on the papers and worked his contacts in the police department, but so far the net had come up empty. It was possible that Miyashita was right and that the newly reborn, mutated virus had failed to adapt to its environment in the short period it had to do so, and had lost its ability to spread. Maybe it was extinct.

“Any idea what we should do next?” asked Miyashita, kicking the floor and twirling in his chair.

“Well, there’s one thing I’ve let slip.”

“What’s that?”

“When and where did Mai get her hands on the videotape?”

“Does it matter?”

“It bothers me. I want to nail down the date.”

Ando felt he should have checked on this. He’d been too busy analyzing the virus and forgotten. Now, it looked to be the only thing left to do. He was virtually certain that the tape Mai had watched was Ryuji’s copy, but he didn’t know how or when it had passed into her possession.

7

Finding out proved surprisingly easy.

Assuming that Ryuji’s effects, including the tape, had been shipped to his parents’ house within two or three days after his demise, Mai could only have obtained it there. So Ando called Ryuji’s family.

When Ryuji’s mother heard that Ando was an old college friend of her son’s, she suddenly became very friendly. Ando asked whether or not a woman named Mai Takano had called on her.

“Yes,” the woman replied. She was even able to ascertain the date by looking at a receipt in her household-finance ledger. She’d bought a shortcake to offer Mai. November 1, 1990. Ando jotted down the date.

“By the way, why exactly did Mai visit you?”

Ryuji’s mother explained that Mai had been helping Ryuji with a work he’d been serializing by making clean copies of each installment, and that a page had been found missing.

“So she visited your house to look for the missing page, is that it?”

Ando jotted down the name and publisher of the magazine that had been running the series.

And then he hung up. He didn’t want to be asked how Mai was doing these days. If he told Ryuji’s mother that Mai was dead, he’d be sure to face a barrage of questions, and he simply didn’t have the kind of answers that would satisfy her.

Ando sat there with his hand on the receiver long after he’d broken the connection.

On November 1st, Mai visited Ryuji’s family home. While searching for the missing manuscript page, she found the videotape. She took it home with her. She probably watched it that very day.

He started to put together a hypothesis based on a November 1st starting point. It took a week for the virus to have its full effect. So something should have happened to her on November 8th. Ando’s date with her had been for the ninth. He’d called her several times that day, with no answer. It made sense. She’d either been in her room and unable to pick up the phone or already in the exhaust shaft.

He started to calculate backwards. The autopsy had been able to tell them how long she’d been alive in the shaft, and how long she’d been dead before she was discovered. She had died, according to the evidence, on or about the 20th of November, and she had fallen into the shaft about ten days before. It was perfectly in line with these projections to posit that the virus had worked its changes on her on the eighth or ninth, leading to her fall into the shaft. Thus it was probably accurate to assume that she’d watched the video on November 1st.

The next thing Ando did was to head to the periodicals section of the library to look for the magazine that contained Ryuji’s articles. He found it. And in the issue dated November 20th, he found the last installment of Ryuji’s work, a piece entitled The Structure of Knowledge. This told Ando something.

Mai managed to transcribe Ryuji’s article and get it to his editor.

This meant that in the time between her watching the video and her death, there was at least one person she’d definitely had contact with.

He put in a call to the editorial office of the monthly that had run the article and made an appointment with the editor in charge of Ryuji’s work. Ando decided he needed to visit the publisher himself; something made him want to actually meet the guy, rather than just talk to him over the phone.

He took a JR train to Suidobashi. From there he walked for about five minutes, looking for the address, before he spotted the eleven-story building that housed the offices of Shotoku, Ryuji’s publisher. At the reception desk he asked for Kimura, an editor with the monthly Currents. Ando looked idly around the lobby as he waited. Kimura sent word that he’d meet him in the reception area right away. Ando was relieved that the editor had readily agreed to receive a total stranger. On the phone he’d sounded like a man in his twenties, but on the ball. Ando found himself imagining a handsome young man in wire-rims.

Instead, he saw a tubby man in check pants and suspenders, whose bald head glistened with sweat in spite of the season. In every way he failed to match Ando’s image of an editor at a major publishing house, especially one who worked for a magazine that chronicled the latest developments in contemporary thought.

“Sorry to keep you waiting.” The man grinned broadly and offered Ando his business card. Satoshi Kimura, Executive Editor. He looked much older than he sounded. He was probably pushing forty.

Ando produced his own card and said, “Thanks for seeing me. Can I buy you a cup of coffee somewhere?” He meant to leave the building.

“There aren’t any decent cafés around here. But we have a lounge, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s fine.”

Ando decided to follow Kimura’s lead, and together they boarded an elevator.

The lounge was on the top floor of the building, overlooking the garden in the courtyard. It was quite well-appointed; as Ando sank into a sofa, he looked around and spotted faces that he recognized from newspapers and magazines. It seemed the lounge was a popular place for editors to meet with their writers. Several people were there with manuscripts in hand.

“We certainly lost a good man.”

At these words, Ando’s wandering thoughts snapped back into focus, and he looked at Kimura’s oily face directly across the table.

“It so happens that Ryuji Takayama and I were classmates in med school,” Ando said, watching for a reaction. He’d lost count of how many people he’d drawn out with this line so far.

“Is that a fact? So you knew Professor Takayama.”

Kimura glanced at the business card in his hand and nodded, seemingly reassured of something. The card bore the name of the university Ando worked for. The man had probably recalled that Ryuji had attended that same university’s medical department.

“What’s more, I performed his autopsy.”

Kimura’s eyes grew wide. He stuck out his chin and emitted a queer little cry.

“Well, now, that’s …”

Kimura lapsed into silence, staring at Ando’s hands, which held a coffee cup. He seemed interested in the fingers that had sliced Ryuji open.

“But I didn’t come here today to talk about him,” Ando said, putting down the coffee cup and bringing his hands together on the table.

“Why have you come?”

“I’d like to ask you a little about one of his students. Mai Takano.”

At the mention of her name, Kimura’s expression softened, and he leaned forward. “What about her?”

He doesn’t know, Ando intuited. But he had to find out sooner or later.

“Are you aware that Mai is dead?”

Kimura let out an even more curious groan and almost jumped out of his chair. It was almost comical how dramatically his features conveyed his emotions; he was the real Man of a Thousand Faces. He ought to audition for a sit com, Ando thought.

“You must be kidding!” Kimura cried. “Mai can’t be dead?”

“She fell into an exhaust shaft on a roof last November and died there.”

“I guess that explains why I haven’t been able to get in touch with her.”

Ando felt a certain closeness to the man, who’d been in the same boat. He had no idea if this Kimura was married or not, but he was willing to bet that the guy had had at least a slight crush on Mai.

“Do you remember the last time you saw her?” Ando asked quickly, loathe to give the man any time to wallow in sentiment.

“We were just beginning to proof the New Year’s issue, so it must have been the beginning of November.”

“Would you happen to know the exact date?”

Kimura took out a datebook for the previous year and started leafing through it.

“November the second.”

November 2nd. The day after Mai had visited Ryuji’s parents’ house and taken the videotape home with her. Mai had probably already watched the tape by then.

“Do you mind if I ask where you met?”

“She called me to say that she’d finished copying the article. I immediately went to pick it up.”

“Went where? To her apartment?”

“No, we met at a café in front of her station. Like we always did.” Kimura seemed to want to stress that he’d never set foot inside her apartment, knowing she lived alone.

“When you saw her, did she seem different in any way?”

Kimura looked puzzled. He couldn’t tell what Ando meant by the question. “What do you mean?”

“Well, unfortunately, there’s still some doubt surrounding the cause of her death.”

“Doubt, you say?”

Kimura folded his arms and thought for a while. The thought that what he said might influence Mai’s autopsy results made him suddenly cautious.

“Any little bit could help. Did you notice anything?”

Ando smiled, trying to put the man at ease.

“Well, she did seem a bit unlike herself that day.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“She looked pale. And she held a handkerchief over her mouth, like she was fighting back nausea.”

The nausea caught Ando’s attention. He remembered the brown clump of what had seemed to be vomit that he’d found on Mai’s bathroom floor.

“Did you ask her about her apparent nausea?”

“No. I mean, right away she told me she wasn’t feeling well because she’d pulled an all-nighter writing out Professor Takayama’s manuscript.”

“I see. So she said it was from lack of sleep.”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you anything else?”

“I was in a hurry, you see. I thanked her for the manuscript, we had a brief discussion about the book to come, and then I said goodbye.”

“Book. You mean Ryuji’s.”

“Right. From the very beginning we ran the series of articles on the premise that we’d publish them in book form eventually.”

“When’s this book coming out?”

“It’s scheduled to appear in bookstores next month.”

“Well, I hope it sells well.”

“It’s difficult material, and we’re not getting our hopes up. I must say, though, that it’s a really good book. Just superb.”

After that, the conversation got sidetracked into reminiscences of Ryuji, and Ando found it hard to get back on topic. By the time he’d managed to drag Mai back into the discussion so they could talk about her relationship to Ryuji, the hour Kimura had promised Ando was up. Ando hadn’t really learned anything of value yet, but he decided he’d best not overstay the editor’s welcome. He doubtless needed to see this man again, and he wanted to leave a good impression. So he thanked Kimura and took his leave.

As Ando stood up, he happened to notice three people entering the lounge. There were two men and a woman, and Ando had seen each of them before. The woman was a nonfiction writer who’d vaulted to bestseller status when one of her books had been turned into a movie. Ando had seen her face on TV and in the weekly news magazines several times. One of the men was the director who’d adapted her work to the screen. But the one who really caught Ando by surprise was the fortyish man who came in with the director. The name was on the tip of his tongue. He wracked his brains. The man had to be a writer or something. As they passed, Kimura spoke to the man.

“Hey, Asakawa. Glad to hear it’s going forward.”

Asakawa.

It was Junichiro Asakawa, Kazuyuki’s older brother. Ando had visited him at his apartment in Kanda in November to pick up the Ring floppy disk. At the time, Ando had been so happy to get his hands on the disk that he hadn’t said more than a perfunctory goodbye. But when he’d sent the disk back later, he’d included a very polite thank-you note.

He also remembered that the business card Junichiro had given him had borne the name of this publishing house. Whether by mere chance or thanks to the connection, Ryuji’s book was being published by his best friend’s brother’s company.

Noticing Ando, Junichiro seemed to flinch slightly in shock.

“Well, nice to see you again …” Ando bowed, thinking to thank the man again for his assistance as well as utter a proper New Year’s greeting. But Junichiro averted his eyes and spoke almost before Ando could get a word out.

“Excuse me.”

With that he sidestepped Ando and ushered the writer and the director to an empty table. Ando could tell when he was being given the brush-off. He glanced again at Junichiro, now seated at the table, but the man was deep in conversation with the director now and didn’t look his way. He was blatantly ignoring Ando.

He searched his memory for an explanation of Junichiro’s rude behavior. Ando thought he’d observed the man well enough in their previous contacts. He couldn’t remember having done anything to merit this treatment. He didn’t get it. Shaking his head at the man’s unnatural attitude, Ando followed Kimura out of the lounge.

8

That evening when he got back to his apartment, Ando filled the tub for the first time in ages. While his boy had been alive, they’d taken a bath together every night. Since he’d been on his own, drawing a bath seemed too much trouble, and he’d gotten in the habit of showering instead.

After his bath, Ando took his copies of the photos from the electron microscope and hung them on the wall. He stepped back and had a good look at them.

One wall of his apartment was taken up with bookcases, but the wall over his bed was bare and white, like a screen. He’d hung the photos there like X-rays on a light box, in ascending order of magnification: xl7000, x21000, xl00000. The photos were of the virus isolated from Mai’s blood. Without taking his eyes off them, Ando stood back a few steps. In one area the ring viruses were piled up on top of each other and looked like a spiral staircase. He concentrated, trying to notice something, anything he might have missed before.

He turned off the overhead light and shone a lamp directly on the photos. Under illumination, it looked as though huge specimens of the virus were crawling around on the white wall. He turned the lamp on a x42000 photo showing broken rings that were stretched out like threads. These showed up in great numbers in Asakawa’s and Mai’s blood, but hardly at all in Ryuji and the others. In Mai’s case, there were no signs of any narrowing in the internal membrane of the coronary artery. In Asakawa’s case, however, the beginning of a lump had been observed. In other words, even Mai and Asakawa showed slightly different symptoms.

Why was her artery undamaged? Ando turned his attention to this problem. The thread-shaped virus he was looking at now had not attacked Mai’s coronary artery, the main target in everybody else. Why was she an exception?

Something tugged at his memory. He opened his planner to where he’d jotted down Mai’s movements for late October and November and held it under the light. He’d first met her on October 20th at the M.E.’s office, just before Ryuji’s autopsy. Mai hadn’t looked well that day. Ando had formed a guess as to why: she was menstruating. It was just an intuition, but he was confident.

He returned his gaze to the photos on the wall. He looked at a xl00000 shot of the virus in thread form. He tried to remember his first impression upon seeing it at the university.

Hadn’t it reminded him of something, with its oval-shaped head and wiggling flagellum? Swarms of them had been swimming around in Mai’s veins, but they hadn’t attacked her coronary artery.

What did they attack?

His head felt hot. A tiny hole slowly opened, letting in light. It was one of those moments when something previously hidden suddenly begins to heave into view. Ando looked at his planner again, at the date on which he supposed Mai had watched the videotape. The evening of November 1st. The twelfth or thirteenth day after her period.

He took one step closer to the wall, and then another. Toward the ring viruses lashing their flagella.

That’s it. They look exactly like sperm swimming toward the cervix.

“Sperm?” he said aloud.

She’d have been ovulating that day.

A woman usually ovulates roughly two weeks after her period, and the egg only stays in the oviduct a maximum of twenty-four hours. If Mai had had an egg in her oviduct the night she watched the video …

The ring virus must have abruptly found another outlet and switched its target from her coronary artery to her egg. Gasping for breath, Ando sat down on the edge of the bed. He no longer needed to look at his planner or the photos. It was just possible that Mai had been ovulating when she watched the videotape. It had been her luck—misfortune, rather—to watch it on the one day of the month. And that was why she was the exception. Of all the females who had watched the tape, she’d been the only one ovulating.

And …

When he tried to deduce what must have happened, Ando’s spine froze. But he couldn’t prevent himself from arriving at the obvious conclusion.

Countless particles of the ring virus would have invaded Mai’s egg and been incorporated into its DNA.

They fertilized her egg.

Although it had evolved, the ring virus’s basic nature had not changed. In exactly a week, the fertilized egg would have reached its full growth and been expelled from Mai’s body. That had to be why the autopsy found evidence that Mai had just given birth.

But what did she give birth to?

Ando was trembling violently now. He was remembering a certain touch on his foot.

Whatever it was … it touched me.

When he’d visited Mai’s apartment, her supposedly empty room, he was sure he’d felt the breath of a living being. Hunched over at an unnatural angle to examine her toilet, he’d felt something soft caress his Achilles tendon where his sock had slipped down. He was sure that whatever had touched him was what Mai had given birth to. Something small enough to escape his notice when he looked around. Maybe it was early enough in its growth stage then to hide in her wardrobe. Whatever it was, he could still feel its touch as it swept across his skin.

Ando’s shivering didn’t stop. Feeling the need for another soak in the tub, he took off his clothes. He hadn’t pulled the plug, so the tub was still full of water. He ran the hot water until the bath temperature was higher than it had been for his first soak. After lowering himself into the tub, he poked his foot above the waterline and twisted it so he could see his Achilles tendon. He rubbed it. It felt perfectly normal, but that didn’t comfort him any.

He brought his foot back into the water and just sat there hugging his knees. After a while, a question came to him. He now knew why Mai hadn’t gotten a heart attack, but what about Asakawa?

“He was male,” Ando murmured.

But maybe he’d given birth to something after all.

Perhaps the water was too hot. Ando suddenly felt thirsty.

PART FIVE

Foreshadowing

1

January 15th, Coming of Age Day, was a holiday, which made it a three-day weekend. On the first day of the long weekend, Ando got a call from Miyashita asking if he wanted to go for a drive. The invitation was like a port in a storm for Ando, who’d been wondering how he was going to get through three workless days all alone. He wasn’t sure if he liked the way Miyashita asked him—like he was hiding something—but Ando had no reason not to go along. He said yes, then asked, “Where are we going?”

“There’s something I want to show you,” was all Miyashita would say. Ando figured his colleague had his reasons, and so refrained from pressing the matter. He’d get the answer out of Miyashita when he saw him.

Miyashita picked Ando up at home. As soon as he climbed in the car, Ando asked again where they were going.

“I can’t tell you. Now stop asking questions.”

And so even as they departed, their destination was unknown to Ando.

The car left the No. 3 Tokyo-Yokohama Freeway for the Yokohama New Road. They seemed to be heading for Fujisawa. They couldn’t go too far and still expect to keep it a day trip. Maybe as far as Odawara or Hakone, possibly the Izu peninsula, but no farther than Atami or Ito. After several guesses at the destination of the mystery tour, Ando decided to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Just before they were to merge with traffic, they came to a halt. The entrance to the Yokohama New Road was always jammed, and was especially so today, at the start of the long weekend. In an effort to keep Miyashita from getting too bored at the wheel, Ando decided to tell him the hypothesis he’d come up with a few days ago as to why Mai alone had displayed no abnormalities in her coronary artery. It was Ando’s theory that Mai had been ovulating the day she watched the video, and that the ring virus had shifted the focus of its attack to her egg. Then, just before falling into the rooftop exhaust shaft, Mai had given birth to some unknown life form. Something that had only gestated for a week. If she’d just given birth, that explained why Mai hadn’t been wearing any panties.

Miyashita heard him out and then was silent for a time. His striking round eyes seemed to be staring straight ahead, but then he changed lanes with an agility that belied his lax expression, poking his way into the passing lane.

“I thought more or less the same thing when we looked at Mai’s virus under the electron microscope,” said Miyashita, paying no attention to the blaring horns behind him.

“What do you mean?”

“The broken viruses looked familiar. After a while it hit me that they looked like spermatozoa.”

“You too?”

“Nemoto said the same thing.”

“So all three of us got the same impression.”

“Yes. Sometimes you have to pay attention to intuition.” Miyashita flashed Ando a grin, turning his attention from the road ahead.

“Watch where you’re going!” As the brake lights of the car ahead drew closer, Ando clenched his leg muscles.

“Don’t worry, we’re not going to end up like Asakawa,” Miyashita said, trying to look unconcerned as he stepped on the brake. But his front bumper was almost touching the car in front of them. Wiping away a cold sweat, Ando wondered if there was something wrong with Miyashita’s depth perception. Driving like that they were sure to get in an accident sooner or later.

“Speaking of Asakawa, it’s still a mystery as to why he didn’t die of a heart attack.”

“Right. Men don’t ovulate.”

“But maybe there was something physically different about him, just as with Mai.”

“The virus probably found another exit.”

“Exit?”

“A better way to spread and flourish.”

Once they passed the exit for the Hodogaya bypass, the traffic snarl eased somewhat, and they made better time. No doubt the road signs had inspired Miyashita to use the word “exit” as he had. He continued.

“You know, it’s up to us to figure this out.” All trace of his customary nonchalance was gone from his voice.

“Believe me, I’m trying.”

Miyashita changed the subject. “What did you do over New Year’s break?”

“Nothing. Just lay around the apartment.”

“Hmph. I took my family down to a fishing village at the southern tip of the Izu peninsula. We stayed at a little B&B that wasn’t even listed on the travel brochures. Guess why I picked such a remote place? Well, one of my favorite novels is set in the village, and I’d always wanted to visit it. In the book it said that if you gaze out over the ocean at the horizon from that village, you see a mirage. I believed it.”

Ando couldn’t figure out where Miyashita was headed. He just nodded and listened.

“I know it’s insensitive to say this to you, but family’s a really wonderful thing. We could hear the surf from that inn, see, and it woke me up in the middle of the night. And as I gazed at the faces of my wife and daughter, it sank in just how dear they are to me.”

Ando knew all too well the dearness of family. He tried to imagine a New Year’s holiday with family in a southern Izu fishing village, where one could see mirages … Alone, the loneliness would be overwhelming, but the presence of loved ones would make the experience heartwarming. Ando began to wallow in thoughts of his own broken home, but Miyashita wouldn’t give him time.

“My wife’s a real looker, isn’t she?”

When Ando replied, though, he wasn’t recalling Miyashita’s wife, but his own. “Absolutely,” he nodded, thinking of how guileless and fresh she’d looked when they’d first met.

“Me, I’m short, fat, and ugly. And her! She’s beautiful, and she’s got a great personality. I’m a lucky man, and I know it.”

Miyashita’s wife was taller than him, and she looked just like a very popular actress. Next to her, Miyashita definitely seemed some inferior breed. But he was talented, and if he just kept it up, there was no way he wouldn’t get tenure at their med school. Ando laughed ruefully. There was nothing inferior about that.

“So I don’t want to die. I think I’ve been too optimistic. See, all along I’ve been at this case as a disinterested observer. In fact, I’ve enjoyed wondering where it might all lead.”

Ando had been taking things a bit more seriously. Still, his, too, was the standpoint of the disinterested observer. Even if he failed to solve the case, he wasn’t afraid of coming to any particular harm as a result. In that, his situation was fundamentally different from Asakawa and Ryuji’s.

“Me, too.”

“But I realized that maybe I’ve been underestimating the danger.”

“Realized when?”

“After the holiday, when we got back from Izu.”

“Did something happen there?”

“There was no mirage.”

Ando frowned. Miyashita wasn’t making sense.

“Just because of that?”

“Have you ever visited the setting of a novel?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Ando figured that most people felt, at least once, the urge to visit the setting of a favorite book.

“How did it go?”

“Like, ‘Well, I suppose this is it.’”

“Was it different from what you’d expected?”

“Most of the time you’re bound to feel let down.”

“The setting as you’d imagined it from reading the novel was different from the way the place looked in reality.”

“I don’t imagine it could ever really be the same.”

“It was the same for me in Izu. That’s the thing. I recognized the place from the descriptions in the book. But it didn’t feel right and finally wasn’t what I’d imagined. I didn’t get to see the mirage.”

He didn’t say so aloud, but Ando thought that Miyashita’s grievance was incredibly juvenile. A novelist inevitably sees things through his own filter and describes them accordingly. That filter is unique to that author, and when readers imagine a landscape for themselves based on it, the result can’t help but be at odds with reality. There’s no way to accurately convey a scene to another person without a camera or a video camera. Language has its limits.

Suddenly bringing his face close to Ando’s, Miyashita said, “On the other hand, what if …”

“You can talk and watch the road at the same time, can’t you?” Ando pointed straight ahead, and Miyashita slowed down and moved over into the other lane.

“Do you remember when you read Ring?”

Ando could recall the exact date. It was the day after he’d borrowed the disk from Asakawa’s brother, Junichiro. Ando had snatched each page up out of the printer and read it eagerly.

“I can even tell you the day. November 19th.”

“I only read it through once.”

The same was true for Ando. He’d read it once through and hadn’t looked at it again. “So what?”

“In spite of that, I remember the scenes, vividly. I still think about them sometimes.”

Ando found himself agreeing with this, too. The events and places described in Ring were extremely vivid; it was as if they’d burrowed into the folds of his brain. If he tried, he could recall each scene with great clarity. It was a highly graphic report. But then again, what of it?

Clueless as to what Miyashita was getting at, Ando didn’t respond.

“I suddenly wondered how accurately the report was communicating the scenes it describes.”

Miyashita’s expression was still strangely peaceful, given the gravity of what he’d just uttered.

Now Ando grasped the nature of Miyashita’s concern. What if the settings they had imagined while reading Ring differed not in the slightest from reality? Was that even possible?

“What if it was …” Ando’s throat was dry as he uttered the words. The heater kept the car at a comfortable temperature, but it also dried out the air.

“Well, I thought we’d better check and see.”

“I get it. So that’s why you’ve dragged me along.”

Ando finally knew their destination. They were headed for the South Hakone-Atami area, where many of the events narrated in Ring had taken place. They were going to see if the appearance of the various locations matched what they’d seen in their minds’ eyes. And of course, two people were better than one for this. Ando and Miyashita could both have a look, discuss the sight, and hopefully come to a precise assessment.

“At first, I wasn’t going to tell you until we got there. I didn’t want you to be prejudiced.”

“I’ll be alright.”

“I forgot to ask. You don’t happen to have been to South Hakone Pacific Land before, right?”

“Of course not. I mean, have you?”

“I’d never even heard of the place until I read that thing.”

So neither of them had been there. But when he closed his eyes, Ando could see in his mind the cabins that comprised Villa Log Cabin, scattered across a gentle slope. It was in cabin B-4 that this astonishing chain of events had begun. Beneath the porch was a hole that led to an old well that sank five or six yards into the ground. Twenty-five years ago a woman named Sadako Yamamura had been raped and thrown into the well—the dungeon in which Sadako’s vengeful will mingled with the smallpox virus’s will to propagate.

That was where Miyashita proposed they go.

Keeping Mt Hakone, shrouded in clouds, on their right, Miyashita drove through Manazuru toward Atami. According to Ring, they were to see signs for South Hakone Pacific Land as soon as they left Atami on the Atami-Kannami Highway. That was the route Miyashita and Ando were taking.

It was the first time either of them had been on the highway. Yet Ando had the illusion that he’d come this way before. Kazuyuki Asakawa had taken this route on October 11th. He’d gone on up a mountain road not knowing what awaited him in cabin B-4, though not without a sense of foreboding, either. It was almost noon, and the sky was clear and bright. On October 11th it had been raining off and on, and Asakawa’s windshield wipers had been on. Ando remembered reading that in Ring. Asakawa had stared uneasily through the windshield as the wipers scraped back and forth. Both the time of day and the weather were different, but Ando felt like he was suffering flashbacks. He saw the sign on the mountainside for Pacific Land. It looked familiar, the unusual script, in black on a white background. Miyashita unhesitatingly turned left and got on the steep mountain road as though he knew the way well.

The road grew narrower and steeper as it wound between farmers’ fields. The surface of the road was in such poor condition that it was difficult to believe it led to a resort. Unpruned branches and desiccated weeds brushed against the car on both sides, and the sound was unpleasant. The higher they climbed, the stronger Ando’s sense of déjà vu became. He’d never been this way before, and yet he could swear that wasn’t so.

“Does all this seem familiar to you?” Ando asked in a low voice.

“I was just about to ask you the same question.”

So Miyashita felt the same way. Of course, Ando had felt déjà vu any number of times, but the sensation had never gone on this long before. And it was only growing stronger as they drove on. Ando could clearly picture the information center that awaited them at the end of the road, an elegant three-story building with a facade of black glass.

They pulled into a circular driveway leading to the parking lot, and a building came into view. It was the information center, just as Ando had imagined it. He could even picture the restaurant beyond the lobby. There was no need for further confirmation. Reading Ring had delivered this scenery to Ando and Miyashita with perfect fidelity. What other explanation was there?

2

A good while later, Miyashita drove down from the mountains past Atami and took the Manazuru Road along the coast toward Odawara. Conversation kept lapsing as each man contemplated the things they’d just seen, the people they’d just met. Ando was too busy worrying about what the day’s drive had proved to even glance at the sublime winter sea out the window. The resort, and the cabin with the well under the floorboards, overlay the waves like a mirage; Ando could still smell the dirt. He kept thinking of the man whose face he had recognized.

The various facilities that made up Pacific Land were scattered along both sides of the road between the information center and the hotel. The tennis courts, the pool, the gym, the cottages, everything was built on an incline, whether on the mountainside or in the valley. The slope on which the log cabins stood was actually a comparatively gentle one. Standing on the bank of the road and looking down over the valley where the cabins stood interspersed, they could see far below them a seemingly endless series of greenhouses, in the area between Kannami and Nirayama. Their white roofs flashed in the winter afternoon light. Each and every one of them looked familiar to the two men.

They went down to cabin B-4. They tried the doorknob, but the door was locked, so they went around the back, under the balcony. When they crouched down they could see at a glance the gaping hole where wall boards had come off between two pillars. The hole seemed to have been made deliberately, and they knew by whom. Ryuji had removed the boards so he could pass through. On October 18th, he and Asakawa had crawled through that hole to the space under the cabin, and then climbed down a rope into a well to fish out Sadako Yamamura’s bones. A hair-raising feat.

Miyashita retrieved the flashlight he kept in his car and shone it into the space beneath the floorboards. Immediately they found a black protrusion, in more or less the center. The top of the well. A concrete lid lay next to it. Exactly as Ring said.

Ando had no desire to crawl in there and peer into the well, just as he’d had no desire to look into the exhaust shaft where Mai’s corpse had been discovered. He had come close but in the end hadn’t found the courage to look in. A young woman called Sadako had been thrown into the well, to end her life staring at a small circle of sky. Mai had breathed her last at the bottom of a rectangular prism made of concrete. One died in an old well at the edge of a mountainside sanatorium, and the other on the roof of a waterfront office building. One died deep in hushed woods, where branches hemming in from all sides nearly obstructed the view of the sky, and the other by a harbor road where the sea smelled strong, with nothing at all between her and the sky. One died in a barrel-shaped coffin sunk deep in the earth, and the other in a box-shaped coffin that floated high. The peculiar contrasts between the places Sadako and Mai had died only served to highlight their essential similarity.

Suddenly Ando’s heart was racing. He detested the damp air beneath the floorboards, the feel of the ground beneath his hands and knees. The smell of soil filled his nostrils until, without his realizing, he was holding his breath. He felt like he was going to suffocate.

Whereas Ando was ready to bolt from the hole, Miyashita was trying to force his fat body into the space under the floorboards. Ando feared that he meant to go all the way to the well, and said, sternly: “Hey, that’s far enough.”

Miyashita hesitated for a moment in his awkward position. “I guess you have a point,” he ceded. Obeying Ando, he started to back out of the hole. They had indeed gone far enough. What else was there to prove?

The two men crawled out from under the balcony and gulped lungfuls of the outside air. There was no need to speak. It was abundantly clear that every detail in Ring hewed to fact. They’d proved the hypothesis that the mental images created by the report were identical to the way things looked in reality. Everything was just where the text said it would be. By virtue of having read Ring, Ando and Miyashita had already “seen” the place. From the smell of the air to the feel of the dirt beneath their feet, they had experienced everything as Asakawa had.

Yet Miyashita didn’t seem quite satisfied. “As long as we’ve come this far, why don’t we have a look at Jotaro Nagao?”

Jotaro Nagao. The name had almost slipped Ando’s mind, but he could remember the man’s face clearly without ever having met him outside the pages of Ring. He was bald, and his handsome face was of a healthy hue that belied his fifty-seven years. Overall he made a first impression of smoothness, and that was true also of his speech. For some reason Ando even knew how Nagao sounded when he talked.

Twenty years ago, there had been a tuberculosis Sanatorium on the ground where Pacific Land now stood. Although Nagao had a private practice in Atami now, he had once worked at the sanatorium. When Sadako Yamamura had come to visit her father, Nagao had raped her and thrown her into the well. Nagao had also been Japan’s last smallpox patient.

In Ring it was written, “In a lane in front of Kinomiya Station was a small, one-story house with a shingle by the door that read Nagao Clinic: Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.” Upon reaching the place, Ryuji, always true to form, had throttled the doctor until he confessed what he’d done a quarter century ago. Miyashita was proposing they visit the clinic and see Nagao’s face for themselves.

But when they got there, the curtain was pulled across the clinic’s entrance. The place didn’t seem to be closed just for the weekend; rather, the door looked like it hadn’t been opened for quite some time. There was dust beneath it, and cobwebs on the eaves. The whole building hinted at extended, perhaps permanent, closure.

Ando and Miyashita gave up on the idea of meeting Nagao, and walked back to the curb where they’d left the car. Just then, they noticed a wheelchair coming down the steep road that descended from Atami National Hospital. A bald old man sat hunched over in the wheelchair, steered by a refined-looking woman of around thirty. From the way the old man’s eyes lolled around looking at nothing in particular, it was clear that he had a psychiatric disorder.

When Ando and Miyashita saw his face they cried out as one and exchanged glances. Although he had aged terribly—twenty years, it seemed, in just three months—the man was instantly recognizable to them as Jotaro Nagao. Ando and Miyashita were able to remember what he had looked like and to compare that image with what they were seeing now.

Miyashita approached the man and spoke to him. “Dr Nagao.”

The old man didn’t respond, but the young woman attendant, who looked like she might have been his daughter, turned toward the voice. Her eyes met Miyashita’s. He bowed slightly, and she bowed back.

“How’s his health?” Miyashita promptly inquired with the air of an old acquaintance.

“Fine, thank you,” she said, and hurried away with a put-upon expression. But the encounter hadn’t been fruitless. Evidently, the interview with Asakawa and Ryuji that had forced the doctor to own up to quarter-century-old crimes had seriously unbalanced him. It was clear that Nagao had almost no consciousness of the outside world.

Father and daughter passed the clinic and entered a narrow road beyond it. Both Ando and Miyashita, as they watched him go, thought the same thing and it didn’t exactly concern Nagao. They were ruminating over the way they’d both instantly recognized the old man in the wheelchair as the one-time clinician. Ring, it seemed, had “recorded” not only scenery but people’s faces with absolute fidelity.

Ando looked at the sign for the Odawara-Atsugi Highway, and then at the face of his friend sitting next to him. Miyashita was showing signs of fatigue, and no wonder. He’d been gripping the steering wheel since morning.

“You can just drop me off at Odawara,” said Ando.

Miyashita frowned and turned his head slightly toward Ando, as if to ask why. “Cut it out, buddy. You know I’d gladly drive you back to your apartment.”

“It’s such a detour. Look, if I get out at Odawara I can take the Odakyu Line straight home.”

Ando was concerned about Miyashita. If he drove all the way in to Yoyogi to drop Ando off, and then back to Tsurumi where he lived, it would add miles to the drive. Miyashita was clearly exhausted, both physically and mentally, and Ando wanted him to just go home and rest.

“Well, since you insist, you shall be dropped off at Odawara!” Miyashita said it like he was indulging the odd whim of a friend, but no doubt he didn’t mind not having to drive into Tokyo and out. He was always that way, hardly ever coming right out with a “Thank you.” He had trouble expressing gratitude in a straightforward manner.

They’d almost finished threading their way through downtown Odawara to the station when Miyashita muttered, “First thing next week, we’ll get our blood tested.”

Ando didn’t need to ask why, since he’d been thinking the same thing. He had the nasty realization that he’d been transformed from an observer into a participant. All copies of the evil video had vanished, and he hadn’t watched it. He was supposed to be safe, but now that he knew the Ring report had described absolutely everything with preternatural accuracy … He felt like a physician treating an AIDS patient who suddenly found himself infected via a previously unknown route of transmission. Of course, nothing at all had been proven; it was still only a possibility. Yet Ando cowered, for he felt now that his body had indeed been invaded by something. He’d been paralyzed for a good part of the day by the fantasy that something just like the ring virus he’d seen under the electron microscope was spreading through his body beneath the skin, coursing through his veins, violating his cells. No doubt Miyashita was tasting the same fear.

Aside from its author, Asakawa, Ando had been the first person to read Ring. The report described the images on the video minutely. It also described Jotaro Nagao so faithfully that Ando had been able to recognize him at a glance. Naturally, he had to wonder if reading Ring might not have the same effect as watching the videotape.

But he’d read it on November 19th of the past year. Two months had elapsed since then, and nothing had happened to him, at least as far as he could tell. He hadn’t developed a blockage in the coronary artery and died in a week. Had the virus mutated so that the incubation period was longer? Or was he to be merely a carrier of the virus, one who did not display any symptoms himself?

Miyashita was right. They had to get their blood checked first thing next week back at the university. If the ring virus swarmed in them, too, they had to do something quick. Not that Ando had the slightest idea what.

“What do you plan on doing if you’re ring-positive?” he asked dejectedly.

“Well, I won’t just sit on my hands. I’ll think of something to do.” Miyashita spoke in clipped phrases. Ando thought he heard in his friend’s voice overtones of fear even greater than his own. That was as it should be in that Miyashita had family to think of.

They entered the traffic circle in front of Odawara Station, went once around in the passenger-car lane, and then came to a stop. Ando got out of the car and saw Miyashita off with a wave.

We’re in up to our necks now.

For the first time, Ando felt he truly understood what Asakawa had been through. In Ando’s mind he and Miyashita started to blur into Asakawa and Ryuji. Ando corresponded to Asakawa, and Miyashita to Ryuji. Of course, from the physical point of view, and even in terms of personality, Ryuji and Miyashita weren’t overly similar. It almost struck Ando as funny. But he was brought up short when he remembered that Asakawa and Ryuji were both dead. He’d cut open Ryuji himself.

He went through the ticket gate and into the station and sat down on a bench on the platform. The cold back of the bench against his spine, Ando wondered if that was what lying on the autopsy table felt like. If that was what it felt like to be dead. Sometimes it was worse to be in the dark, imagining terrors. He figured that in some ways, it was much more grueling to suspect you had cancer than to be told straight out that you did. The uncertainty was what made it so hard. Directly faced with a trial it was possible to endure it with some measure of equanimity. Something in man made being left hanging the worst. So was he infected, or wasn’t he? For Ando, there was only one way to overcome the misery of the moment, and it was to persuade himself that his life was spent anyway. Regret at having let his son die could help him overcome his own attachment to life …

But as he sat there in the cold on the platform waiting for the Romance Car Express, Ando couldn’t stem his shivering no matter what.

3

He settled himself in a seat on the Romance Car. Now he had nothing to do but stare out the window at the scenery. Usually, he’d turn his attention to a book right about now, but he’d neglected to bring one. That morning as he’d climbed into Miyashita’s car, he hadn’t expected to return by train. Staring at the suburban landscape gradually made him drowsy, and he didn’t fight it. He shut his eyes.

When he opened them again he didn’t know where he was. His pulse quickened with the unease of having been carried off a great distance in his sleep. He thought he could hear his heart beat. He tried to stretch his legs and bumped them into the back of the seat ahead of him; his upper body jerked. He was jostled from beneath by the distinctive vibrations of a train, and he heard the clanging of a railway crossing in the distance.

I’m on a train.

With a sense of relief, Ando recalled that some two hours ago he’d said goodbye to Miyashita in Odawara, where he’d luckily managed to catch an express for Tokyo. That felt like days ago; it seemed like ages since he visited South Hakone Pacific Land with Miyashita. Hakone felt like some far-off land. Only the highland scenery and Jotaro Nagao’s face remained vivid when he shut his eyes.

Ando rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands and then looked out the window again. Nighttime street scenes flowed slowly past. The train was slowing down now as it approached its final destination, Shinjuku Station. Red lights flashed and bells clanged as they crossed streets. He strained his eyes to read the signs as they passed through a station without stopping.

Yoyogi Hachiman. The next station would be Sangubashi, his station. He wished he could just get off there, but the Romance Car Express was skipping all stops before the terminal. He’d have to get off there and get on another train coming back this way, to return two stops. What a pain.

At Yoyogi Hachiman the Odakyu Line tracks made a nearly ninety-degree swerve to run parallel to the dark woods of Yoyogi Park. The scenery was quite familiar to him. He couldn’t see it from where he sat, but his apartment was just over to the right. As they rushed through the station he used every day, Ando pressed his face up against the window to his left and gazed at the platform.

With a start, he turned to press his face harder to the glass. He saw a woman he recognized standing on the platform. Wearing only a blazer, hardly dressed for a winter night, she stood at the edge of the platform, very close to the train as it rushed by, staring at the Romance Car with a nonchalant expression. Although the train was slowing down, figures on the platform flashed in and out of view in an instant. In that mere instant Ando’s eyes and the woman’s had met. He wasn’t imagining it; he could still feel the impact from that moment when their gazes locked.

This was the third time he’d encountered her. The first time, she’d emerged from Mai’s apartment and shared the elevator with him. The second time had been on the top floor of the building where Mai’s body had been discovered. The elevator door had opened and he’d found himself face to face with her. Though he’d only seen her twice, he remembered her face very clearly.

Ten minutes later, at Sangubashi, he got off an outbound train from Shinjuku. At Sangubashi Station, the inbound and outbound tracks were situated in the middle between the two platforms. When the outbound train stopped and he got off, another train was stationed on the inbound tracks. As a result, Ando’s view of the other platform was totally blocked. He struggled against the current of passengers heading for the gates to stay where he was on the platform, waiting for the trains to depart so he could see if the woman was still there on the opposite platform. Though it had been ten minutes and perhaps his desire to see her again was confounding him, Ando was curiously sure she was still there.

Bells rang and both trains pulled away at the same time, like sliding doors opening, revealing a clear view of the opposite platform. In the sudden stillness his eyes met hers again. His hunch had been right. She stood in exactly the same place as before, fixing him with the same steady gaze. Ando returned her gaze and nodded. He was signaling an intention to comply with her instructions.

Ando slowly began to walk toward the gate. Matching his movements, she went down the stairs on her side. They met at the ticket gate.

“We meet again,” she said, as if this were coincidence. Ando didn’t think so. He felt that she’d somehow known he’d pass through Sangubashi Station on that train. She’d been lying in wait for him. But it was no use resisting her charms now that she stood before him. Together they went through the ticket gate and turned into the little store-lined street beyond.

4

When he awoke the next morning, the woman lying next to him immediately asked him to take her to a movie that had just opened. It was the weekend, but as they went to the first showing, the theater wasn’t too crowded.

The woman sat down leaving an open seat between her and Ando. Until they’d entered the theater, she’d been practically hanging from his arm, but now she suddenly wanted to keep her distance. The seats themselves were luxuriously large, so it wasn’t a question of feeling cramped. Ando couldn’t figure it out. But if he started listing everything she’d done that struck him as strange, it’d take him all day. All he knew was that she was Mai’s sister and that her name was Masako.

He stared at the screen, but he couldn’t follow the story. It was partly because he was still sleepy, but more than that, Masako’s presence was distracting him. He remembered meeting her at Sangubashi Station the night before, but he couldn’t quite reconstruct how he’d ended up taking her back to his apartment. He’d invited her to a bar in front of the station, where, over beers, he’d asked her name.

Masako Takano. I’m Mai’s older sister.

Just as he’d guessed. She said she was two years older than Mai; she worked at a securities firm which she’d joined after graduating from a women’s college. Everything after that point was hazy for Ando. He hadn’t drunk that much, but he could only recall fragments. He couldn’t recall who had suggested it, but one way or another, they’d ended up in Ando’s apartment.

In the next scene he could recall, there was running water. In this fragment the context was clear. Masako was in the shower, and Ando was sitting on the bed waiting for her to come out.

The water stopped, and then Masako emerged from the hallway. She turned out the lights without even asking him; that moment, when everything went dark, left a strong impression. A second later, Masako pressed her naked upper body against him. Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel, which she held together with her left hand, and with her right, she grabbed Ando’s head and pressed his face against her flesh. He felt sucked into her fine skin; his nose and mouth were covered, and he was starting to smother. It was all he could do to push her away enough for him to breathe. Then he filled his lungs with her fresh scent and put his arms around her …

The movie was unremarkable, so Ando spent the time dredging up bits and pieces of the previous night’s weirdness. He hadn’t been flesh to flesh with a woman for a year and a half. He’d ejaculated three times that he could remember. Not that it gave him any particular pride about his virility. He was about to turn thirty-five, and his managing to do it three times, at least, in one night said more about her beauty than his stamina. Only, now that he thought about it, he realized that everything that had happened in bed last night took place in complete darkness. It didn’t matter how pretty Masako was, or how provocative she may have looked; Ando hadn’t feasted on her with his eyes. Not only had she turned off the lights, but she’d covered the clock on the bedside table with a towel. She’d made the room truly dark, unwilling even to tolerate the faint trace of light coming from behind the face of the clock. Every one of her movements had betrayed an intense attachment to darkness.

Ando was pretending to watch the movie screen, but all the while he was secretly watching Masako. The darkness of the theater set off her beauty even more. Darkness became this woman.

She closed her eyes several times while watching the movie. She wasn’t dozing off; her lips were moving. She appeared to be saying something, but Ando couldn’t make out what. He leaned forward and to the left, resting his elbow on his knee.

Finally, by looking back and forth between her lips and the screen, Ando figured out what she was doing. Masako was repeating the characters’ lines under her breath.

On screen, a bad street girl who had been transformed into a killing machine by a government agency was being sent out on her first mission. In this scene she wore a black dress and carried a huge pistol hidden in her handbag. She was entering a classy restaurant. It was a very tense moment in the film, with lots of rapid-fire dialogue.

Utterly indifferent to the movie, Ando watched Masako as she repeated the heroine’s lines. Then, for a moment, Masako’s voice and the heroine’s overlapped. The movie was in French, with Japanese subtitles, but Masako’s Japanese was perfectly in sync with the heroine’s French. It was like a well-done choral recitation. Ando was shocked to see that sometimes Masako’s mouth opened even before the subtitles appeared. She couldn’t pull off such a feat unless she’d seen the movie enough times to memorize the dialogue.

For a while Masako lost herself in the heroine with a look of happiness on her face that Ando found amusing. But she seemed to feel his eyes upon her and abruptly shut her mouth. She didn’t open it again, just staring at the screen thereafter.

As they left the theater, Masako squinted, stifled a yawn, and took Ando’s arm. The winter sun shone softly, and Ando decided he’d rather touch Masako’s skin directly than link arms with her. He separated his arm from hers and then held her hand. For a moment he felt a chill, but then their skin temperatures evened out, and Masako’s hand relaxed in Ando’s long fingers.

It was Coming of Age Day, and everywhere they looked there were young women dressed up in kimonos. Ando and Masako followed the crowd from Yurakucho toward Ginza. He intended to take her out to lunch, but had no particular place in mind. He planned to choose some likely-looking restaurant as they strolled along.

Masako kept looking around with evident curiosity at the Ginza streetcorners, and now and then she’d let slip a sigh. She didn’t offer much in the way of conversation, but Ando didn’t feel ill-at-ease with her. In fact, he felt a surge of satisfaction at being able to quietly stroll around Ginza on a sunny holiday.

Masako stopped in front of a hamburger joint on a corner and stared at its sign on the sidewalk. There was something of the innocence of a teenager in her earnest gaze.

“You want to eat here?” Ando asked.

“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding vigorously. Ando went inside, glad he was getting off so cheaply.

Masako’s appetite was simply astounding. In the blink of an eye she’d consumed two hamburgers and an order of fries, and was eyeing the counter again greedily.

It turned out to be ice cream she wanted now, so he ordered one and gave it to her. This time she ate slowly, as if she dreaded coming to the last bite. She carried each spoonful to her mouth with great care, but even so, she ended up dripping melted ice cream on her lap. Her stockings were flecked with drops of milky white mixed with bits of strawberry. She scooped up a drop with her index finger and licked it, then grew impatient. She clutched her shin with both hands, brought her mouth to her knee, and ran the tip of her tongue over it. Still in her curled-up position, she rolled her eyes and shot Ando a suggestive glance. There was provocation in her eyes, and Ando couldn’t look away. She finished licking up the ice cream and lowered her leg again. There was a run in her new stockings. She must have snagged them with a canine tooth.

Ando had bought her those stockings that morning at a convenience store by the station. She didn’t seem to own any; after all, she’d been walking around with bare legs in the middle of winter. Ando felt cold just looking at her, so he bought a pair of stockings without even checking with her. When he handed them to her she ran straight into a restroom to put them on, and she was still wearing them.

The run seemed to bother Masako, because she kept rubbing her knee.

Ando felt he’d never get tired of watching her every move. She came out of nowhere, and now I’m falling for her.

He wondered if he really was. Maybe he was just becoming desperate, dissolute. If he’d become a carrier of the ring virus as a result of having read that strange report, if his body was being eaten away by the hour, then his nascent pleasure was something he couldn’t afford to lose.

Back in college, he’d read a novel set in a little mountain village that featured a female character who was rather like the woman he was confronted with now. The fictional woman is possessed of above-average looks, but because she doesn’t speak and act like others, the villagers have branded her as crazy. She ends up providing comfort to men who have no fixed companions. The image of a woman without a home wandering the woods in a disheveled state, accepting the local men one and all without discrimination, embodied a certain high Eros, aided by the exotic setting. The mountain village gave the story a perfect harmony of character and setting, and at the time Ando had felt that if the author had placed such a woman in the city, the novel wouldn’t have acquired the right atmosphere.

Well, he was in Ginza now, smack in the middle of Tokyo, not some alpine hamlet. But Masako had the same aura as the heroine of that book, and her modern beauty didn’t seem at all out of place on a stool in a fast-food joint.

Ando suddenly remembered how the novel ended. Alone in the mountains, the woman gives birth to a child, having no idea who the father is. The story closes with that baby’s first cries piercing the forest and echoing across the mountainside.

I can’t let that happen.

Ando admonished himself. He had to take precautions to protect Masako’s body. He recalled that the night before he’d been so overjoyed at the prospect of coupling that he’d forgotten himself and neglected to use birth control.

Masako was running her fingers in a circle over her kneecap, gradually making the hole bigger. The skin of her leg showed white where it peeked through the rent, so white as to make it a shame to cover it up with stockings.

The hole got bigger. Ando stopped her by laying his hand on top of hers.

He asked her, “What were you saying back there in the theater?” He meant to ask why she was repeating the characters’ lines.

Masako’s reply was: “Take me to a bookstore.”

She liked to deflect his questions that way. She asked Ando to do things far more often than she answered his queries. But of course, Ando was incapable of saying no to her.

He took her to the biggest bookstore in Ginza. Masako flitted from shelf to shelf, in the end spending over an hour in the bookstore reading on her feet. Ando, who didn’t share that habit, ended up wandering around aimlessly until he discovered, next to the registers, a stack of pamphlets from Shotoku, the publisher. Since he’d visited their offices only the other day, and the pamphlets were free, he picked one up.

The pamphlet included a short essay but consisted mainly of ads for future Shotoku releases.

I wonder if Ryuji’s in here? Ando flipped through the pamphlet expectantly. The other day, Ryuji’s editor Kimura had told Ando that Ryuji’s collection of philosophical essays was just about to be published. Ando was hoping to see a friend’s name in print.

But before he could find it, he was dragged out of the bookstore by Masako. “How about another movie?”

Her plea was a mild one, but the way she gripped his arm and pulled him along suggested she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Maybe, while reading in the bookstore, she’d found out about another movie and decided she had to see it. Ando slipped the pamphlet into his coat pocket and asked, “What do you want to see?”

She didn’t answer, but simply squeezed his hand and tugged him forward.

He hung back a bit, saying, “Pushy, aren’t you?” Then he noticed that she was still clutching an event-guide magazine and came to a full stop. Masako hadn’t spent a single yen since the night before. She hadn’t made a move to pay for anything, always leaving it to Ando to pick up the tab. He didn’t imagine for a moment that she’d purchased the magazine with her own money. Indeed, it wasn’t in a bag, and she held it bare rolled up in her hand.

She lifted it.

Ando looked back toward the bookstore. Nobody was coming after them. She’d managed to elude the sharp eyes of the clerks. It was only a three-hundred yen magazine; even if she’d been caught, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. As he let Masako pull him along, Ando was beginning to feel bolder than ever before.

5

When he put the key in the lock he could hear the phone in his apartment ringing. Figuring he wouldn’t make it in time anyway, Ando decided not to hurry. He turned the knob. When friends called, they usually only let the phone ring five or six times, because they knew how small his apartment was. Hence he could usually guess the caller by how long it took him or her to give up. As he’d expected, by the time he got the door open the ringing had stopped, a sure sign of someone who knew him and how he lived. There weren’t too many people who had visited him. It was probably Miyashita, Ando figured, looking at his watch. It was just past eight o’clock in the evening.

He opened the door wider and beckoned Masako inside, then turned on the lights and the heat. Clothing was scattered about exactly as they’d left it that morning. Masako had left her belongings there, seemingly having decided to spend another night with Ando.

Ando’s shoulders and back were stiff from watching movies in the morning and afternoon. He wanted a soak in the tub.

Starting to take off his coat, he found the publisher’s pamphlet in his pocket. He took it out and placed it on the bedside table, thinking to examine it at leisure after a bath. He’d decided to buy Ryuji’s book, and he needed to look up the title and publication date.

He stripped down to his shirt and rolled up his cuffs. He gave the tub a quick rinse and then adjusted the water temperature and started to fill it. It wasn’t a large tub, so it wasn’t long before it was ready. The bathroom was full of steam, and turning on the fan didn’t do much good. He thought he’d have Masako bathe first, so he stuck his head into the other room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed taking off her stockings.

“Would you like to take a bath?”

She stood up. At the same time, the phone rang.

As Ando walked to the telephone, Masako took his place in the bathroom, disappearing behind the accordion-style shower curtain.

It was Miyashita, as he’d expected. As soon as Ando had the receiver to his ear, his friend yelled, “Where the hell have you been all day?”

“At the movies.”

Miyashita obviously hadn’t expected that answer. “At the movies?” he blurted.

“Two of them, in fact.”

“Must be nice not to have a care in the world,” Miyashita sneered in heartfelt disgust. Then he continued with his harangue. “I don’t know how many times I tried to call you.”

“I do go out, you know.”

“Well, whatever. Do you know where I am now?”

Where was Miyashita calling from? It didn’t sound like he was at home. Ando could hear cars. He must have been in a roadside phone booth somewhere.

“Please don’t tell me you’re in the neighborhood and you want to come up?”

Now was a bad time. Masako was in the bath. Ando was prepared to refuse if that was Miyashita’s plan.

“Don’t be an idiot. Think theater, man, the stage.”

“What are you talking about?”

Now it was Ando’s turn to be annoyed. What right did Miyashita have to criticize him for watching movies when he was going to plays? But that wasn’t what Miyashita was up to.

“I’m at the offices of Theater Group Soaring.”

The name rang a bell. Where had he seen it before? He remembered—in Ring. It was the name of the troupe Sadako Yamamura had belonged to prior to her death.

“What the hell are you doing there?”

“Yesterday I realized that the descriptions in Ring were so precise and objective that it was like they’d been observed through the viewfinder of a video camera.”

“Me, too.”

Why were they going through all that again? Ando spotted the Shotoku pamphlet on the table and pulled it over next him so he could take notes on it. It was a habit of his to take notes while he was on the phone; it calmed him down. His customary phone-conversation posture was receiver wedged between his ear and left shoulder, ballpoint pen in right hand.

“Well, I realized today that there was one more thing to check on. I mean, if we wanted to look at faces, we didn’t need to go all the way to Atami, did we?”

Ando was getting impatient. He couldn’t see where Miyashita was going. “Just tell me already.”

Miyashita finally came out with it. “I’m talking about Sadako Yamamura.”

“Come on, she died in 1966.” But wait … Ando suddenly realized why Miyashita had visited the theater group. “The photograph.”

He remembered reading in Ring that Asakawa’s colleague Yoshino had visited the troupe’s rehearsal space and seen Sadako’s portfolio. This was something she’d submitted when she’d joined the troupe, and included two photos, a full-length one and one from the chest up. Yoshino had made copies of them.

“Finally got it, huh? All along, it was easy as pie to feast our eyes on Sadako.”

Ando summoned up his mental image of Sadako. Thanks to Ring, he had quite a strong impression stored away in his brain. Tall and slender, with only a modest bustline but perfectly balanced in her proportions. Her facial features were somewhat androgynous, but she had perfect eyes and a perfect nose, with nothing about them he would change if he could. He imagined her as an unapproachable beauty.

Ando whipped up some courage and asked, “And how about it? Have you gotten them to show you the photos?”

Miyashita had probably seen them, and the face in the photos and the one in his mind had probably been identical. That was the reply Ando expected.

But what he heard from the other end of the line was a sigh.

“It’s different.”

“You mean …”

“The face is different.”

Ando didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t know how to put it. The Sadako Yamamura in the photos is not the one I pictured. She’s beautiful, no question, but … How can I put it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Hell, I’m just confused. But I did remember something. I had a friend who was good at drawing people’s portraits, and I asked him once what type of face was the hardest to draw for him. And he told me there wasn’t any particular type of face he couldn’t draw. He said all faces had peculiarities that made them easy to capture in convincing portraits. But if he had to pick one, he said, the hardest type to draw, for him, was his own face. Especially when the self-portraitist is a very self-conscious sort, it’s next to impossible to make the picture match the reality. It always comes out looking like someone else.”

“So?” What did that have to do with the question at hand?

“Nothing, I guess. I was just reminded of him, that’s all. But take the videotape. It wasn’t shot with a camera, right? Those images came from Sadako’s eyes and mind. And in spite of that …”

“What?”

“It captured places and people accurately.”

“We didn’t actually see the video, you know.”

“But we read Ring.”

Ando was getting annoyed. Miyashita seemed to be dancing around the subject. He was like a child who wanted to go somewhere but was afraid to take the first step.

“Look, Miyashita, why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind?”

Ando could hear Miyashita take a deep breath.

“Did Kazuyuki Asakawa really write Ring?”

Who else could have? Ando started to say, but heard a beep signaling that Miyashita’s phone card was about to run out.

“Crap, my card’s almost used up. Can your fax machine handle photos?” Miyashita spoke fast.

“That’s what the guy said when he sold it to me.”

“Great, I’ll fax them to you. I want you to check right away to see if she’s different from what you imagined, or if I’m just—”

And with that they were cut off.

Ando sat there for a minute with the receiver still on his shoulder, in a daze. The noise of the shower stopped, and the apartment was wrapped in stillness. Feeling a chill breeze, he looked over to see that the window was open a crack, admitting the wintry night air. In the distance, a car horn sounded. The dry, harsh noise testified to how desiccated the outside air was. In contrast, the air inside his apartment was almost wringing with moisture as steam seeped out from the bathroom. Masako was taking a long time.

Ando thought over what Miyashita had said. He could understand his friend’s state of mind. Probably he’d spent the whole day on pins and needles, and rather than just sit around and wonder whether the ring virus had entered his body because he’d read Ring, he’d decided to act. When he’d remembered that the acting troupe had kept photos of Sadako, he’d gone over to check. Surprisingly, the photos hadn’t matched his mental image. Unable to judge whether this was simply due to some blockage on his part, he’d copied the photos, so he could get Ando’s opinion. And now he was going to fax them over.

Ando glanced at the fax machine. No movement yet.

He looked away from it. His eyes came to rest on the publisher’s pamphlet. He picked it up and started to flip through it while he waited. Upcoming publications were listed in the back. Under the heading “New in February” fifteen or so titles were listed, each one followed by the name of the author and a dozen or so words describing the contents. About halfway down Ando saw Ryuji’s name. The title was still The Structure of Knowledge, and the summary said it represented “the cutting edge of contemporary thought”. On the list it was sandwiched between a romance novel and a collection of behind-the-scenes essays about the television industry, making it seem even more eggheaded. But this was his friend’s last work being published posthumously. Ando would give it a read no matter how difficult it was. He circled the entry.

He felt something click in his mind. He couldn’t figure out what. Still holding the pen, he thought hard. It seemed to him that he’d seen a familiar word on that page of the pamphlet. He looked again. The bottom half of the page was taken up with a list, in smaller type, of books coming out in March. He looked at the third title from the end.

And then his eyes grew wide with shock. At first he wondered if it was just a coincidence, but then he saw the name of the author.

New in March:

…

…

RING by Junichiro Asakawa. Bloodcurdling cult horror.

Ando let the pamphlet slip out of his hand. He was going to publish that?

Now he understood why Junichiro had been so standoff-ish that day when Ando had run into him in the Shotoku lounge. He’d decided to tweak his brother’s reportage and publish it as a novel. And since Ando was the one person who knew Junichiro was using his brother’s work without consent, it was no wonder he’d been so cold that day, fleeing after hardly the most perfunctory of greetings. Had they talked for long, the subject of the report would have come up, and his editors might have found out. Junichiro obviously wanted to claim the book as being entirely his own.

“It mustn’t go to press!” Ando cried out loud. At the very least, he had to get Junichiro to delay publication until it could be established that Ring was physically harmless. It was his duty as a medical professional. Tomorrow, he and Miyashita would have their blood tested. It would take several days for the results to come back. If they were positive, if he and Miyashita turned out to be carriers of the ring virus, then publication of that book could have catastrophic consequences. The original videotape could only spread at the rate of one copy at a time. Publication involved numbers of an entirely different scale, ten thousand copies at least. In a worst-case scenario, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of copies would be disseminated throughout the country.

Ando’s teeth chattered as he imagined a huge tsunami. A vast, dark wall of ocean bearing down silently, driving before it a wind that he thought he could feel on him even now. He went to the window and shut it tightly. Standing by the window, he looked back toward the hall. Masako stood there, wrapped in a towel; he saw her face in profile. She was rummaging through her bag, probably for underwear.

The phone rang. Ando picked up the receiver, and when he confirmed that it was an incoming fax, he pushed the start button on the fax machine. Miyashita was sending him the photos.

A few seconds later, the fax machine whirred to life and began printing. Ando stood motionless over the black machine, staring at the sheet slowly emerging from it. He felt someone sneak up behind him and turned to look. It was Masako, wearing only panties. She’d draped the towel over her shoulders and was standing directly behind him. Her face was flushed, and her eyes had a new gleam, so lustrous as to make him want to hold her and kiss her eyelids then and there. She wore a strangely resolute expression.

The fax machine beeped to say it was done printing. Ando tore off the fax, sat down on the bed, and had a look. The transmission consisted of two photos, side by side. The printout wasn’t quite photo quality, but it was clear enough for him to make out Sadako Yamamura’s face and body.

He screamed. The woman in the photos was indeed different from what he’d imagined. But that wasn’t why he’d screamed. The photos on the fax were of the woman standing in front of him now.

She took the fax out of his hands and looked at the photos. Ando stared up at her weakly, like a boy getting a scolding from his mother. Finally he managed to wring words from his throat.

“You’re … Sadako Yamamura.” Not Masako, not Mai’s sister—those were lies.

Her expression relaxed. Perhaps she found Ando’s consternation funny, for she seemed to be smiling.

Ando’s mind went blank. It was the first time he ever fainted in his almost thirty-five years.

6

Ando was unconscious for less than a minute, but that was enough. With no way to process the facts thrust into his face, he’d had no other option but to stop thinking altogether. Perhaps his consciousness would have been able to deal with it if he’d had a little more time, or more composure to begin with. If he’d even remotely entertained the possibility beforehand, maybe he wouldn’t have had to faint.

But as it was, it came all too suddenly. To find out that a woman who had died twenty-five years ago was standing right in front of him, and remembering making love to her several times the night before … In that instant he’d gone to the brink of insanity, and his brain circuitry had been forced to shut down momentarily. Most people would faint if they got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and turned around to find a dead person standing there. That’s how people escape from horrors presented to them; once you faint, you no longer have to endure the unendurable. Only with that cushion of unconsciousness are we able to prepare ourselves to accept reality.

When consciousness returned to him, Ando thought he could smell burning flesh somewhere. He should have been lying face down on the bed, but somehow he was on his back looking up instead. Had he rolled over himself, or had someone turned him over? Only his upper body was actually on the bed; his legs, though neatly arranged, were hanging out onto the floor. Without otherwise moving a muscle, Ando sniffed the air and listened for sounds. He opened his eyes a slit. He had no intention of reawakening all his senses at once. He meant to ease himself into acceptance. Otherwise he’d probably suffer the same reaction all over again.

He could hear water spurting from a faucet. The sound probably came from the bathroom, but it sounded like the distant burbling of a brook. The noise of the water hid the night sounds of the city. Normally he should have been able to hear the cars rushing by on the Metropolitan Expressway. He eased his eyes open. In the middle of the ceiling two twenty-watt fluorescent bulbs glowed, casting a bright light over the whole room.

Moving only his eyes, Ando looked around the room. Then, gingerly, he sat up. He couldn’t see anybody around. Just as he was starting to wonder if his imagination was playing tricks on him, the water stopped. He held his breath without meaning to.

The woman emerged from behind a corner in the hallway. Just as before, she wore nothing but panties and held a wrung-out towel.

Ando tried to scream, but no sound came out. He brushed away the hand offering him a wet towel and got unsteadily to his feet. Then he backed up until he was flat against the wall. He tried to scream her name, but he still couldn’t find his voice.

Sadako Yamamura!

He tried to recall everything he knew about her. Twenty-five years ago she’d been murdered, thrown into an old well. She had created that awful videotape by means of thought projection. She possessed paranormal powers. She had testicular feminization syndrome; she was a hermaphrodite. Ando turned his stare on her lower body. There was no visible bulge under the white panties that covered her crotch. Of course, her testicles were not supposed to be readily visible. But Ando had touched her down there last night, caressed her over and over. Nothing had struck him as odd; she was in every way perfectly female as far as he could tell. But he hadn’t been able to see. Everything they’d done the night before had been done in darkness. Ando suddenly wondered what her obsession with darkness was meant to prevent him from seeing.

The otherworldliness he’d felt on first meeting her hadn’t been off the mark after all. That time in the elevator in Mai’s building, he’d been desperate to distance himself from her—just like now. The way she’d just appeared like that from Mai’s apartment, he’d had no idea where she’d come from and still didn’t.

He had so many questions, but he could hardly breathe much less ask her anything.

He felt that if he wasn’t careful he’d collapse onto the floor, and if he did, he’d be in Sadako’s clutches. The only way to maintain any dignity at all was to stay where he could look down on her from above.

He didn’t take his eyes off her.

Her naked skin gleamed whitely under the fluorescent lights, as if to impress him with the reality of her flesh, as if to assert to him that she was no ghost. This body of hers overwhelmed him, this body whose arms and legs had been so entangled with his last night. What did he need to do to escape from her spell? There was only one answer: flee. Get away from this place. It was all he could think of. What he saw before him was a monster. A woman come back after being dead for twenty-five years.

With his back against the wall, Ando began to move sideways toward the vestibule. Sadako made no move to block him, following him only with her eyes. Ando looked toward the door. Had he locked it when they came in? He didn’t remember doing that. The door should swing open when he turned the knob. Warily, Ando moved in that direction. He was in no shape to think about taking a coat.

When he’d put several good feet between himself and the woman, he bolted for the door and stumbled outside. In slacks and a sweater he was dressed much too lightly for the cold, but he spared not a thought for that as he ran down the stairs. It was only after he’d run through the lobby and out onto the sidewalk that he was able to turn around to look behind him. There was no sign of pursuit. He looked up at his windows, still brightly lit. He wanted to go someplace crowded. He ran toward the station.

7

The wind chilled him to the bone. He had no particular destination in mind, but he found himself naturally gravitating toward bright places. He turned his back on the shadowy groves of Yoyogi Park. The skyscrapers of Shinjuku loomed ahead like so many black hulks. Between him and them lay the modest bustle of Sangubashi Station, surrounded by narrow shop-lined streets leading into residential areas. He guessed that even on a holiday there might be one or two places open. Ando’s steps took him in that direction. Anywhere there might be people was good enough for him.

It was only when he came to the ticket vending machines at the station that he realized he’d left his wallet behind. He couldn’t go back and get it now. He searched his other pockets. He found the little case he kept his driver’s license in. He remembered shoving it in his pocket the other day when he’d gone on that excursion with Miyashita, thinking he might have to take the wheel at some point. He’d forgotten to take it out of his pocket when he got home. Luckily he’d tucked some money behind the license for emergencies.

A five-thousand-yen bill. That was all the money he had now. At the thought he felt more lonely than cold. Where was he supposed to sleep tonight? Five thousand yen wouldn’t even buy him a night in a capsule hotel.

His only hope was Miyashita. He bought a train ticket, and then stepped into a phone booth. He dialed his friend’s number, doubting he’d have gotten home yet. And, indeed, he hadn’t. No wonder, he’d only just called Ando from Yotsuya, across town from where he lived. He was probably still on his way home to Tsurumi. Ando decided to head in that direction himself.

It was past nine o’clock when Ando sank into a seat on the train. When he closed his eyes Sadako’s face appeared before him as if by conditioned reflex. He’d never had his feelings about a woman change so drastically over such a short period of time. The cold air of mystery he’d sensed on their first meeting had dissipated somewhat on their second, to be replaced by a growing desire for her. When they met a third time, that desire was realized, and the faint beginnings of infatuation had stirred his heart. And then, the fall. She’d lured him up to a high place, had her way with him, and then pushed him off the edge into the abyss. It was unendurable to think that he’d copulated with a woman who should have been dead for twenty-five years. The word “necrophilia” came to mind. Where had this woman come from? Was the part about her being dead a mistake? Or had she really come back from beyond the grave?

It being a holiday, the train was comparatively empty. Only a few passengers had to stand. Across the aisle from Ando, a laborer-type was sprawled across the bench, occupying enough space for three people. His eyes were shut tight, but he wasn’t asleep. Proof of this came every time somebody walking the length of the car passed by him and he opened his eyes a crack to fathom his surroundings. His eyes, however, were so heavy and dull that they almost looked dead. Ando averted his eyes from the man. But the laborer wasn’t the only one. Every one of the passengers was as pale as a corpse.

Ando hugged himself to keep from trembling. If he didn’t hug himself, he was afraid he’d start screaming, right there in the public space of a train carriage.

He accepted a glass of brandy from Miyashita. First he sent a trickle of it down his throat, savoring the sensation, then he drained the glass. He was starting to feel human again, but was still shivering slightly.

“How do you feel now?” Miyashita asked.

“More or less alive.”

“You must’ve been freezing.”

Miyashita didn’t know yet why Ando had come without a coat.

“It’s not the cold.”

Miyashita had shown Ando into the room he used as a study. Ando was sitting on the spare bed in the corner. It was where he was going to sleep tonight, but for the moment, he was just rattling its metal bars. Only after downing his second glass of brandy was he able to stop shaking.

“What happened?” Miyashita’s voice was gentle.

Ando told him everything that had happened since the previous night. When he finished, he fell backwards onto the bed and let out a whine like a mosquito’s.

“I give up! Explain it to me! I’m lost,” he moaned.

“Good Lord,” muttered Miyashita, utterly thrown for a loop. It was one of those moments when people can’t help laughing, albeit bitterly, and that’s what Miyashita did, weakly. When his laughter had subsided, he poured brandy into some hot coffee and started sipping it. He seemed to be deep in thought, trying to find a reply that was logical, that made at least some sense.

“The basic question is, where did Sadako come from?” The rhetorical tone suggested that Miyashita had already come up with an answer.

“Tell me. Where did she come from?”

Miyashita turned the question back on Ando. “Don’t you know?”

Still supine, Ando shook his head. “No, I do not.”

“You really don’t know?”

“Tell me! Where did she come from?”

“Mai Takano gave birth to her.”

Ando forgot to breathe for a few moments while he tried to think of an alternate explanation. But he could hardly think at all. He’d lost the power of cogitation. All he could do was repeat what he’d heard.

“Mai Takano gave birth to her?”

“The evil video was born from Sadako’s mind. Mai watched it on a day when she was ovulating. The ring virus was born in her body and then fertilized her egg. ‘Fertilized’ isn’t the right word, though. It’s probably more accurate to say that the nucleus of Mai’s egg was replaced with Sadako Yamamura’s genes.”

“I hope you’re going to tell me you can explain the mechanism by which all this happened.”

“Think back to when we ran the ring virus through the genetic sequencer. We discovered that it contained smallpox genes and human genes mixed together in a fixed ratio.”

Ando sat up and reached for his glass. But the glass was empty.

“So the human genes were …”

“Sadako’s. Split into hundreds of thousands of parts.”

“Hundreds of thousands of ring virus specimens, each carrying a tiny segment of Sadako’s DNA?”

“Despite its being a DNA virus, the ring virus has reverse transcription enzymes. So it ought to be able to insert those fragments into the nucleus of a cell.”

A single virus specimen would be incapable of carrying the entirety of a person’s genetic information. It simply wasn’t big enough. But things would be otherwise if a person’s DNA could be split into hundreds of thousands of segments, and each segment parceled out to a different piece of virus. In the photos taken by the electron microscope, they’d seen what looked like countless numbers of ring viruses, mobs of them. It turned out that each one of them had been carrying a part of Sadako Yamamura’s genetic code, and together they’d ganged up on Mai’s egg.

Ando started to stand up, but thought better of it and sat down again. He always got fidgety when he tried to counterargue.

“But Sadako died twenty-five years ago. Her genetic information shouldn’t be able to manifest itself anymore.”

“Let’s think about that. Now, why do you think Sadako projected those images on a tape?”

What had she been obsessed with at the bottom of that well, on the brink of death? The idea of packing all her hatred for the masses into images that would bring terror to anyone who saw them? Practically speaking, what would she get out of that? There had to be some deeper purpose. But Ando couldn’t comprehend what Miyashita was trying to say.

Miyashita tried to guide him toward the answer. “She was only nineteen.”

“So?”

“So she didn’t want to die.”

“She was too young to die.”

“Isn’t it conceivable that she transformed her genetic information into a code and left it behind in the form of energy?”

Ando’s only answer was a sigh.

She translated her genetic information into images and then projected those images? True, Ryuji had succeeded in communicating with them by encoding the word “mutation” into his own DNA base sequence. But the human genome was huge, much too big to be translated into a single videotape.

Ando finally countered with, “Impossible. The human genome is too large.”

Miyashita spread his arms to point at the corners of the room. “Take this room, for example. Let’s say we were to express the totality of this room in words.”

The study was about eight mats large. A desk stood next to the bed. There was a computer on the desk, and next to that a pile of dictionaries. Most problematic were the bookshelves that took up one wall. They were crammed with what had to be a few thousand books ranging from works of literature to specialist works on medicine. It could easily take a day just to list all the titles and authors.

“That’s a lot of information.”

“But what if …” Miyashita mimed holding a camera. Click. “… you took a picture. You’ve got it all in an instant. With just one photo you can store most of the information that makes up the sight of this room. And think, continuous images would increase the capacity that much more. It wouldn’t be impossible to encode Sadako’s complete genetic information that way.”

Ando saw what his friend was trying to say, but he still wasn’t ready to go along. “Let me think about it for a while,” he said, shaking his head. He needed to go back and retrace for himself a path through what Miyashita was saying.

“Go ahead and think. I’m going to go take a leak.” Miyashita disappeared down the hall, leaving the study door open.

Of course, what Miyashita had spelled out was merely a hypothesis. But regardless of whether or not the mechanism Miyashita had suggested was actually how it had happened, the fact remained that Mai Takano had given birth to Sadako Yamamura a week after insemination. That seemed to be beyond question at this point. A week from insemination to birth was an awfully short time. Something must have served to hasten the process of cellular division. A cell’s nucleus contains chemical compounds called nucleic acids, and cellular division only occurs when the levels of these nucleic acids exceed a certain level. Accordingly, the only way to drastically accelerate the frequency of cellular division is to provide excess quantities of nucleic acids. Perhaps the ring virus had managed this somehow, making it possible to force an incredible rate of growth in the fetus.

The first time he’d visited Mai’s apartment he’d felt the presence of something hidden, even though there was nobody there. His feeling had been right. The newborn Sadako had been hiding somewhere in that room. No doubt she’d been very small still. She could have easily found a place to secrete herself, in the wardrobe, maybe, or in the cabinet under the sink. Ando hadn’t gone so far as to search those places. And because she was still so young, when she’d seen Ando in such a compromised position in the bathroom, she’d laughed. The thing that had touched his Achilles tendon had most likely been little Sadako’s hand.

Sadako took over that room in the absence of its rightful inhabitant and grew there, away from the eyes of other people. A week was enough time for her to reach adulthood. And when Ando visited the apartment a second time, she emerged from within it as a full-grown woman.

Ando went over the sequence in his head over and over until he managed to wrap his mind around the hypothesis of Sadako’s birth and growth. The theory accorded with what he himself had experienced.

But what about the following days? Having reached adulthood in a week, her lifespan would have been just a few more weeks unless she somehow didn’t keep on aging at the same rate. Sadako had come back to life at the beginning of last November, ten weeks ago. And yet her skin retained the youthfulness of a girl of nineteen. Perhaps maturation for her meant simply reaching the age she’d been at when she died?

Miyashita came back, shaking his wet hands, and immediately spoke. “One other thing we shouldn’t forget is the vital role of the smallpox virus in all this.”

“Yeah, well, Sadako and the smallpox virus seem to be in league alright.”

Just before her death, Sadako had contracted the virus from Jotaro Nagao. It seemed that she’d somehow blended with it there at the bottom of the well, over a long period of time, until the mixture had achieved full ripeness. Two beings hounded to untimely extinction had exacerbated each other’s potency in their mutual desire to come back to life someday.

“Now, is it true that Junichiro Asakawa is going to publish Ring?”

“Yup. Shotoku already has it listed in a brochure of upcoming releases.”

“Okay. Sadako and the smallpox virus. Those two threads were twisted into one in the form of that killer videotape. Now they’re coming apart, evolving back into two separate strands. One is Sadako herself, and the other is Ring.”

Ando didn’t object. A virus was something that inhabited the gray area between life and non-life anyway, something that amounted to little more than information, whose very nature it was to effect dramatic changes in itself in response to its environment. That it should switch from the form of a video to the form of a book didn’t come as much of a shock.

“So that’s why Kazuyuki Asakawa survived so long.”

Finally, that riddle was solved. In other words, there had been two exits. One was Sadako, and the other was the Ring report. And that was why both Mai and Kazuyuki had been spared death by arterial blockage. As long as they had the ability to give birth, so to speak, their lives weren’t to be claimed so easily. It made sense. Just as the ring virus that had invaded Mai’s body had headed for her womb, in Kazuyuki’s body the virus had headed for the brain. It wasn’t really Kazuyuki Asakawa who wrote Ring; he had been forced to write it. Sadako’s DNA entered his brain and made him do it. And that was how he was able to describe things with such video camera-like accuracy. Only his depiction of Sadako, the main subject, was lacking in verisimilitude, according to the logic that dictated that the person looking through the viewfinder won’t appear on film.

Ando and Miyashita fell silent, trying to anticipate what was to come.

Just what did Sadako and Ring have in mind for humanity? Ando and Miyashita didn’t need to wait for the results of their blood tests. They were sure now that they had to find some way to stop Ring from being published. Junichiro simply didn’t understand how much misery the human race would suffer as a result of the book he was putting his name to. He had to be their first point of counterattack. They’d have to persuade him to reverse his decision to publish the book. But would he listen to them? They weren’t sure they could get him to believe their outlandish tale in the first place.

Miyashita slapped his knee and stood up. “Let’s go, then.”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Your place.”

“I told you already. Sadako’s there.”

“That’s why we’re going. We’re going to confront her.”

“Now, just hold on a minute,” Ando recoiled. He’d come here to get away from Sadako. It was going to take a lot to get him to go back.

“We don’t have time to fart around like this. Don’t you understand how deep we’re into this?”

Ando did understand. It was obvious that something had to happen to him because he’d read Ring. But he didn’t care anymore. He wasn’t afraid of death, not particularly. He’d been quite afraid of death while his son was alive and his wife had loved him, but not now.

Miyashita hooked a hand under Ando’s arm and tried to wrestle him to his feet. “Get a move on. This might be our last chance.”

“Chance?”

“Listen, Sadako came to you and entered your apartment of her own free will.”

“Well, yes.”

“She must have had a reason.”

“What reason?”

“How the hell should I know? Maybe she wants you to do something for her.”

Now Ando remembered. She’d said something along those lines the second time he met her.

I’ll call on you soon with a request.

As Miyashita dragged him out of the study, Ando was thinking that he had no idea what kind of request she might have for him, and that he didn’t really care to find out.

8

They parked the car on a street that went by Yoyogi Park. As they climbed out onto the sidewalk, Ando and Miyashita looked up at the apartment building. Ando’s windows were dark. It had been well over three hours since he’d burst out of there, chest heaving. It was now nearly one in the morning.

Miyashita lowered his voice and asked, “Hey, are you sure the bitch is in there?” His use of the word “bitch” sounded forced. Ando figured Miyashita was trying to steel himself against the upcoming encounter.

“Maybe she’s asleep.”

The room seemed quiet, but there was no way to tell from the outside if she was still in there.

“Hey, do the living dead need to sleep?” Miyashita was sarcastically driving at the strangeness of Sadako awakening from a long slumber just to doze off in a place like this.

The two men stood on the empty sidewalk staring up at the fourth-floor windows for a while. Then Miyashita, with a show of fighting spirit, said, “Let’s go,” and barged on ahead. Ando followed meekly behind. The silence and cold of the night pierced him to the marrow, and he didn’t think he could bear standing on the sidewalk much longer. Perhaps, if it had been warmer, he would have been even less willing to go back into his apartment.

Urged on by Miyashita, Ando braced himself and turned the doorknob. It hadn’t been locked from the inside. The door opened easily. The place seemed to be empty. The pumps were gone from the concrete floor of the vestibule, as was Sadako’s only possession, a small Boston bag. Ando remembered seeing it sitting unceremoniously in the vestibule when he fled.

Ando led the way into the apartment and flipped on the lights. The place was indeed empty.

The thread of his tension severed, Ando collapsed limply onto his bed. Miyashita, though, kept his senses sharp, peering into the bathroom and out at the balcony.

Finally, having searched the place meticulously, he was convinced. “I think she’s gone.”

“I wonder where she went,” Ando mumbled. But in reality, he couldn’t care less where she’d gone. He never wanted to have anything to do with her again.

“Any ideas?” asked Miyashita.

Ando immediately shook his head. “Nope,” he said. It was then that he noticed it. On the desk by the window, a notebook had been left open. Ando couldn’t remember using a notebook there for some time.

He got to his feet and picked it up. Several pages had been filled with sloppy writing. The first line said, Dear Mr Ando, and at the end it was signed Sadako Yamamura. She’d left him a note.

Ando read the opening sentence silently to himself, and then handed the notebook to Miyashita.

“What’s this?”

“A message from Sadako.”

Miyashita let out a gasp as he took the notebook from Ando. Though he hadn’t been asked to, he read it aloud.

Dear Mr Ando,

As I do not wish to startle you any further, I have decided to leave you a letter. It’s rather an old-fashioned thing to do, I know. Please try to remain calm as you read it.

Surely you’ve figured out by now where I came from. I borrowed the womb of a woman named Mai Takano in order to effect my rebirth into this world. I am perplexed myself as to the exact mechanism by which I was able to come back to life.

My father was an assistant professor of medicine at a university, and he often used to speak to me about heredity when I visited him at the South Hakone Sanatorium where he was a patient. As a result, I know a little about genetics. It may be just a hunch, but I wonder if perhaps, using my psychic powers, I was able to imprint my genetic information onto something. Thinking about it now, I am quite sure that on the verge of death I willed my genetic information to remain intact in some form or other. What I felt was not so much a desire to be reborn as an unbearable revulsion at the thought that Sadako Yamamura and everything she represented would rot away at the bottom of that well, unbeknownst to anyone. What happened to me as a result is something that no doubt you, as a specialist, are better qualified to explain than I.

My psyche, that which had died in that well, gradually took shape again within that woman. When I regained self-awareness, what I saw in the mirror was not my own face. At first, I did not understand what had happened. My face and my body were not my own; they belonged to another woman. But the “me” that was thinking that was indeed the true me. The city, too, looked unfamiliar. The cars lining the streets were so modern. The apartment (that tiny concrete box), the appliances, the electronics. When I looked at the calendar I found that twenty-five years had passed in the blink of an eye. I realized that somehow my spirit must have escaped my corpse and then taken up a new body twenty-five years later. The poor girl whose body I stole was Mai Takano.

My consciousness was not born when Mai gave birth to me. A seed named Sadako was already putting forth buds in the depths of Mai’s womb. As I grew, it grew, taking up residence within Mai, the master of that body. By the time I was ready to be born I ruled Mai completely from my place in her womb.

I was able to see things from two perspectives, mother and fetus, and touch and feel accordingly. With my little hands I was able to touch the soft folds of my own oviducts, feel them undulating like waves.

As my birth approached, one thing began to bother me. After I was born, what would become of the Mai-body? Would Mai’s soul return, would that body go back to wholeness as Mai Takano? Somehow I thought not. I had come to think of that borrowed body as my chrysalis. Just as the chrysalis cannot live by itself after the butterfly has grown, the body had to be discarded, having outlived its usefulness. It might have been a self-serving conclusion, but I felt that Mai had already died when her body had been usurped.

The question then became, where should I be born? If she bore me in her room, I would be faced with the need to dispose of her decomposing corpse. Judging from how rapidly my fetus had developed, I thought it would not be long before I reached maturity, and I would need a place to live. Mai’s apartment seemed the most sensible choice.

This meant that I had no other choice but to be born somewhere out of sight of the neighbors, someplace where I could leave behind the husk and return to the apartment alone. That rooftop was made to order. If I left the husk in the exhaust shaft, it would be some time before it was discovered, and in the meantime I could use Mai’s apartment freely.

As our time approached, I made preparations and went up to the roof in the middle of the night. I tied a cord to the metal grate and descended into the shaft. In the process I slipped and wrenched an ankle, but this did not bother the mother-body. I was able to be reborn into this world on schedule. I crawled out of the womb, severed the umbilical cord with my hands and mouth, and cleaned myself off with a wet towel I had readied for the purpose. I was born in the early morning, before sunrise. It was only then when I looked up that I first realized, with a shock, that the exhaust shaft looked quite like the well where I had died.

It was like a rite of passage prepared for me by the gods. I thought of it as a divinely appointed trial; I would not be able to adapt to this world, into which I’d been newly reborn, unless I crawled out ofthat hole on my own. But it wasn’t hard to do. A cord hung down from the rim. I climbed it and was able to emerge from the hole with no difficulty. The eastern sky was growing light and the city was awakening with it. Let me tell you, I drank the air greedily. I felt, quite literally, revived.

A week later I had grown to the age I had been at my death. Mysteriously, I retained all my memories from my previous life. My birth in Sashikiji on Izu Oshima Island, my transient life with my mother as she was subjected to parapsychological experiments, my aged father’s time in the sanatorium … I remembered it all. Why is that, I wonder. Perhaps memories are not engraved upon the folds of the brain, but stored in the genes.

Deep within my body, however, there was one way in which I could tell I differed from my previous self. Intuition is all I have to go by regarding the changes in my body, but I know beyond a doubt that I am different from what I was before. I seem to have both a womb and testicles. Previously, I had no womb. Reborn, I have both. I am now a complete hermaphrodite. What is more, the man in me can ejaculate. I learned that as a result of what we did together.

At that point, Miyashita raised his eyes from the notebook and glanced at Ando. Thinking Miyashita meant to tease him about sleeping with Sadako, Ando snapped, “Shut up and keep reading.”

But Miyashita was thinking about something else. “‘A complete hermaphrodite.’ Suppose she—it, maybe?—can have a child without procreative sex? Imagine the consequences.”

There are many lower organisms that can reproduce without male-female union. Worms, for example, have male and female parts in one body, and can lay fertilized eggs. Reproduction among single-celled organisms by cellular division also falls under the heading of asexual reproduction. A child born without input from a male and a female would have the same genes as its single parent. In other words, Sadako would give birth to another Sadako. If such a thing were possible.

“If that’s true, then …” Ando’s gaze wandered uneasily off into space. “Then Sadako isn’t human anymore. She’s a new species. New species arise due to mutation. This is evolution happening before our eyes!”

Ando tried to pursue the train of logic. The question was how Sadako meant to establish herself as a new species. When a new species arises as a result of mutation, it can find only unmutated individuals to mate with.

For example, suppose a single black sheep is born into a flock of thousands of white sheep. That black sheep must mate with a white sheep. Assuming the result of this mating to be a white or gray sheep, it’s easy to see how the trait of blackness must become weaker and weaker until it gradually disappears. Unless there are at least two black sheep, one of each sex, the trait will not be passed on down the generations.

But in Sadako’s case, the problem was already solved. If she could reproduce asexually, there was no need for her to choose a breeding partner. If she could reproduce herself, all alone, then all the traits that made her Sadako would be transmitted to the next generation.

However, with one Sadako giving birth to another Sadako, one at a time, the species’ rate of increase would be extremely slow, no faster than the videotape’s propagation, one copy at a time. And while the species dallied, the human race might corner it and annihilate it. Just as the killer videotape itself had been made extinct. In order to thrive, the new species needed to reproduce itself rapidly and en masse. Sadako needed to secure room to survive, perhaps by usurping human habitats, perhaps by flooding in through the cracks. Perhaps she already had a plan …

Ando’s thoughts were interrupted when Miyashita resumed reading from the notebook.

This has become rather a long letter, but I assure you that every word of it is true. I have simply told you honestly what happened to me. Why have I? So that you may understand. And now that you do understand, I would like to ask you to do something for me. Why you? Because I believe you, as an expert, have the expert knowledge that will be required.

Ando braced himself reflexively. Oh God, here it comes. What if it was something he didn’t know how to do? The thought filled him with anxiety.

First things first: I want you not to interfere with the publication of Ring.

Well, that was certainly within the scope of his abilities. All he had to do was do nothing.

I want you not to interfere with anything else I may try to do, either. I want you to cooperate with me.

Please listen to me. It is not my intention to threaten you, but I must tell you that something very bad will happen to you if you interfere. After all, you have already read the manuscript called Ring. Consider it too late, please, to do anything. If you cross me, you will find a change coming over your body. But I realize that you are courageous and may be willing to resist me even at the risk of death. So I think I must offer you a reward for granting my request. Nothing is free, is it? What would you say if I told you that I could offer you the thing you want most, namely …

Miyashita stopped reading and handed the notebook to Ando, evidently wanting him to see for himself what came next.

No sooner did Ando read what was written there than he dropped the notebook. In an instant he’d been robbed of the power to think; all strength had been sapped from his body. He’d never dreamed she would offer such a thing. Miyashita must have guessed how he was feeling, and he made no comment.

Ando’s eyes were shut. Sadako, he felt, was whispering sweetly to him that he should destroy the human race. That he should take the side of the new species, become its ally, and work on its behalf. Sadako understood that without collaborators among humans, her species could never survive. Junichiro Asakawa, through his efforts to publish Ring, was already acting on Sadako’s behalf. He probably didn’t yet realize it himself, but there was no question Sadako was manipulating him.

But the compensation Ando was being offered in exchange for his soul was more than enticing. How many times had he prayed for that dream to come true? Never thinking that it actually could.

Is such a thing possible? he asked himself. He opened his eyes and looked at the bookshelf. There it was, in an envelope sandwiched between two books. Medically, it wasn’t impossible. And with Sadako’s help, it might actually happen. Still …

He raised his voice in a cry of anguish. If Sadako wasn’t stopped now, there was no telling what suffering she’d bring to the human race. As a member of that race, Ando couldn’t betray it. In the end the only way to stop Sadako was to destroy her. But if her body was obliterated, his dream would be, too. The only way to make his dream come true was to keep Sadako safe and healthy.

Ando was openly groaning now from the depths of his torment. As he lay on the bed, belly heaving, he saw a figure behind his closed eyelids, a figure that he could not chase away.

“What should I do?” Ando wept. He was incapable of coming to a decision on his own.

“That’s your problem,” Miyashita said—not cruelly, but with calm self-possession.

“But I don’t know what I should do.”

“Think about it. If we get in Sadako’s way, you and I, we’ll be killed on the spot. She’ll just find someone else to assist her, that’s all.”

Miyashita was probably right. Everything was clear when he thought about it coolly. Ando’s meeting up with Sadako had not been pure chance. She’d been watching him. None of it was accident, not his brush with her in Mai’s apartment, not his rooftop encounter with her, not their meeting at Sangubashi Station. She’d foreseen that Ando would ferret out the truth, and she’d made her moves. Suddenly, Ando felt it was simply impossible to outmaneuver Sadako. All he had to do was make one false move and the ring virus in his body would start to wreak havoc on him.

Miyashita had seen this immediately and drawn the obvious conclusion, but Ando still couldn’t quite make up his mind.

“Are you saying I should cooperate with her?”

“What else can you do?”

“What about humanity?”

“Come on, stop acting like you’re a delegate for the whole species. Besides, you’ve already decided, haven’t you? Consider the reward, for God’s sake. Are you telling me you mean to pass it up?”

“But it’s not fair. What do you get out of it?”

“I’ll consider it a sort of insurance policy. One day I might be glad I had it, you know. We’ve no idea what life has in store for us.”

Ando realized he was cornered, snared. Decades from now, he would be in the history books, and not as a hero. He’d be remembered as the traitor thanks to whom the human race was driven to the brink of extinction. That was, of course, if there was still a human race to remember him. If the species ended, so did its history.

Why did I ever get involved in the first place?

Remorsefully, Ando thought back to how it had all begun for him. How could he forget it? There had been Ryuji’s autopsy, and then the code, RING. It was meant to inform Ando of the existence of a report, Ring. He’d read that report. If he hadn’t read it, he wouldn’t be in this mess now. If only he hadn’t read it …

Something interrupted Ando’s reflections. A thought. There was something else going on here.

“Ryuji,” he muttered. Miyashita gave him a worried look. Ando paid no attention, though, as he pursued this new line of reasoning. He was beginning to think he saw a will at work behind all the events he’d accepted as random. Had Ryuji really sent him the words “ring” and “mutation” in code out of pure goodwill? Just to tell Ando to pay attention? Ando began to doubt that. He began to see those hints as course corrections, delivered at moments when Ando seemed about to get off track. Why had Ryuji done such a thing?

There was something else, too. Just why had Mai ended up watching the killer video anyway? If it hadn’t been for the coincidence of her watching it on the very day she was ovulating, Sadako would never have been reborn. Where had Mai gotten the tape?

At Ryuji’s place.

Why had she gone there?

Ryuji’s article was missing a page.

But was it really missing a page?

Only Ryuji knows.

Everything came back to Ryuji.

Ryuji, Ryuji, Ryuji.

He and Mai had been intimate. It wasn’t strange if he knew her menstrual cycle. She’d been guided by him on that very day.

Oh Lord …

Ando looked at Miyashita’s face, at his eyes narrowed with concern, and whispered, “It’s Ryuji.”

Miyashita’s eyes narrowed even further: he didn’t understand.

“Don’t you see? It’s Ryuji. He’s been the one pulling the strings all along. He’s behind Sadako.”

As Ando repeated the name, he felt his suspicions harden into certainty. Ryuji had been playing all of them. He’d written the script.

Outside the window the sounds of the city at night eddied and swirled. A car passed by on the Metropolitan Expressway with a grating noise as if it were dragging something heavy behind it. Like fingernails on glass it sounded at first, then turned into loud male laughter, an eerie shriek coming from someplace far away. Ando thought it was Ryuji’s voice.

He called out to empty space. “Ryuji, are you there?”

Naturally there was no reply. But Ando could sense him. Ryuji was present. The man who had joined forces with Sadako to hunt humanity for sport was in his room, watching how things went, laughing derisively at Ando for noticing too late to do anything about it.

A light came on in Ando’s head as he surmised what Ryuji wanted. Something he was unable to obtain without Ando’s cooperation. Ryuji’s occult motives were finally clear, but it didn’t do Ando any good. It was too late, the course of events was beyond his influence. The only thing left for Ando to do was to join his voice with Ryuji’s, with the chuckling in the dark.

EPILOGUE

On a day so clear it was hard to believe it was still the rainy season, Ando went to the beach. Two years ago to the day, at this very place, his son had died. It wasn’t that Ando made a point of coming here on the anniversary. He hadn’t come the year before. But today he had a reason to be here.

Unlike two years ago, the waves today were gentle as they approached the shore. White sand stretched away on either side, and here and there anglers stood casting their lines. It was still early summer, and there were no bathers, only two or three families picnicking on plastic sheets.

Ando felt as if he’d been transported back to that fateful day. The waves were different, and there was a seawall stretching out from the shore that hadn’t been there before; even the contours of the dunes had changed. To Ando, however, everything was just as it had been. The last two years now seemed to him nothing but one long nightmare.

He sat on an embankment from which he could look down over the beach. Sunlight as bright as midsummer’s hit him full in the face. Shading his eyes with his hand, he squinted at a small figure playing at the water’s edge. The figure didn’t approach the water, but squatted in place, barefoot on dry sand, digging holes and making sand piles. Ando couldn’t take his eyes off the figure.

He thought he heard someone calling his name. Wondering if he’d imagined it, he looked around. He saw a stocky man who was walking along the top of the embankment, headed straight for Ando.

The man wore a striped long-sleeve shirt buttoned right up to the top. The shirt looked about to burst; the man’s chest and upper arms were amazingly well-muscled. His short neck was wrinkled above his painfully tight-looking collar. The man’s blocky, angular face was sweaty, and he was out of breath as he approached, swinging a plastic bag from a convenience store.

Ando recognized him. The last time he’d seen the man, it was at the medical examiner’s office, back in October.

The man sat down beside Ando, shoulder to shoulder with him.

“Hey, long time no see.”

Ando didn’t reply. He didn’t even meet the man’s eyes, but kept his gaze on the small figure playing near the waves.

“Man, you just disappeared without telling me where you were going. What kind of way is that to treat a friend?” The man took a can of cold oolong tea from the bag, cleared his throat, and drank it dry in a few gulps. When he’d finished, he took out another can and offered it to Ando. “Thirsty?”

Ando accepted the can silently and popped the ring pull.

“How did you know I was here?” Ando asked calmly.

“Miyashita told me that today was the anniversary of your kid’s death. The rest was guesswork. You’re not that hard to figure out,” the man laughed.

Ando had to restrain himself. “What do you want?”

“Look, I had to take a train and a bus to get here. I think I deserve a warmer welcome than this.”

“Bullshit,” Ando spat.

“Ooh, don’t be mean,” the man said, a smirk playing over his lips.

“Mean? Where do you get off calling me that? Who do you think is responsible for your being here?”

“Listen, I’m grateful to you, I really am. You worked out just as I expected.”

Ando was reminded of just how far this man had manipulated him. In medical school, in their days playing at cryptography, this guy could toss out a code that Ando couldn’t possibly break, and then turn around and immediately crack one Ando had wrung his brain to come up with. Ando had felt annoyed and frustrated, but also somehow inspired by the guy’s cleverness. Not anymore. Now, he just felt used, and insulted. He found nothing to praise in the man.

Ando looked over at Ryuji Takayama, whom he had helped bring back to the world. Ryuji was facing forward, and Ando looked at his profile, wishing he could see inside Ryuji’s head. He wished he knew what this man was thinking. Then he remembered that last October he actually had laid his hands on the man’s brain. Not that it helped him understand any of Ryuji’s thoughts. And because he hadn’t, he’d let Ryuji’s codes lead him into a mess. If he hadn’t performed Ryuji’s autopsy, he would never have become involved.

“Isn’t this better for you, too?” Ryuji said in a patronizing tone.

“I don’t know about that.” That was the truth.

Down by the water’s edge, the little figure stood up and waved at Ando. When he saw Ando make a beckoning motion with his head, the boy came closer, kicking sand as he came.

“Daddy, I’m thirsty!”

Ando offered his son the oolong tea Ryuji had given him. The boy took it and brought it quickly to his lips.

Ando watched his son’s pale throat. He could almost see the cool liquid coursing down the little throat. Living, moving flesh and blood.

Compared to the sweat oiling Ryuji’s face, the droplets of perspiration rolling down the three-and-a-half-year-old boy’s neck were like crystal. Ando could hardly believe they were basically the same fluid.

“Hi there, kid. Want another one? We’re two of a kind, you know,” Ryuji said, fishing around in his bag.

Two of a kind. The phrase stuck in Ando’s craw. It was true, though: the boy and Ryuji had been born of the same womb. Ando found it utterly horrifying.

His son looked at Ryuji and shook his head, then raised his half-finished can of tea and said, “Can I have the rest?”

“Sure, drink up,” said Ando, and the boy went back to the water’s edge, swilling the can. Ando figured the boy wanted to play with the can after it was empty, maybe fill it with sand. Ando yelled after him, “Takanori!”

The boy stopped and turned around. “What, Daddy?”

“Don’t go in the water yet, okay?”

The boy grinned, and turned his back to him again.

Ando didn’t have to stress the point. The child was still afraid of the water, as if he remembered drowning. He probably wouldn’t go into the water of his own accord. Even though he knew that, Ando couldn’t help but be a little overprotective.

“Cute kid.”

Ando didn’t need Ryuji to tell him. Of course Takanori was cute. He was a jewel, an irreplaceable treasure that he’d lost once. A treasure that he’d betrayed the human race to recover. Ando still wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing.

The reward Sadako had offered him in exchange for his help was to resurrect his son.

Half a year ago, when he and Miyashita had read those words in the letter Sadako had left in his apartment, Ando had found the idea too ludicrous to accept. But that feeling had passed in an instant, and he’d become a firm believer in resurrection. After all, he had Sadako herself as living proof. And he had carefully preserved a sample of his son’s DNA in the form of a lock of hair that he kept on the bookshelf. Without some cells from his son, the resurrection would have been impossible. If it weren’t for the fact that Ando’s hand had brushed against the boy’s head in the sea, catching those few strands of hair in his ring, Takanori’s genetic information would have been lost forever.

Scientifically speaking, it wasn’t difficult. As long as they had a maternal body with the special capabilities—as long as they had Sadako, in other words—modern science could easily take care of the rest.

The first thing to do was for Sadako to inseminate one of her own eggs. With both female and male functions, Sadako was the only one capable of implanting a fertilized egg in her uterine wall with no outside assistance. The next step was to remove this egg and replace its DNA with the DNA of the individual they wanted to bring back to life. True, it took delicate skill to extract the nucleus from one of the cells in Takanori’s hair and switch it with the nucleus of Sadako’s inseminated egg. But for a specialist, it wasn’t all that difficult. Theoretically, it was possible even to resurrect long-extinct dinosaurs, as long as their DNA survived.

The egg with its newly-implanted nucleus was then returned to Sadako’s womb. All they had to do now was wait for it to be born. The fetus crawled out of her womb in about a week, and a week after that, it had grown to the age at which the DNA sample had been separated from the rest of the original body. In Takanori’s case, it was the moment when the drowning boy’s head had touched his father’s hand, leaving a lock of hair behind. He even recovered all of his memories up to the point of his death. It appeared that memories were stored in the intron, the “junk” part of the DNA that doesn’t contain genetic code.

The Takanori that Ando was seeing now was in all respects identical to the son he’d lost. From his habits to the way he spoke, he was just like he used to be. He had all of his memories of his time with his parents, too, and speaking with him felt perfectly natural.

As soon as she’d presented Ando with his son, Sadako had demanded that he earn his reward. Her request was just what Ando had expected. She wanted him to use the same techniques to resurrect Ryuji. Bringing back Takanori was as much practice as payment. From the beginning, it had been Ryuji’s will to be reborn that had allowed him to expel the numerical code from his belly sutures, and then to insert a coded message into the ring virus’s DNA. And he’d gotten his wish. He’d gotten a body, and now he was sitting next to Ando in the flesh. It was he who’d been Sadako’s partner all along, and a formidable one at that.

This was the first time Ando had seen the resurrected Ryuji. As soon as he’d made sure that Ryuji’s DNA had been successfully switched with the inseminated egg’s, Ando had taken his son and disappeared. He told no one where they were going, leaving the rest of the operation in the hands of Miyashita and others. He figured that, with Ryuji’s conception, his role was over. With Ryuji around, there was no further need for him. Sadako’s greatest desire had been to have Ryuji around as a reliable ally.

At exactly what point had she and Ryuji decided to collude? Probably they’d communicated somehow at the DNA level, recognized in each other a valuable co-conspirator, and realized that a partnership would be for their mutual benefit.

But the question didn’t really interest Ando. His concern was monopolized now by the problem of how he was going to raise his son. To give himself time to think about it, he’d resigned from the university two months ago, and spent the time since traveling around and seeing the Japanese countryside. He had no particular aim. He just wanted to live at as far a remove from Ryuji and Sadako as possible.

Ryuji reached into a pocket and pulled out an ampoule.

“Here,” he said, offering it to Ando.

“What’s this?”

“A vaccine made from the ring virus.”

“A vaccine …” Ando accepted the tiny glass vial and examined it carefully.

Ando’s and Miyashita’s blood tests had come back positive. Just as they’d suspected, reading the Ring report had made them carriers of the virus. Ever since, they’d both been living in apprehension, wondering when the virus within them would start to act up.

“Take that and it’ll take care of the virus. Your worrying days are over.”

“Did you come all the way here just to give me this?”

“What, can’t a guy go to the beach once in a while?” Ryuji gave an embarrassed laugh. Ando let down his guard a little. No matter where he’d moved, he’d never have been able to relax as long as he carried the ring virus.

“So tell me. What’s going to happen to the world now?” Ando asked, putting the vial in his breast pocket and buttoning it shut.

“I don’t know.” Ryuji’s reply was blunt.

“Don’t give me that. Together you and Sadako are going to redesign the world and everything that lives in it—aren’t you?”

“I can tell you what’s going to happen in the immediate future. But after that … Even I don’t know.”

“Then at least tell me about the immediate future.”

“Ring’s sold over a million copies.”

“A million-seller, huh?” Ando already knew this. He’d seen it in newspapers. The book had already been through several reprints, a fact that was trumpeted in its marketing. But every time Ando saw the word “reprint” it made him think “replication”. Ring had been able to effect a near-instantaneous mass reproduction of itself. There were now more than a million people carrying the virus.

“They’re even making it into a movie.”

“A movie? Ring?”

“Mm-hmm. They cast the part of Sadako through an open casting call.”

“An open casting call?” Ando found himself reduced to repeating after Ryuji.

The resurrected man broke into laughter. “That’s right, an open casting call. And who do you think nailed the part of Sadako?”

Ando didn’t keep up on show-business news. “Tell me,” he said. How was he to know who’d passed the audition?

Ryuji was almost doubled over with laughter. “Don’t be such a dullard. You know her quite well.”

“Sadako … herself?”

It was only as he said the name that he realized the import of this development. Sadako had always wanted to be an actress. She’d joined a professional theater troupe right out of high school. She was no amateur, she had the training. It wasn’t surprising that she’d auditioned, and with her powers, she must have easily captured the casting director’s heart. Besides, it was an irresistible role. Sadako would be playing herself. Ando thought he could guess why. She wanted to project her thoughts into the film, so that when the movie showed the killer videotape, it carried her genetic information again. The extinct tape itself was now to be resurrected, and on a grand scale.

And what would be the result? Ando had no idea how big a hit it would be, but it was certain that a fair number of women would go to the theater to see it; those who happened to be ovulating would be visited by the same tragedy that had destroyed Mai. A week later, they would all give birth to Sadako, their own bodies cast aside as used cocoons, abandoned to decay.

And then the movie would hit the video rental shops, and then it’d be broadcast on TV. The images would spread far more quickly than they ever could have through one-copy-at-a-time dubbing. This would be reproduction at an explosive rate. And these new Sadakos would all be able to have children of their own, by themselves. Sadako had managed to work out a method by which she’d have the whole world wrapped instantly around her finger.

“Sadako’s going to breed with the media,” Ryuji said, finally done laughing and looking up.

“They’ll figure it out soon enough, and the movie will be suppressed.” Not just the movie, but the book, too. All circulating copies would be rounded up and burned. Ando wanted to believe that humanity would rally.

“Nope. Just think how huge the media industry is, and how many people in it have already been in contact with the virus. Even if Ring itself is destroyed, the media is going to be transformed by people who have contracted the ring virus. Just as that videotape mutated into a book, it’s going to get into every stream: music, video games, computer networks. New media will crossbreed with Sadako and produce more new media, and every ovulating woman who comes in contact with them will give birth to Sadako.”

Ando touched his breast pocket and felt the vial of vaccine. It would be effective only against the ring virus. It would be powerless against mutated media. Without knowing what type of media the virus would mutate into, it was impossible to concoct a vaccine that would be effective against them. Humanity would forever lag behind. Sadako, the new species, would gradually crowd out the human race until finally she’d driven it to the edge of extinction.

“And you’re okay with all that?”

Ando himself couldn’t peacefully sit back and watch as people died and Sadako took their places. But never mind him. Ryuji was taking an active role in the whole thing, helping it along. Ando simply couldn’t understand that.

“You’re looking at it from a human standpoint. I’m not. The way I see it, one person dies, one Sadako is born. Add one here, take one there, the total’s still the same. Where’s the problem?”

“That’s totally beyond my comprehension.”

Ryuji brought his sweaty face right up close to Ando’s. “Now’s no time for you to be bitching. You’re on our side now.”

“To do what?”

“You’ll get to intervene in evolution, for one thing. A pretty rare opportunity, if you ask me.”

“Evolution? Is that what you call this?”

All the diversity of human DNA would converge with the single DNA pattern that was Sadako. Was that evolution? It seemed rather a point of weakness to Ando. It’s precisely because of genetic diversity that some plague victims die while others survive. Even if another ice age comes, thought Ando, the Inuit would be able to live through it, and this would be thanks to diversity, in this case of populations within the human species. If this diversity vanished, then the slightest mischance could lead to the downfall of the whole species. If, say, the original Sadako Yamamura had some defect in her immune system, the defect would be present in every subsequent Sadako. A simple cold could come as a mighty blow to a species.

Ando could only hope that happened. The only path left for the human race was to scrape by and wait for the Sadako species to die out.

“Do you know why living things evolve?”

Ando shook his head. He doubted there was anyone who could answer that question with perfect confidence.

But Ryuji’s voice had that confidence as he continued. “Take the eye. I know I don’t have to explain this to an anatomist like yourself, Dr Ando, but the human eye is an amazingly complex mechanism. It’s next to impossible to imagine that a piece of skin evolved into a cornea, a pupil, an eyeball, an optical nerve connecting it to the brain, all in such a way as to make it actually see. It’s hard to believe it all happened by chance. It wasn’t that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape. It wasn’t chance that led sea creatures to first crawl onto the land, or reptiles to learn how to fly. They had the will to do so. Now, try and say this and most experts will just laugh. They’ll call it mystical teleology, an execrable excuse for philosophy.

“Can you imagine what the world is like for a creature that can’t see? To the worms crawling around in the earth, the world is only what touches their bodies there in the darkness. For starfish or sea anemones waving around on the ocean floor, the whole world is the texture of the rock they’re stuck to and the feel of the water as it flows by. Do you think such a creature can even conceptualize seeing? It beggars the imagination. It’s one of those things you can’t contemplate, like the edge of the universe. But somehow, at a certain point in its evolution, life on earth acquired the concept of ‘seeing’. We crawled up onto the land, we flew into the skies, and in the end we grasped culture. A chimp can comprehend a banana. But it’ll never be able to comprehend the concept of culture. It can’t comprehend it, but somehow it gets the will to obtain it. Where that impulse comes from, I have no idea.”

“Oh, so there’s something even you don’t know?” Ando said with all the sarcasm he could muster.

“Pay attention. If the human race goes extinct and Sadako Yamamura’s DNA takes its place, in the end it’s because the human race willed it.”

“Does any species desire its own extinction?”

“Subconsciously, isn’t that what humanity desired? If all DNA were united into one pattern, there would be no more individual difference. Everyone would be the same, with no distinctions in ability, or beauty. There’d be no more attachment to loved ones. And forget about war, there wouldn’t even be any more arguments. We’re talking a world of absolute peace and equality that transcends even life and death. Death would no longer be something to fear, you see. Now, be honest, isn’t that what you humans wanted all along?”

By the end of his speech, Ryuji had brought his mouth even closer and was whispering into Ando’s ear. Ando, meanwhile, simply kept staring at Takanori, who for some time now had been crouched in the same position, packing sand into his empty can.

“Not me,” he replied. His son was special to him, unique. Ando had no desire to see things exactly as other people did. He could say that with confidence.

“Well, whatever,” Ryuji laughed, getting to his feet.

“Are you leaving?”

“It’s about time I took off. What are you going to do now?”

“What can I do? I’ll find a deserted island someplace out of the media’s reach, and raise my son there.”

“That sounds like you. Me, I’m going to watch the end of the human race. Once it’s gone as far as it can go, who knows, maybe a will beyond human wisdom will come raining its wrath down on us. I’d hate to miss that.”

Ryuji started walking away along the embankment.

“Bye, Ryuji. Say hi to Miyashita for me.”

Ryuji stopped again at the sound of Ando’s voice.

“Maybe I ought to teach you one more thing before I go. Why do you think human culture progressed? People can endure almost anything, but there’s one thing they just can’t survive. Man is an animal that can’t stand boredom. And that’s what set the whole thing off. In order to escape boredom, humanity had to progress. I imagine it’ll be pretty boring to be controlled by a single strand of DNA. Think about it in those terms, and it seems like you’d want to have as much individual variation as possible. But hey, what can we do? People just don’t want that variation. Oh, and one last thing—I think you’re going to be pretty bored on that desert island.”

With that and a wave of his hand, Ryuji walked off.

Ando had no definite plans as to where they were going to live. The future was still too uncertain for that. Prospects were such that maybe no plan, no matter how ingenious, would work. He’d just have to drift for a while and let happen what may.

Ando took off his shirt and slacks. He was wearing swim trunks underneath. He ran to his son, took the boy’s hand, and helped him to his feet.

“Let’s go.”

He’d explained to his son a hundred times what they needed to do today and why they needed to do it. They were going to swim out into the ocean just as they had two years ago, and then, when the boy was on the verge of drowning, Ando would take firm hold of his hand. Two years ago their hands had missed. Today they were going to hold on tight.

In the letter she’d left him, Sadako had written that when she was reborn in the exhaust shaft on the roof of that building, she realized it was the exact same situation, physically, as the bottom of the well where she’d died. And only when she had crawled out of the hole on her own did she sense, intuitively, that she’d be able to adapt to the new world. Ando thought his son needed to undergo the same sort of trial. The boy needed to be put in the same situation he’d been in two years ago.

Takanori had an abnormal fear of water, so strong that it was going to make daily life difficult for him if he couldn’t conquer it. As they walked along over the wet sand, Ando could feel Takanori’s hand tighten on his in fear every time seawater lapped at the boy’s ankles.

Now the boy turned to him with trembling lips and said, “Daddy, you promised, right?”

“Yes, I did.”

Ando had already prepared the reward he’d promised the boy for meeting his father’s expectations and overcoming his fear of the water. He was going to let him meet his mother.

“Mommy’s going to be so surprised.”

His wife didn’t know yet that their son had been brought back to life. Ando got excited just thinking about the moment when mother and son would be reunited. He’d have to think of a plausible story. Maybe he could say that the boy hadn’t drowned after all but had been rescued by a fishing boat; that he’d had amnesia, that he’d lived with other folks for the last two years. It didn’t matter how ridiculous the story was. The minute she touched Takanori, alive in the flesh, it would become the truth.

Whether or not they’d be able to make it as a married couple again was another question. Ando wanted to try. He gave himself a fifty-fifty chance.

A particularly big wave came along and started to raise the boy’s body off the sand. The boy gave a little shriek and clung tightly to Ando’s waist. Ando held his son tightly to his side and waded out into the sea. He could feel his son’s heartbeat. That rhythm was the only sure thing in a world facing destruction. It proved they were alive.

LOOP

KOJI SUZUKI

Translation

Glynne Walley

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One: At the End of the Night

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two: The Cancer Ward

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part Three: Journey to the End of the Earth

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Four: The Space Underground

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Five: Advent

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

PART ONE

At the End of the Night

1

He opened the sliding glass door, and the smell of the sea poured into the room. There was hardly any wind—the humid night air rose straight up from the black water of the bay to envelop his body, fresh from the bath. The resulting immediacy of the ocean was a not-unpleasant feeling for Kaoru.

He made a habit of going out onto the balcony after dinner to observe the movements of the stars and the waxing and waning of the moon. The moon’s expression was constantly, subtly changing for him, and watching it gave him a mystical sort of feeling. Often it would give him ideas.

Gazing up into the night sky was part of his daily routine. He’d slide open the door, feel around in the darkness below until he found his sandals, and step into them. Kaoru liked it up here on the twenty-ninth floor of the apartment tower, on this balcony thrust into the darkness. It was where he felt most at home.

September was mostly gone, but not the heat of summer. The tropical evenings had arrived in June, and while the calendar now said it was autumn, they showed no sign of faltering yet.

He didn’t know when the summers had started getting longer. All he knew was that coming out onto the balcony like this every evening never cooled him off. It just brought him face to face with the heat.

But then the stars rushed right down to him, so close that he felt like he could touch them if he only stretched out his hand, and he forgot the heat.

The residential part of Odaiba, facing Tokyo Bay, boasted an overgrowth of condominium towers, but not many residents. The banks of windows only gave off a limited amount of light, little enough in fact to allow a clear view of the stars.

An occasional fresh breeze took the sea out of the air some, and his hair, just washed and still clinging to the back of his neck, began to dry.

“Kaoru, close the door! You’ll catch cold!” His mother’s voice, from behind the kitchen counter. The movement of the air must have told her that the door was open. She couldn’t see the balcony from where she was, though, so Kaoru doubted she realized that he was outside, fully exposed to the night air.

How could anybody catch cold in this heat, he wondered, exasperated at his mother’s over-protectiveness. Not that it was anything new. He had no doubt that if she knew he was out on the balcony, she’d literally drag him back inside. He shut the door behind him so he couldn’t hear her anymore.

Now he was the sole possessor of this sliver of space jutting into the sky a hundred yards above the ground. He turned around and looked through the glass door into the apartment. He couldn’t see his mother directly. But he could read her presence in the milky band of fluorescent light that shone from the kitchen onto the sofa in the living room. As she stood in front of the sink, cleaning up after the meal, her movements caused slight disturbances in the rays of light.

Kaoru returned his gaze to the darkness and thought the same thoughts he always did. He dreamed of being able to elucidate, somehow, the workings of the world that surrounded and contained him. It wasn’t that he hoped to solve a mystery or two on the cutting edge of a particular field. What he desired was to discover a unifying theory, something to explain all phenomena in the natural world. His father, an information-engineering researcher, had basically the same dream. When they were together, father and son discussed nothing but the natural sciences.

But it wasn’t quite right to call them discussions. Basically, Kaoru, who had just turned ten, shot questions at his father, and his father answered them. Kaoru’s father, Hideyuki, had started out as part of a team working on an artificial life project. Then he’d elected to move his research into a university setting, becoming a professor. Hideyuki never blew off Kaoru’s questions. In fact, he maintained that his son’s bold thinking, unrestrained as it was by common sense, sometimes even gave him hints he could use in his research. Their conversations were always deadly serious.

Whenever Hideyuki managed to get a Sunday afternoon off, he and Kaoru would spend it in heated discussions, the progress of which Machiko, Hideyuki’s wife and Kaoru’s mother, would watch with a satisfied look on her face. Her husband had a tendency to get so involved in what he was saying that he would forget his surroundings; her son, on the other hand, never neglected to be mindful that his mother was probably feeling left out because she was unable to join in the debates. He’d explain the issues they were discussing, breaking them down into bitesize chunks, in an effort to allow her to participate. It was a kind of consideration Hideyuki would never be able to imitate.

She always wore the same look of satisfaction as she watched her son, full of gratitude for his effortless kindness and pride that at age ten he could already discuss the natural sciences at a level so far beyond her own understanding.

Headlights flowed along on Rainbow Bridge far below. Kaoru wondered expectantly if his father’s motorbike was in that belt of light. As always, he couldn’t wait for his father to get home.

It was ten years ago that Hideyuki had gone from mere team member on the artificial life project to university professor; ten years ago that he’d moved from the Tokyo suburbs to this condo in Odaiba. The living environment here—the tall apartment buildings on the water’s edge—suited his family’s tastes. Kaoru never got tired of looking down from on high, and then when night came, he’d pull the stars down close, using them to bolster his imagination concerning the world whose ways he couldn’t yet fully grasp.

A living space high above the ground: the kind of thing to foster a bird’s eye. Kaoru fell to wondering. If birds represented an evolutionary advance from reptiles, it meant that living spaces had gradually progressed skyward. What effect did that have on human evolution? Kaoru realized that it had been a month since he’d set foot on soil.

As he placed his hands on the balcony railing, about his own height, and stretched, he felt it. And not for the first time, either. He’d felt it from time to time for as long as he could remember. Only never, oddly enough, had the feeling come over him when he was with his family.

He was used to it by now. So he didn’t turn around, even though he could feel someone watching him from behind. He knew what would be there if he did: the same living room, the dining room beyond it, the kitchen next to it, all unchanged. And in the kitchen, his mother Machiko washing dishes just like always.

Kaoru shook his head to chase away the feeling that he was being watched. And the sensation seemed to take a step back, blending into the darkness and disappearing into the sky.

Once he was sure it was gone, Kaoru turned around and pressed his back against the railing. Everything was just as it had been. His mother’s shadow, flickering in the band of light from the kitchen doorway. Where had they gone, those countless eyes watching him from behind? Kaoru had felt them, unmistakably. Innumerable gazes, fastened on him.

He should have felt those inky stares on his back when he was like this, staring into the apartment, his back to the night. But now those eyes had disappeared, assimilated into the darkness.

Just what was it that was watching him? Kaoru had never thrown this question out at his father. He doubted even his father would be able to give him an answer.

Now he felt a chill, in spite of the heat. He no longer felt like being on the balcony.

Kaoru went back into the living room and peeked into the kitchen at his mother. She’d finished washing the dishes and was now wiping the edge of the sink with a dishcloth. Her back was to him, and she was humming. He stared at her thin, elegant shoulders, willing her to notice his gaze. But she just kept humming, unmoved.

Kaoru came up behind her and spoke.

“Hey, Mom, when’s Dad getting home?”

He hadn’t intended to startle her, but there was no denying that his approach had been a little too silent, and his voice when he spoke a little too loud. Machiko jumped, her arms jerked, and she knocked over a dish that she’d placed at the edge of the sink.

“Hey, don’t scare me like that!”

She caught her breath and turned around, hands to her breast.

“Sorry,” Kaoru said. He often accidentally took his mother unawares like this.

“How long have you been standing there, Kaoru?”

“Just a few seconds.”

“You know Mom’s jumpy. You shouldn’t startle me like that,” she scolded.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it.”

“Really? Well, you did it all the same.”

“Didn’t you notice? I was staring at your back, just for a few seconds.”

“Now, why should I notice that? I don’t have eyes in the back of my head, you know.”

“I know, but, I …” He trailed off. What he wanted to say was, People can feel someone staring at them even if they don’t turn around. But he knew that would scare his mother even more.

So he went back to his original question. “When’s Dad getting home?” Of course, he knew it was pointless to ask: not once had his mother ever known when his father was coming home.

“He’ll probably be late again today, I imagine.” She gave her usual vague answer, glancing at the clock in the living room.

“Late again?”

Kaoru sounded disappointed, and Machiko said, “You know your dad’s really busy at work these days. He’s just getting started on a new project, remember?” She tried to take his side. He got home late every night, but never did she betray the slightest hint of discontent.

“Maybe I’ll wait up for him.”

After she’d finished putting away the dishes, Machiko went over to her son, wiping her hands with the dishcloth.

“Do you have something you want to ask him again?”

“Yeah.”

“About his work?”

“Unh-uh.”

“How about I ask him for you?”

“Huh?” Kaoru couldn’t stop himself from laughing.

“Knock that off! You know, I’m not as dumb as you think I am. I did go to grad school, you know.”

“I know that. But … you studied English lit, right?”

Machiko had indeed belonged to a department of English language and literature at the university, but to be exact her focus had been on American culture, rather than English literature. She’d been particularly knowledgeable about Native American traditions; even now she kept up on it, reading in her free time.

“Never mind that, just tell me. I want to hear what you have to say.”

Still holding the dishcloth, Machiko ushered her son into the living room. Kaoru thought it was a little odd: why should she suddenly take an interest tonight, of all nights? Why was she reacting differently?

“Wait a minute, then.” Kaoru went to his bedroom and came back with two pieces of paper. He sat down on the sofa next to his mother.

As she glanced at the pages in Kaoru’s hand, Machiko said, “What’s this? I hope these aren’t full of difficult figures again!” When it came to mathematical questions, she knew it was time for her to admit defeat.

“It’s nothing hard like that this time.”

He handed her the two pages, face up, and she looked at them in turn. A map of the world was printed on each one.

“Well, this is a change. You’re studying geography now?”

Geography was one of her strong suits, particularly North American. She was confident that in this field, at least, she knew more than her son.

“Nope. Gravitational anomalies.”

“What?” It looked like she’d be out of her league after all. A faint look of despair crept into her eyes.

Kaoru leaned forward and began to explain how these maps showed in one glance the earth’s gravitational anomalies.

“Okay, there’s a small difference between the values you get from the gravity equation and those you get by correcting gravitation acceleration for the surface of the geoid. Here we have those differences written on maps in terms of positive or negative numbers.”

The pages were numbered, “1” and “2”. On the first map were drawn what seemed like an endless series of contour lines representing gravitational anomalies, and each line was labeled with a number accompanied by a plus sign or a minus sign. The contour lines looked just like the ones found in any normal atlas, where positive numbers equaled heights above sea level and negative numbers depths below sea level.

But in this case, the lines showed the distribution of gravitational anomalies. In this case, the greater the positive number, the stronger the gravitational force, and the greater the negative number, the weaker the gravitational force at that particular location. The unit was the milligal (mgal). The map was shaded, too: the whiter areas corresponded to positive gravitational anomalies, while the darker areas corresponded to negative ones. It was set up so that everything could be understood at a glance.

Machiko stared long and hard at the gravitational anomaly distribution map she held in her hands, and then looked up and said, “Alright, I give up. What is a gravitational anomaly?” She’d long since given up trying to fake knowledge in front of her son.

“Mom, surely you don’t think that the earth’s gravity is the same everywhere, do you?”

“I haven’t thought about it once since the day I was born, to be honest.”

“Well, it’s not. It varies from place to place.”

“So what you’re saying is that on this map, the bigger the positive number, the stronger the force of gravity, and the bigger the negative number, the weaker, right?”

“Uh-huh, that’s right. See, the matter that makes up the earth’s interior doesn’t have a uniform mass. Think of it like this: if a place has a negative gravitational anomaly, it means that the geological material below it has less mass. In general, the higher the latitude, the stronger the force of gravity.”

“And what’s that piece of paper?”

Machiko pointed to the page marked “2”. This, too, was a map of the world, but without the complex contour lines: instead it was marked with dozens of black dots.

“These are longevity zones.”

“Longevity zones? You mean places where people tend to live longer?”

First a map of gravitational anomalies, and now a map of longevity zones—she was growing more confused by the minute.

“Right. Places whose residents clearly live longer than people living in other areas. This map shows how many of these spots there are in the world,” Kaoru said, indicating the black dots on the map. Four of them were actually marked with double circles. The Caucasus region on the shores of the Black Sea, the Samejima Islands of Japan, the area of Kashmir at the foot of the Karakoram Mountains, and the southern part of Ecuador. All had areas famous for the longevity of their inhabitants.

Kaoru seemed to think the second map needed no further explanation. Machiko, though, was looking at it for the first time. She urged him on. “So?” The real question now was, of course, what the two maps had to do with each other.

“Put one on top of the other.”

Machiko obeyed. They were the same size, so it was easily done.

“Now hold them up to the light.” Kaoru pointed to the living room chandelier.

Machiko raised them slowly, trying to keep the pages aligned. Now the black dots of the one were showing up in the midst of the contour lines of the other.

“Get it?”

Machiko didn’t know what she was supposed to get.

“Stop putting on airs. Tell me what I’m supposed to see.”

“Well, look—the longevity zones correspond perfectly to the low-gravity areas, don’t they?”

Machiko stood up and brought the pages closer to the light. It was true: the black dots representing longevity zones only showed up in places demarcated on the first map by low-gravity lines. Very low gravity.

“You’re right,” she said, not bothering to disguise her astonishment. But she still cocked her head as if not entirely convinced. As if to say she still wasn’t sure what it was all supposed to mean.

“Well, maybe there’s a relationship between longevity and gravity.”

“And that’s what you want to ask your father about?”

“Well, yeah. By the way, Mom, what do you think the odds were of life arising on earth naturally?”

“Like winning the lottery.”

Kaoru laughed out loud. “Come on! Way smaller. You can’t even compare the two. We’re talking a miracle.”

“But someone always wins the lottery.”

“You’re talking about a lottery with, like, a hundred tickets and one winner, where a hundred people buy tickets. I’m talking about rolling dice a hundred times and having them come up sixes every time. What would you think if that happened?”

“I’d think the game was rigged.”

“Rigged?”

“Sure. If someone rolled the same number a hundred times in a row, it’d have to mean the dice were loaded, wouldn’t it?” As she said this, she poked a finger into Kaoru’s forehead affectionately, as if to say, Silly.

“Loaded, huh?”

Kaoru thought for a while, mouth hanging open. “Of course. Loaded dice. It had to be rigged. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

“Right?”

“And humanity just hasn’t noticed that it’s rigged. But, Mom—what if dice that aren’t loaded come up with the same number a hundred times in a row?”

“Well, then we’re talking about God, right? He’s the only one who could do something like that.”

Kaoru couldn’t tell if his mother really believed that or not.

He decided to move on. “By the way, do you remember what happened on TV yesterday?” Kaoru was referring to his favorite afternoon soap opera. He loved the soaps so much that he even had his mother tape them for him sometimes.

“I forgot to watch.”

“Well, remember how Sayuri and Daizo met again on the Cape?”

Kaoru proceeded to recount the plot of yesterday’s episode almost as if it involved people he knew personally. Sayuri and Daizo were a young couple in their first year of marriage, and a series of misunderstandings had brought them to the brink of divorce. They were still in love, but coincidence had piled on coincidence until they were hopelessly tangled in the cords that bind men and women: now they were in a morass they couldn’t find their way out of. So they’d separated. And then, one day, by pure chance, they’d run into each other on a certain point of land on the Japan Sea coast. The place was special to them—it was where they’d first met. And as they began to remember all the wonderful times they’d had together there, their old feelings for each other had been reawakened. They cleared up their misunderstandings one by one, until they were sure of each other’s love again.

Of course, a heartwarming twist lay behind this trite tale. Both of them were under the impression that it was purely by chance that they’d run into each other on this sentimental promontory, but they were wrong. They had friends who were desperate to see them make up, and those friends had colluded, taking it upon themselves to arrange it so that each would be there at that moment.

“Get it, Mom? What are the chances of a separated couple running into each other like that—being in the same place at the same time on the same day? Not exactly zero. Coincidental meetings do happen. But in some cases, when the chances of something happening are really small, and then it actually happens, you tend to think that there’s somebody in the shadows pulling strings. In this case, it was Sayuri and Daizo’s nosy friends.”

“I think I see where you’re going with this. You’re trying to say that even though there was almost zero chance of it happening, life actually did arise. After all, we exist. In which case, there must be something somewhere pulling the strings. Right?”

Kaoru felt that way constantly. There were times when the idea that he was being watched, manipulated, insinuated itself into his brain for no apparent reason. Whether this was a phenomenon unique to himself, or whether it was in fact universal, was something he hadn’t yet figured out.

Suddenly he got chills. He shivered. He looked at the sliding-glass door and found that it was open a crack. Still seated on the sofa, he twisted his body until he could close the door.

2

Kaoru just couldn’t get to sleep. It was already thirty minutes since he’d crawled into his futon after having given up on waiting for his father to get home.

It was customary in the Futami household for both parents and their son to sleep in the same Japanese-style room. With its three Western-style rooms, one Japanese-style room, and good-sized living room, plus dining room and kitchen, their apartment was more than large enough for the three of them. They each had their own room. But for some reason, when it came time to sleep, they’d all gather in the Japanese-style room and lie down together. They’d spread out their futons with Machiko in the middle, flanked by Hideyuki and Kaoru. It had been like that ever since Kaoru was born.

Staring at the ceiling, Kaoru spoke softly to his mother, lying next to him.

“Mom?”

No reply. Machiko tended to fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

Kaoru wasn’t what you’d exactly call agitated, but there was a faint pounding of excitement in his chest. He was sure he’d discovered something in the relative positions of gravitational anomalies and longevity zones. It couldn’t be just a coincidence. The simple interpretation was that gravity was somehow related to human longevity—perhaps even to the secret of life itself.

He’d discovered the correlation purely by chance. There’d been a documentary on TV about villages where people lived to extraordinary ages, and it just so happened that at that moment his computer screen had been displaying a map of world gravitational anomalies. Lately he’d come across a lot of information about gravitational anomalies while fooling around on the computer; he’d gotten interested in gravity. Between the TV screen and the computer screen, something triggered his sixth sense, and he’d overlaid the two maps. It was the kind of inspiration only given to humankind.

No matter how prodigious its ability to process information, no matter how fast its calculation speed, a computer has no “inspiration” function, reflected Kaoru. It was impossible for a machine to bring together two utterly disparate phenomena and consider them as one. Were such an ability to arise, it would be because human brain cells had somehow been incorporated into the hardware. Human-computer intercourse.

Which actually sounded pretty intriguing to Kaoru. There was no telling what sort of sentient life form that would bring into the world. Endlessly fascinating.

Kaoru’s desire to understand the workings of the world manifested itself in a lot of different questions, but at the root of all of them was one basic unknown: the source of life.

How did life begin? Or, alternatively: Why am I here?

Evolutionary theory and genetics both piqued his curiosity, but his biological inquiries always centered on that one point.

He wasn’t a single-minded believer in the variation on the coacervate theory which held that an inorganic world developed gradually until RNA and DNA appeared. He understood that the more one inquired into life the more the idea of self-replication became a big factor. It was DNA that governed self-replication; under the direction of the genetic information it carried came the formation of proteins, the stuff of life. Proteins were made of alignments of hundreds of amino acids, in twenty varieties. The code locked away within DNA was in fact the language that defined the way those acids aligned.

Until those amino acids lined up in a certain predetermined way, they wouldn’t form a protein meaningful to life. The primordial sea was often likened to a soup thick with the prerequisites for life. Then some power stirred that thick soup up, until it so happened that things lined up in a meaningful way. But what were the odds of that?

To make it easier to comprehend, Kaoru decided to think in terms of a much smaller, neater number. Take a line of a hundred amino acids in twenty varieties, with one of them turning into a protein, the stuff of life. The probability then would be twenty to the hundredth power. Twenty to the hundredth power was a number far greater than all the hydrogen atoms in the universe. In terms of odds, it was like playing several times in a row a lottery in which the winning ticket was one particular hydrogen atom out of a whole universe full of them, and winning every time.

In short, the probability was infinitesimal. Essentially impossible. In spite of which, life had arisen. Therefore, the game had to have been rigged. Kaoru wanted to know just how the wall of improbability had been surmounted. His uttermost desire was to understand the nature of that dice-loading—without resorting to the concept of God.

On the other hand, sometimes there arose the suspicion that maybe everything was an illusion. There was no way to actually confirm that his body existed as a body. His cognitive abilities may have convinced him that it did, but there was always the possibility that reality was empty.

As he lay there in the dim room, illuminated by only a night light, the stillness was such that he could hear his heart beat. So it would seem that right now, at this very moment, it was no mistake to think that he was alive. He wanted to believe in the sound of his heart.

The roar of a motorcycle sounded in Kaoru’s inner ear. A sound he shouldn’t have been able to hear. A sound that shouldn’t in reality have been able to reach his ears.

“Dad’s home.”

In his mind’s eye Kaoru could see his father on his off-road bike skidding into the underground parking area a hundred yards below. He’d bought that bike new less than two months ago. Now his father got off the bike and looked at it with satisfaction. He used it to commute to work, probably because otherwise he’d have no time to ride it. And now he was home. The signs of it communicated themselves to Kaoru intensely. There was no mistaking them. Separated though they were, Kaoru’s sixth sense enabled him to follow his father’s movements tonight.

Kaoru imagined his father’s every little movement, tracing each one in his mind. Now he was turning off the ignition, now he was standing in the hall in front of the elevator with his helmet tucked under his arm, now he was looking up at the floor indicator lights.

Kaoru counted to see how long it took him to get to the twenty-ninth floor. The elevator door opened and his father strode quickly down the carpeted corridor. He stood in front of the door to apartment 2916. He fished his card-key from his pocket and inserted it …

Imagined motions and sounds were replaced by real ones starting with the click of the front door opening. He felt a palpable moment of precariousness, caught between imagination and reality, and a cry rose within his breast.

It was Dad after all!

Kaoru wanted to jump up and go to greet his father, but he forced himself to hold back. He wanted to try and forecast what his father would do now.

Hideyuki seemed to be walking down the hall in the apartment with no care for who might be trying to sleep. The helmet under his arm banged loudly against the wall. His humming was nothing short of its normal volume. At the best of times, Hideyuki seemed to make more than the usual amount of noise when he moved. Maybe it was because he radiated so much energy.

Suddenly Kaoru found himself unable to read what his father would do next. All sound stopped, and he had no idea where his father was. His mind was a blank, but then the sliding door to the room where he slept was flung roughly open. Without warning, light from the hall flooded the room. Not that it was that bright, but still Kaoru had to narrow his eyes against it. He hadn’t foreseen this. Hideyuki walked onto the tatami mats until he was right next to Kaoru’s futon. Then he knelt and brought his mouth close to his son’s ear.

“Hey, kiddo, wake up.”

Kaoru pretended he’d just this minute woken up, saying, “Oh, Dad. What time is it?”

“One in the morning.”

“Huh.”

“C’mon, wake up.”

This happened a lot to Kaoru—getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night so he could keep his dad company over beer, conversing till dawn. Kaoru would always end up missing school the next day, sleeping the whole morning away.

Last week he’d been late for school twice on account of his father. Hideyuki evidently didn’t think much of what his son was studying in elementary school. Kaoru often found himself exasperated at his father’s lack of common sense: to a kid, school wasn’t just a place to study, it was also a place to play. His dad didn’t seem to get that.

“I want to go to school tomorrow.”

Kaoru whispered so as not to wake his mother, sleeping next to him. He didn’t mind getting up to talk—in fact, he’d like nothing better—but he wanted to make it plain that it shouldn’t go too late.

“Pretty responsible for a kid. Who do you take after, anyway?” With a devil-may-care tone in his voice, he ignored Kaoru’s efforts to keep the noise down. Frustrated, Kaoru leapt out of his futon. If he didn’t get Dad out of the room now, he’d wake Mom up.

Yeah, who did he take after? In terms of facial features, Kaoru and his father sure didn’t have much in common. In terms of personality, too, Kaoru was a lot more sensitive—high-strung, even—than his rough-and-tumble father. Of course, he was still a child, but still, Kaoru was sometimes puzzled by how little he and his father resembled each other, outwardly or inwardly.

Kaoru put his hands on his father’s back and pushed him across the room into the hall. Then he kept pushing him until they’d made it to the living room, at which point he sighed and said, “Boy, you’re heavy,” and stopped.

If his son was going to push, Hideyuki was going to lean back, which he did, putting up a playful resistance which he supplemented with a forceful fart and a vulgar laugh. Then he noticed that where Kaoru had shoved him to was right next to the kitchen counter: as if he’d just remembered something, he walked over to the refrigerator and opened it.

He took out a beer, poured some in a glass, and held it out to the still-panting Kaoru.

“You want some too?”

Hideyuki hadn’t stopped for a drink on the way home. He was stone-cold sober. This was the first alcohol he’d seen today.

“No thanks. Mom’ll get mad at you again.”

“Stop being so responsible.”

Hideyuki took a showy swig and wiped his mouth. “I guess when a kid’s got a dad like me, he’s got to have his shit together, huh?”

With an audible gulp Hideyuki drained his second glass, and in no time he’d finished the bottle.

“I’ll tell you, this stuff tastes best when I’m looking at you, kiddo.”

For his part, Kaoru didn’t mind keeping his father company when he was drinking. His father took such obvious pleasure in his alcohol that Kaoru had fun just watching him. As the fatigue of the day’s work left his father, Kaoru’s mood, too, lightened.

Kaoru went to the fridge, got another bottle, and filled his father’s glass.

But instead of saying “thanks,” Hideyuki issued his son an order.

“Hey, kiddo, go wake up Machi.”

Hideyuki was referring, of course, to Kaoru’s mother.

“No way. Mom’s asleep. She’s tired.”

“So am I, but do you see me sleeping?”

“But you’re up ’cause you want to be.”

“Never mind that, just go wake her up.”

“Do you need her for something?”

“Yeah. I need her to drink beer.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to drink.”

“’s alright. Tell her I want her and she’ll come running.”

“We don’t need her. We’re okay, just the two of us, aren’t we? Besides, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“Gimme a break. I’m asking you here. We don’t want Machi to feel left out, do we?”

“This always happens …”

Kaoru headed for the bedroom, dragging his feet. For some reason it always fell to Kaoru to wake his mother. Supposedly his father had tried it once a few years ago, and she’d reacted very badly; now he was gun-shy.

In the Futami household, Dad always got his way in the end. Not because Hideyuki exercised his patriarchal authority, but rather because, of the three of them, he was the most juvenile.

Kaoru respected his father’s talent as a scientist. But he couldn’t help noticing that he was distinctly lacking as a grown-up. Kaoru wasn’t sure exactly what his father was missing, but his child’s mind figured that if growing up was a process of eliminating childishness in favor of adult wisdom, then it was precisely that function that his father lacked.

3

He hated to disturb his mother’s peaceful slumber. Kaoru went to the bedroom door and hesitantly slid it open. But Machiko was already sitting up in her futon, running her fingers through her hair. Kaoru didn’t need to wake her up—his father’s noisy homecoming had taken care of that.

“Oh, Mom. Sorry.” He was apologizing for his father.

“That’s alright.” The expression in her eyes was as gentle as ever.

Kaoru’s mother almost never scolded him. Probably because he never asked for anything unreasonable, she’d always given him what he wanted. Though he was still a child, he could tell from her words and actions how absolutely she relied on him; it made him happy, but also gave him a feeling of grave responsibility.

The Futami Family Three-Way Deadlock, was how Kaoru thought of his and his parents’ relationship. It was just like a game of rock-scissors-paper—each of them had someone they could always beat, and someone they’d always lose to.

Kaoru was strong against his mother, but weak when it came to his father. So he’d always end up going along with his father’s unreasonable courses of action, doing whatever he was told. Hideyuki was strong enough vis-à-vis his son that he could treat him high-handedly, but somehow he couldn’t manage such a firm front with his wife. When his wife was in a bad mood, he seemed to pale and shrink.

So he had to fob the task of waking his sleeping wife off on his son. Kaoru’s mother, meanwhile, was lenient with her son’s demands, but could at times respond severely to her husband’s impossible behavior, scolding him as she would a child.

His father would sometimes boast about how this marvelous balance of power maintained harmony in the family. He’d joke about their relationship pseudo-scientifically, calling their family a “self-sustaining structuralization of chaos”. The peculiar situation wasn’t the result of intent on anybody’s part—it had arisen naturally through the interaction and altercations of the three parties involved.

“What’s Hide doing?” Machiko scratched her neck and ran her fingers slowly through her hair.

“Drinking beer.”

“At this late hour? He’s hopeless.”

“He wants to know if you’ll join him.”

Machiko stood up, laughing through her nose.

“I wonder if he’s hungry.”

“I don’t know. Probably he just wants to see you, don’t you think?”

Kaoru said it with a straight face, but Machiko just laughed, as if to say, You don’t know what you’re talking about.

But Kaoru was already quite aware of his parents’ erotic side.

One night three months ago—a night in mid-June, a rare dry night in the middle of the rainy season, hot enough to forebode the tropical nights to come—Kaoru had been shocked to run into his father in the kitchen in an unexpected state.

That night Kaoru had been shut in his room using his computer, when his thirst finally became too great to ignore. He’d gone to the kitchen to get some mineral water. His parents had apparently shut themselves in their separate rooms, saying they had work to do, and the apartment was quiet. His parents often went to their rooms to work and fell asleep like that. Kaoru had expected it to be the same that night. He didn’t realize they’d been in the same room after all.

He didn’t turn on the light. He stood there in the darkness and poured some mineral water into a glass, and then popped a piece of ice into his mouth.

Then he opened the refrigerator door again to put the plastic bottle back in, and that was when he found himself facing Hideyuki, who had suddenly entered the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator shone on his father’s naked body.

Hideyuki jumped, but in surprise, not embarrassment.

“I didn’t know you were there,” he said, and with no thought for his nakedness he grabbed Kaoru’s glass from him and gulped down its contents.

What surprised Kaoru was not only that his father was completely unclothed, but that his genitalia was larger than it normally was. It was covered with some sort of thin bodily fluid, and it gleamed slickly. It always hung limply when Kaoru and his father were in the bath together. But now it arched and pulsed, exuding the confidence of having fulfilled its role as a part of its owner’s body.

The whole time his father was drinking the mineral water, Kaoru couldn’t tear his gaze from it.

“What’re you looking at? Jealous?”

“Unh-uh.”

Kaoru’s reply was blunt. Hideyuki bent over a bit and placed the tip of his right index finger on the tip of his member. With it he took up a single drop of semen and held it out before Kaoru’s eyes.

“Look, kiddo, it’s your ancestors,” he remarked, with mock seriousness. Then he wiped his fingertip on the edge of the sink against which Kaoru was leaning.

“Eww,” said Kaoru, twisting away, but he kept staring at the white droplet on the edge of the sink.

He didn’t know how he should react. Hideyuki turned his back on him and disappeared into the bathroom. After a while, from the open door came the sound of urination, forced, irregular bursts.

Sometimes Kaoru didn’t know if his father was stupid or clever. Sure, he was an excellent computer scientist, but sometimes he did things that were worse than childish. Kaoru respected his father alright, but watching him made him nervous. He could understand his mother’s sufferings.

So ran his thoughts as he stared at what his father had called his “ancestors”.

The sperm swimming in the tiny droplet gradually died as the stainless steel stole heat from them. They were, of course, invisible to the naked eye, but Kaoru found himself quite aware of the actions of the herd—he could quite easily imagine the faces of each one of them as it died and contributed its corpse to the growing layer of dead.

These sperm, born of meiosis inside his father, held, as did his mother’s eggs, half the number of chromosomes contained within the cells of his body. Together they made a fertilized egg, only then supplying the total number of chromosomes necessary for a cell. But it didn’t follow that a sperm was merely half a person. Depending on how you looked at it, the sperm and the egg were the body’s basic structural units. Only reproductive cells could be said to have continued uninterrupted since the inception of life—it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say they possessed a kind of immortality.

All that aside, to have a chance to leisurely observe his father’s sperm was something he’d never dreamed of. Right here in front of him was the source of the life form that he knew as himself.

Was I really born from something this tiny?

He stood there mystified and mute. These sperm hadn’t existed anywhere until they’d been made within his father’s body. Created from nothingness by means of that mysterious power only life possessed.

So caught up was he in his examination that Kaoru didn’t notice when his father finished urinating and rejoined him.

“What are you doing, kiddo?” He seemed to have already forgotten his own prank.

“Observing your … things,” said Kaoru, not looking up. Hideyuki finally realized what his son was looking at and gave a curt laugh.

“What kind of idiot would stare at a thing like that? Shame on you.”

Hideyuki grabbed a dishtowel, wiped up the semen, and then dropped the dishtowel in the sink. As he did so, the image of life that Kaoru had been constructing fled with its tail between its legs.

He suddenly had an awful premonition, as he imagined his own body being wiped up with a rag and tossed away.

So his parents’ secret life, something not for him to come in contact with, became, under the influence of his father’s attitude, something subject to no taboo whatsoever. Kaoru remembered that incident three months ago as if it were last night.

Of course, Machiko had no way of knowing what mischief her husband had worked on her son as he went about opening the refrigerator and using the bathroom. Had she known, her embarrassment would no doubt have lit a bonfire of anger within her; no doubt she would have refused to speak to her husband for some time. Probably tonight she would have been in no mood to get up and fix him a snack.

“What am I going to do with him?” she muttered again and again; still, she fixed her hair with a will, and refastened her misaligned pajama buttons. Kaoru found it a pleasant, warm sight.

4

Kaoru’s mother put on slippers and headed for the living room, and he followed her.

“Sorry to get you out of bed,” Hideyuki said to Machiko.

“That’s okay. I’ll bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?”

“A little.”

“Why don’t I make something?”

Machiko was already heading for the kitchen, but Hideyuki stopped her, holding out a glass of beer.

“Have a drink first.”

Machiko accepted the glass and took a few sips. She didn’t like carbonated beverages, so it was impossible for her to down a beer in one gulp. That didn’t mean she wasn’t a drinker, though—she was above average when it came to holding her liquor.

When he’d seen that his wife had settled down with her beer, Hideyuki finally loosened his necktie. As a researcher, he was under no special requirement to wear a tie to work. Still, every day he put on a suit and buttoned the top button of his shirt before getting on his motorcycle to go to the lab. No doubt the sight of him in a suit riding an off-road bike struck people as peculiar, but that didn’t bother Hideyuki in the least.

Kaoru’s mother poured some oil into a frying pan and started warming up some sausages, and his father stood next to her and began reporting to her on his day in the lab. Oblivious to the fact that she hadn’t asked him, he recounted the day’s events with brio, mentioning coworkers by name, sometimes with a disparaging comment. Kaoru began to feel bored as his parents receded into their own world, seeming to forget his presence beside them.

Then Machiko noticed him, and in her considerate way changed the subject. “By the way, Kaoru, why don’t you show your father what you showed me?”

“Huh? What?” He’d been taken by surprise.

“You know, those gravitational anomaly thingies.”

“Oh, those.” Kaoru took the two pages out of the dish cupboard where he’d put them away and handed them to Hideyuki.

“You’ll be amazed at what he’s discovered,” his mother said, but Kaoru didn’t feel it was that great a discovery.

“What’s this?” said Hideyuki, holding the printouts up to his face. He gazed at the first one, with its contour lines and their positive and negative numbers, and within a few seconds had grasped its meaning.

“I get it, this is a map of the earth’s gravitational anomalies.”

He turned his gaze to the second page, and this time he didn’t have such an easy time figuring it out. He frowned. Hideyuki already had a geological map of the earth stored in his brain, but try as he might he couldn’t figure out what the black marks on this map meant. He tried several guesses connected with gravitational anomalies, such as subterranean mineral deposits, before giving up and turning to his son.

“Alright, you got me. What is this?”

“The earth’s longevity zones.”

“Longevity zones?” No sooner had he heard the words than Hideyuki placed the maps over one another and looked at them anew.

“Would you look at that. The longevity zones are only found in places with high negative gravitational anomalies.”

Kaoru was impressed, as usual. His father’s mental quickness was one of the reasons why he enjoyed their discussions so much. “That’s right!” he said, his excitement lending his words added emphasis.

“I wonder why that is,” Hideyuki asked himself, raising his eyes from the maps.

“Is this, like, common knowledge?” It had worried Kaoru to think that people had already noticed this correspondence, that it was only he who’d been ignorant of it.

“Well, I for one wasn’t aware of it.”

“Really?”

“So, what? Does this mean that perhaps there’s some sort of relationship between people’s lifespans and gravity? The data’s so clear and specific, it’s hard to think it’s just a coincidence. By the way, kiddo, how do you define a ‘longevity zone’?”

It was only natural for Hideyuki to stick at that point. Kaoru felt the same way. How exactly should he define a longevity zone? Was it an area with lots of long-lived people in it? Perhaps an area where the average lifespan was longer than in other areas? If that was what he meant, there was nothing to prevent him from seeing all of Japan as one big longevity zone.

He had to use a more limiting definition. It would be more exact, at least, to stipulate that a longevity zone was an area clearly delineated from the surrounding territory, a high percentage of the inhabitants of which were a hundred or more years in age.

But in reality, no such mathematical definition existed. The villages that he’d seen talked about on TV were simply places that had been found, statistically and experientially, to have lots of long-lived people in them, and they were known for it.

“I’m not sure there is a mathematical definition.”

He found it more and more curious that the villages mentioned on TV, defined as impressionistically and sentimentally as they were, should match up so nicely with gravitational anomalies, so clearly visible as numerical values. Kaoru and Hideyuki both were impressed by this.

“Too vague. Still, I wonder why it came out like this?” Hideyuki said this under his breath, as if bothered.

“Have you heard anything about the relationship between gravity and life, Dad?”

“Well, they did an experiment where they had a chicken lay eggs in a zero-gravity environment, and they turned out to be unfertilized eggs.”

“I’ve heard about that. That was ages ago.”

Somewhere in the corner of his mind he recalled the sight of his father’s sperm three months ago. He remembered reading an article about the chickens, which had laid unfertilized eggs in spite of the fact that they had copulated. He’d forgotten exactly what the experiment had been trying to prove. He’d read about it in a mass-market weekly, which had seized on the results of what was actually an old experiment in order to make some point about modern sexuality.

His imagination started to run away with him. Suppose an egg started to undergo cellular division without fertilization, growing through birth to maturity—what kind of human being would result? Kaoru got a mental image of a woman with a smooth, egg-shaped face. He shivered. He tried to banish the image, but the woman’s slippery face wouldn’t leave him.

“Well, nobody’s made a logical connection yet, I don’t think. But anyway, why did you think to compare gravitational anomalies and longevity?”

“Huh?” Sometimes the images taking shape in his brain undermined Kaoru’s ability to think, and he couldn’t hear what was being said to him.

“Stop making me repeat myself.” Few things annoyed the impatient Hideyuki more.

“Sorry.”

“What gave you the idea, in other words?”

Kaoru explained how a TV special on longevity villages had been playing in the background while on the computer he’d been looking at a map of gravitational anomalies, and how he’d had a flash of intuition.

“I think it was just a coincidence.”

“Meaningless coincidences produce nothing. Take jinxes, for instance.”

“Jinxes?”

Kaoru actually had something of an idea why his father would bring up something unscientific like that now. He was trying to give Machiko an entry into the conversation.

Having pretty much finished fixing snacks to go with the beer, Machiko had joined them at the dining room table, where she sat listening to the conversation without offering up a word. Not that she’d looked particularly bored, but she did lean forward just a bit when her husband mentioned jinxes.

Her reaction didn’t escape Hideyuki’s notice.

“Hey, Machi. Know of any interesting jinxes?”

“Why ask me?”

“You like that kind of thing, don’t you? Fortune-telling, charms, stuff like that. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you reading the horoscopes every week. Plus, you know a lot about folk-tales from around the world.”

“Okay, jinxes. How about the one that says if you give a handkerchief to your lover as a present you’ll break up?”

“Everybody knows that one. Don’t you know anything, you know, weirder?”

Kaoru thought he could guess what kind of thing his father was looking for. He was probably trying to find an example of a belief that connected, seemingly at random, two disparate phenomena.

“Something weirder? Okay, how about this? If you see a black cat swimming in a river, someone close to you will die.”

Kaoru immediately pursed his lips. “Really?”

“That’s what they say. You’ve heard it, haven’t you, dear?” She looked at Hideyuki for support. But he just laughed and cocked his head.

“Don’t you have any that are just way out there?”

“How about the one that says, when you leave the house, if a chair has its back to the window, you’ll drop your wallet?”

Hideyuki clapped his hands.

“Okay, we’ll go with that one. Now, it may be true or it may be false, but let’s just take it as a given that such a superstition exists.”

“It does!” Machiko frowned.

“Alright, alright!” Hideyuki said, putting his palms together. “Now, we have two phenomena brought together. A chair having its back to the window when you leave the house, and dropping your wallet. Scientifically, these two phenomena have no relation to each other. There are lots of superstitions in the world, and no doubt different kinds come about for different reasons. But what I find fascinating is when you have the exact same superstition existing in two distant places, isolated from each other. If this crazy superstition that Machi just told us about happened to exist in different places on the globe, it’d make you wonder, wouldn’t it? Of course it would.”

“So, are there superstitions like that? That exist in different places in the world?” Kaoru looked back and forth between Machiko and Hideyuki.

Hideyuki prompted his wife. “How about it, Machi?”

“Of course there are. The jinx I just told you about is one. It exists in Europe and in the Americas, too.”

Kaoru and Hideyuki exchanged skeptical looks.

“By the way, Machi, have you ever thought about why superstitions arise?”

“No,” she said, curtly.

“What about you, kiddo?”

“I guess it has something to do with human psychology. I’m not real sure, though.”

By this point there were five empty beer bottles sitting in front of Hideyuki. His conversational engine was finally getting warmed up.

“Ask yourself: what is a superstition? It’s an oral tradition that if you see something or experience something, a certain thing will happen. With a jinx it’s something bad, but of course a superstition can involve something good, or even something that can’t necessarily be categorized as good or bad. To cut to the chase, a superstition is something that connects one phenomenon with another phenomenon. Sometimes science can explain the connection. For example, the superstition that when clouds move from east to west it means it’ll rain can be explained very easily by modern meteorology. There are others that you can understand intuitively, like the one that says being photographed takes years off your life. Or ones about breaking chopsticks or sandal thongs, or seeing black cats or snakes—those aren’t too hard to understand. Those things are just eerie somehow. There’s something about black cats and snakes that makes people the world over uneasy.

“The problem is superstitions that aren’t reasonable. The ones that strike you as totally arbitrary, like, ‘Why in the world do people believe that?’ The jinx Machi told us about is a good example. What could having a chair back toward the window when you leave the house possibly have to do with dropping your wallet?”

Hideyuki stopped and looked Kaoru in the eye.

“Maybe it’s based on experience.”

“No doubt it is. Maybe people found out through experience that the chances of dropping your wallet are greater if a chair’s back is to the window when you leave your house.”

“But there’s no statistical necessity that it has to be that way.”

“We’re not talking strict accuracy here. Let’s say when you drop your wallet, it just so happens that the chair’s back is to the window. And let’s say that the next time you drop your wallet, the chair’s back is toward the window again. So you tell someone about it, suggesting that the two phenomena are related somehow. Now the important thing is whether or not the person you tell about it has had a similar experience—whether or not they can nod and say, ‘yeah, you’re right’. If the idea is dismissed by a third party, then chances are it won’t be handed down. But once it becomes established as a jinx, then by the mere fact of people’s being aware of it, it can influence their actions, and so it stands a good chance of surviving. Once the relationship is established between the two things, the fact that people are aware of the relationship strengthens the bond even more, see. Reality and imagination begin to correspond to one another.”

“So you’re saying that the phenomenon of a chair having its back to the window when you leave the room and the phenomenon of dropping your wallet exert some kind of invisible influence on each other?”

“You can’t rule out the possibility that they’re connected on some level, deep down.”

What was his father trying to say, using the superstition as an example? Kaoru had the feeling that he could substitute “life” for “superstition” and the argument would still stand up.

“Life,” Kaoru muttered. As if that word were a cue, the three exchanged glances.

“It reminds me of the Loop.”

It was Machiko who brought up the subject. It seemed she felt it was a natural progression from the word “life”.

Hideyuki had started his college career in pre-med. He’d switched fields, to logic, in graduate school, studying the concepts of metamathematics, but one thing led to another and he found his old abandoned interest in the world of living things rekindled. He decided it would be interesting to see if the language of mathematics could explain life. His original interest in biology was reanimated as it found expression in numbers.

Thus it was that when he’d finished his doctorate and received an offer to join a joint Japanese-American research project on artificial life, he’d accepted without a second thought. To create life within a computer? Hideyuki couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do more.

He was still young, in his late twenties, married but childless. Five years after he took the appointment, the project was brought to a halt in an entirely unforeseen way. It wasn’t a failure, having achieved a certain manner of success. But it never felt like success to Hideyuki because the way it all ended stuck in his throat.

This project into which he’d poured all his youthful passion, only to see it miscarry, was known as the Loop.

5

Hideyuki presented a new question to Kaoru, forcefully steering the conversation away from the Loop.

“So do you think life emerged by chance or by necessity? Which side are you on?”

“The only answer I can give to that question is, ‘I don’t know’.”

It was all he could say. He couldn’t affirm the necessity argument just because he himself existed. In the absence of confirmed life anywhere else, it was possible that life on earth was an utterly random gift, unique in the universe.

“I’m asking you what you think.”

“But Dad, aren’t you always saying that it’s important to recognize what modern science doesn’t know? To be willing to say ‘I don’t know’?”

Hideyuki chuckled at the question. A look at his face revealed the alcohol taking effect. The number of empties was up to six.

“You don’t have to tell me that. Think of this as a game if you have to. We’re in the world of play. I want to know what your gut tells you, that’s all.”

Machiko had gone into the kitchen to fry up some noodles; now she stopped what she was doing and fixed her gaze on Kaoru, a gleam in her eye.

Kaoru thought about himself. Things like the emergence of life and the universe were beyond the reach of his imagination, when he got right down to it. It was better to take the emergence of one individual as an example, and work up from there.

First and foremost, what about the inception of his own life? When was that? When he’d crawled out of his mother’s womb and had his umbilical cord cut? Or when the egg, after insemination in the fallopian tube, had been safely embedded in the wall of the womb?

If he was going to talk about inception, then he figured he should probably take insemination as the first step. His nervous system had taken shape by around three weeks from insemination.

Now, he thought, just suppose that a fetus of that age had consciousness, the ability to think. To that fetus, the mother’s womb would be the whole universe. Why am I here, the fetus asks. Immersed in amniotic fluid, he begins to wonder about the mechanism of conception. But as he knows nothing of the world outside the womb, he can’t even imagine that his own conception was preceded by reproductive acts. All he can do is make guesses based on evidence he finds within the womb.

So he begins to think of the amniotic fluid itself as his parent—a natural conclusion. He begins to think of the amniotic fluid as the primordial soup covering the primeval earth, churning until twenty kinds of amino acid join hands in brotherhood to make life-enabling proteins; these then begin to replicate themselves … The probability of which is, of course, the same as the monkey at the typewriter, banging keys at random, coining up with a passage from Shakespeare.

A probability so low that even with trillions of monkeys banging away for trillions of years, it was still virtually nil. And if a passage from Shakespeare should appear anyway? Would people still call it a coincidence? Of course not—they’d suspect some kind of fix. A man in a monkey suit sitting at one of the typewriters, or an intelligent monkey …

But the fetus immersed in amniotic fluid thinks his conception was by chance—he can’t make his imagination comprehend the mechanism behind it. And that’s because he doesn’t know about the world outside.

Only when he crawls out of the birth canal after roughly thirty-six weeks in the womb does he for the first time see the outside of the mother who bore him. Only after growing and increasing in knowledge yet further does he come to understand with exactness why and how he was conceived and born. As long as we’re inside the womb—inside the universe—we can’t understand the way it works. Our powers of apprehension are blacked out on that point. They have to be.

Kaoru decided to apply the example of the fetus in its universe—the womb—to the question of life on earth and the universe it occupied.

In most cases, the womb comes pre-equipped with everything necessary to nurture a fetus after insemination. But does it always host a fetus? Of course not. The phenomenon of insemination itself is controlled largely by chance. And many women choose not to have children.

And even if a woman has a couple of children, the length of time in which her womb holds a fetus is still less than two years total. In other words, equipped for a fetus though it may be, the womb is usually unoccupied.

Kaoru decided to take a step back and think about the universe again. Given that we are actually existing within it, it seems reasonable to say that the universe is equipped with what is necessary to sustain life. In which case, life arose out of necessity, right? But, no, remember the womb: it may be capable of sustaining the life of a fetus, but it’s usually without one. So life arose by chance, then? The universe is not constantly filled with life—indeed, a universe that does not beget life may indeed be more natural.

In the end, Kaoru couldn’t come up with an answer after all.

But there was Hideyuki, drinking his beer and expecting a reply.

“Maybe we’re the only life in the universe after all,” said Kaoru.

Hideyuki grunted. “That’s what your gut tells you?”

Hideyuki stared at his son fascinatedly, then shifted his gaze to his wife.

Machiko was sleeping peacefully, her head pillowed on her hands on the table.

“Hey, go get a blanket for Machi, will ya?”

“Okay.” He immediately went to the bedroom and brought back a blanket, which he handed to Hideyuki. Hideyuki draped it over Machiko’s shoulders and smiled at her sleeping face before turning back to his son.

The eastern sky had begun to whiten without them noticing, and the temperature of the room had dropped. Night in the Futami household was over, and it was just about time to sleep.

Hideyuki’s eyes as he drank the last of the stale beer were hollow.

Kaoru waited until his father was finished drinking, then said, “Hey, Dad. Can I ask you a favor?”

“What?”

Kaoru lay the gravitational anomaly map in front of his father again. “What do you think of this?”

Kaoru’s pinky was pointing at a particular spot on the map, a desert region, the so-called Four Corners area of the western North American continent, where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado met.

“What about it?” Hideyuki brought his eyes close to the map, blinking.

“Look closely at it. Now take another look at the gravitational anomaly figures for this area.”

Hideyuki rubbed his eyes again and again, as the numbers swam in his tired eyes.

“Hmm.”

“See, the space between the contour lines gets smaller and smaller the closer they get to this point.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“That means an extreme gravitational anomaly.”

“I see. The negative values are quite large here.”

“I think there has to be something there, geologically speaking. It’s like there’s something deep under the earth’s surface there with extremely little mass.”

Kaoru took a ballpoint pen and made an X where the four states met. He didn’t have a gravitational figure for that exact point, but the contour lines surrounding it certainly pointed to a spot with particularly low gravity.

For a while, Kaoru and Hideyuki looked at the map in silence. Then Machiko raised her head a little and broke in, drowsily, “I’m sure there’s nothing there, dear.”

Evidently she’d been listening to their conversation the whole time, only pretending to be asleep.

“I didn’t think you were awake.”

His mother’s words were provocative. Kaoru tried to imagine a space filled with nothingness deep beneath the desert. If the earth there concealed a huge cavity, it could easily explain the extreme gravitational anomaly.

And in that huge limestone cavern lived an ancient tribe of people … Kaoru could see it now, a close-up look at an extreme longevity zone.

Even more than before, Kaoru wanted to go there.

Machiko yawned and mumbled, “That sounds strange though—if it’s nothing, how can it be there?” She got up from her chair.

“See, Mom, you’re interested in the place, too. If low gravity and longevity are connected, then maybe there’s a city of ancient people there, cut off from civilization. It’s at least possible, right?”

Kaoru was fishing for a response, based on his knowledge of Machiko’s interest in North American folk tales, especially Native American myths. He figured that he stood a better chance of getting what he wanted if he got Machiko to go to bat for him than if he just blurted it out himself.

Just as he’d hoped, Machiko’s interest seemed to grow suddenly. “Well, it is close to a Navajo reservation.”

“See?”

Kaoru knew—Machiko had told him—that there were tribes who had made their homes in the wildest deserts and ravines, and whose lives today were not all that different from the way they’d lived in ancient times. He hadn’t heard of any noted for their longevity, but he knew that if he suggested it without really suggesting it, he could pique Machiko’s curiosity.

“Hey, kiddo, what are you trying to pull here?”

Hideyuki had evidently guessed what Kaoru was going for. Kaoru shot a meaningful glance at his mother.

“It’d be interesting to go there,” Machiko said.

She sounded less like she was pleading Kaoru’s case than like she’d become interested herself.

“Yeah, let’s go!” Kaoru said, expectantly.

“Four Corners, eh? Talk about coincidences.”

“Huh?” Kaoru looked at his father.

“Well, in a little while—next summer, maybe, or the summer after that—it looks like my work is going to take me there.”

Kaoru yelped in delight. “Really?”

“Yeah, I’ll have to be at some laboratories in New Mexico, in Los Alamos and Santa Fe.”

Kaoru clapped his palms together as if in prayer. “Take me! Please?”

“Want to come too, Machi?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then I guess we’ll all go.”

“That’s a promise, okay?” Kaoru held out paper and pen. If he was bound by a contract, Hideyuki couldn’t turn around someday and pretend he’d never said it. This was just a little insurance. Kaoru knew from experience that his father’s promises stood more chance of being kept if they were backed up by writing.

Hideyuki filled out the contract in his sloppy handwriting and waved it in Kaoru’s face. “There, see? It’s a promise.”

Kaoru took it and examined it. He felt satisfied. Now he could sleep soundly.

Dawn was breaking and September was ending, but still the sun as it climbed was brighter than at midsummer. A few stars still shone evanescently in the western sky, looking now as if they would disappear at any moment. There was no line dividing light from dark—Kaoru couldn’t say just where night ended and morning began. He loved with all his heart this moment when the passage of time manifested itself in changing colors.

Kaoru remained standing by the window after his parents disappeared into the bedroom.

The city was starting to move, its vibrations reverberating in the reclaimed land like a fetus lacking in the womb. Before his gaze a huge flock of birds was circling over Tokyo Bay. Their cries, like the mewling of newborns, asserted their vitality under the dying stars.

At times like this, staring at the blackness of the sea and the subtly changing colors of the sky, Kaoru’s desire to understand the workings of the world only increased. Taking in scenery from on high stimulated the imagination.

The sun rose above the eastern horizon, pushing the night aside; Kaoru went into the bedroom and curled up in his futon.

Hideyuki and Machiko were already asleep in their different positions, Hideyuki with arms and legs akimbo and no blanket atop him, Machiko curled into a ball hugging the rumpled blanket.

Kaoru lay down beside them, hugging his pillow and clutching the paper holding the promise that they’d go to the desert. Curled up like that, he looked something like a fetus.

PART TWO

The Cancer Ward

1

Recently Kaoru had begun to look older than his twenty years. It wasn’t so much that his face had aged as that his unusually large frame projected a robust presence. He exuded an air of adulthood. People he met tended to tell him he was mature for his age.

Kaoru thought that was only natural, considering how he’d been forced to become his family’s pillar of strength at the age of thirteen. Ten years ago, in elementary school, he’d been skinny and short, and people had often thought him younger than he was. Supposedly he’d been something of a know-it-all, tutored as he’d been in the natural sciences by his father and in languages by his mother. His main job had been to give his imagination free reign, to wonder about the structure and workings of the universe, rather than to involve himself in mundane chores.

Ten years ago—it felt like another world altogether. Back then, playing with his computer, sitting up talking with his parents into the wee hours of the night, the road ahead of them had been clear and without shadow. He could remember how he’d started linking about longevity and gravity, and how that had turned into a family plan to visit the Four Corners region of North America. He’d even gotten his father to sign a pact to that effect.

Kaoru still kept that contract in his desk drawer. It had never been fulfilled. Hideyuki still wanted to honor it, but Kaoru the medical student knew better than anybody how impossible that was.

Kaoru had no skill that could tell him when or by what route the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus had infiltrated Hideyuki’s body. No doubt the virus had turned one of his body’s cells cancerous years before he first complained of stomach problems. Then that newborn cancer cell had probably undergone its first cellular division not long after he’d promised that trip to the desert. And those cancer cells had silently, steadily reproduced themselves until the family trip had become an unattainable dream.

Hideyuki’s initial plans to visit some laboratories in New Mexico had been delayed; only three years after the initial promise had he been able to finally work the visits into his schedule. He’d arranged for a three-month stint at the Los Alamos and Santa Fe research centers. He’d planned to depart for New Mexico two weeks early, so he and Machiko and Kaoru could visit the site of the negative gravitational anomaly that still fascinated Kaoru so.

And then in early summer, two months before they were scheduled to leave—after they’d already bought the plane tickets and the whole family had their hearts set on the trip—Hideyuki suddenly complained of stomach pain.

Why don’t you see a doctor, Machiko said, but he wouldn’t listen. Hideyuki decided it was a simple case of gastritis, and made no lifestyle changes.

But as the summer wore on, the pain became worse, until finally, three weeks before their departure date, he vomited. Even then, Hideyuki insisted it was nothing. He kept refusing to be examined, reluctant to cancel the plans they were so excited about.

Finally, though, the symptoms became unendurable, and he agreed to go to the university hospital and see a doctor who happened to be a friend of his. The examination found a polyp in his pylorus, and he was admitted to the hospital.

Naturally, the trip was cancelled. Neither Kaoru nor Machiko was in any mood to travel. The doctor in charge informed them that the polyp was malignant.

Thus did Kaoru’s thirteenth summer turn from heaven into hell: not only did the trip fall through, but he and his mother ended up spending most of the sweltering summer going back and forth to the hospital.

Don’t worry, I’ll get better next year, and then we’ll go to the desert like I promised, just you wait and see, bluffed his father. Their one comfort was Hideyuki’s positive attitude.

Machiko believed her husband, but, at the same time, whenever she let herself imagine what might happen, she became despondent. She grew weaker emotionally, and physically.

And that was why it fell to Kaoru to take a central role in the family. It was Kaoru who stood in the kitchen and made sure his mother ate enough when she couldn’t bring herself to think about food; it was Kaoru who swiftly absorbed enough medical knowledge to plant thoughts of an optimistic future in his mother’s head.

There was an operation in which two thirds of Hideyuki’s stomach was removed, and it went well; if the cancer hadn’t metastasized, there was every chance he’d get well. By the beginning of autumn Hideyuki was able to return home, and to his laboratory.

It was around that time that a change began to appear in Hideyuki’s attitude toward Kaoru. On the one hand, as a man he had a new respect for the dependability his son showed while he was in the hospital, but on the other hand he began to be stricter with his son out of a new determination to make him into a stronger man. He stopped calling him “kiddo”, and encouraged him to spend less time on his computer and more time exercising his body. Kaoru didn’t resist, but went along with his father’s new expectations: he could detect a certain desperation in his father, as if he wanted to transfer something from his own body to his son’s before it disappeared.

He knew his father loved him, and he felt special, as if he’d inherited his father’s will; pride coursed through him.

Two years passed uneventfully, and Kaoru’s fifteenth birthday came around. But changes had been taking place inside his father’s body. Those changes were revealed by a bloody stool.

This was a red light signaling the spread of the cancer. With no hesitation this time, Hideyuki saw the doctor, who gave him a barium enema and x-rayed him. The x-ray showed a shadow on the sigmoid colon about half the size of a fist. The only conceivable course of action was surgery to cut it out.

There were, however, two possibilities for the surgery. One option would leave the anus; the other would remove more tissue and require the insertion of an artificial anus. With the former, there was the fear that they would miss some of the invading cancer cells, leaving the possibility of a recurrence, while the latter option of removing the entire sigmoid colon allowed for more surety. The doctor’s opinion was that from a medical standpoint the artificial anus would be preferable, but because of the inconvenience and lifestyle changes that would bring, he had to leave the final decision up to the patient.

But Hideyuki didn’t flinch as he coolly chose the artificial anus. If you open me up and can’t say with certainty that the cancer hasn’t spread that far, then I want you to cut it all out without hesitation, he’d volunteered. He intended to bet on the option with the best odds of survival.

Once again the summer found him back in the hospital for surgery. When they cut him open, the doctors found that the cancer hadn’t invaded as far as they had feared; normally, in this situation, leaving the anus in would give at least even odds of success. But the surgeon in charge decided, in view of the patient’s expressed wishes, to remove the sigmoid colon entirely.

Once again autumn found Hideyuki checking out of the hospital. For the next two years he’d lived in fear of signs of a relapse, as he strove to get used to life with a colostomy.

Exactly two years later there was another sign, this one a yellow light, as it were. Hideyuki became feverish and his body took on a yellowish cast, symptoms that got worse day by day. One look at his jaundiced condition told the doctors that the cancer was attacking his liver.

The doctors hung their heads. They thought they’d made sure, over the course of two previous surgeries, that the cancer hadn’t spread to the liver or lymph nodes.

It was at this time that Kaoru began to suspect that what they were seeing was the emergence of some unknown illness, something that was indeed a kind of cancer, but one different from those previously known. His interest in basic medicine intensified. In the summer of his seventeenth year, having graduated from high school a year early, he entered the pre-med program in the same university that his father had attended.

The third time he lay down on the operating table, Hideyuki lost half his liver. He subsequently checked out of the hospital, but neither Kaoru nor Machiko could make themselves believe now that the battle with cancer was over. The family watched for enemy movements with bated breath, wondering where the cancer would invade next; the return of a peaceful, happy home life was something hardly to be hoped for.

That cancer won’t rest until every organ in his body has been plucked out, Machiko insisted, and she wouldn’t listen to any of Kaoru’s medical knowledge. If she heard about a new vaccine, she’d scramble to get her hands on it even before it was fully tested. Hearing vitamin therapy was effective she tried that; she pressured the doctors into trying lymphocyte treatment; she even sought salvation in charismatic religion. She was willing to try anything—she couldn’t swear she wouldn’t sell her soul to the devil if it would save her husband’s life. It depressed Kaoru to see his mother running around like a woman possessed. It was beginning to look like his father’s death would also mean the collapse of his mother’s psyche.

After that, Hideyuki spent most of his time in his hospital bed. He was still only forty-nine, but he looked like an old man of seventy. His hair had fallen out as a side-effect of the anti-cancer drugs, he was emaciated, his skin had lost its luster, and he was constantly running his fingers over his whole body and complaining of itchiness. But even so, he never lost his attachment to life. As his wife and son sat by his bedside he’d hold their hands and say, “You listen to me, next year we’re going to that desert in North America.” And he’d force a smile. It wasn’t exactly false cheer—he obviously fully intended to fight this illness so he could keep his promise. The sight was both reassuring and painful.

As long as his father showed such a positive attitude toward life, Kaoru never entertained thoughts of giving up. No matter how bad the cancer got, Kaoru believed his father would conquer his illness in the end.

At around this time, a type of cancer with the same progression as Hideyuki’s began to be identified, first in Japan, then worldwide. At first the true cause of this new strain could not be identified, as if it lay wrapped under a veil. A few medical professionals supported a theory that it was the work of a new virus that turned cells cancerous, but they couldn’t explain how this cancer virus differed from others, and besides, there had been no reports of such a virus being successfully isolated. But the vague suspicion spread.

It can take several years after a new disease has been identified to pinpoint the virus that causes it. The lag was especially understandable in the case of the cancer that had afflicted Hideyuki and millions of others, because at first it looked just like any other cancer: nobody realized they were dealing with a new disease. But gradually the world came to be gripped by fear that a terrible new virus had been unleashed.

Finally, one year ago, the new cancer virus had been successfully isolated in a laboratory at the medical school of Fukuzawa University. With that they had proof: a virus was the cause of this metastatic cancer.

The new virus was named the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, and it was thought to have the following characteristics.

First, it was an RNA retrovirus that actually caused normal cells to become cancer cells. Thus, anyone infected with the virus ran the risk of developing cancer, regardless of whether or not they had been exposed to carcinogens. However, there was room for individual variation: there were confirmed cases, though only a few, of infected people who were mere carriers, never developing cancer themselves. It took on average three to five years from the time of infection for the cancer to grow large enough to be detected clinically, although the degree of individual variation in this was great.

Second, the cancer was contracted through the direct introduction of virally-infected lymphocytes into the body. That is, it was not spread through the air, but through sexual contact, blood transfusions, breast-feeding, and similar contact. Thus, it was not what would be called highly contagious. But there was no definitive evidence to say that it would not at some point in the future become transmissible through the air. This virus mutated with frightening speed.

Due to the similarity in the manner of its transmission, some scholars speculated that the new virus was the result of some sort of mutation in the AIDS virus. Perhaps the AIDS virus had sensed that it was about to be eliminated by vaccines, and so had colluded with an existing cancer virus, skillfully changing its appearance. And indeed, there was a nasty resemblance between the two viruses, not only in how they spread, but in the way they nested in cells in the human body.

When the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, carrying reverse-transcription enzymes, merged with human cellular tissue, the RNA and reverse-transcription enzymes were released to synthesize the double helix of DNA.

Then, this synthesized DNA mingled with normal cellular DNA, turning the cell cancerous. Which was bad enough. But it didn’t end there. The cell could now no longer tell the difference between its own DNA and the viral DNA, and so it kept manufacturing the cancer virus and releasing it outside the cell. The released virus made its way into the bloodstream and the lymph stream, where it deviously fought off attacking immune cells while awaiting the chance to move into a new host.

The third characteristic: when the cancer started, almost without exception it metastasized and spread throughout the body with frightful strength. This, of course, was why it was called the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus.

There are benign tumors and malignant ones, and the difference between them lies in the thorny questions of invasiveness and metastasis. A person may develop a tumor and still have no reason to fear, as long as it doesn’t spread through the surrounding area, move into the blood and lymphatic vessels, and metastasize.

But this metastatic cancer spread through rapid reproduction and extreme invasiveness, and was highly resistant to the immune-system attacks it experienced as it circulated through the lymph and blood streams. It was much more likely than normal cancer to survive in the circulatory system.

As a result, anyone who came down with this cancer had to assume a 100% probability that it would metastasize. The question of whether or not one survives cancer can be restated in terms of whether or not one can prevent that cancer from metastasizing. With a 100% chance of metastasis, it was essentially impossible to hope for a complete recovery from MHC.

The fourth characteristic was that the cancer cells created by this virus were immortal—they would live forever if their host didn’t die.

Normal human cells have a limit to the number of times they can divide over the course of their existence—just like humans themselves, they have a certain span of life allotted to them at birth. For example, by the time a person becomes an adult, his or her nerve cells have lost their ability to reproduce themselves, so that they are no longer replenished. It might be said that nerve cells have the same lifespan as humans do.

In this way, the aging and death of cells is intimately connected with the question of human lifespan. But these cancer cells, when removed from a host and sustained in a culture fluid, went on dividing infinitely—they would never die.

There were certain religionists who pointed to this and spoke of it in a prophetic vein, saying, If we could harness the power of these cancer cells and transfer it to normal cells, we would be able to achieve immortality—we’d never grow old.

But of course these were nothing but amateurish delusions. It was paradoxical that cells which had achieved immortality would then kill their human hosts, assuring that they themselves would die. But it was a paradox that, by and large, people managed to accept.

2

It was the rainy season, early summer of the year before Kaoru was to take his national examinations, and every day was a busy one for him. Visiting his dad and working a part-time job took up so much of his life that he barely had time to look after his mother’s mental state—much less study.

If left to her own devices, his mother would try to get her hands on anything that claimed to be effective against cancer; Kaoru had to keep a constant watch so it didn’t get out of control.

Hideyuki didn’t approve of his son spending so much energy on his part-time job. He felt that his son should concentrate on studying, and that splitting his time between that and working was essentially a waste. The idea that Kaoru was doing it on account of his own illness irritated him even more: Hideyuki insisted that he could pay for Kaoru’s school expenses, that they had enough money in savings. As far as talking big went, he was as healthy as ever; but the optimism in his words was Kaoru’s salvation.

In reality, Kaoru was the one who held the family’s finances in his hands, and he knew that they didn’t have much to spare. He had to keep his job. But of course he wasn’t about to complain to his father about their budgetary straits. There was nothing to be gained by letting his father know things were tight. So Kaoru lied to Hideyuki, telling him that he worked because he wanted more spending money.

When they were together, Kaoru wanted to set his father’s mind as much at ease as possible. It wouldn’t do to betray the fact that because his illness had decreased the family’s income, Kaoru and his mother were having to squeeze by. Luckily, as a medical student Kaoru had no trouble hanging out his shingle as a tutor, and in fact he made quite a bit of money that way. The hospital connected to Kaoru’s medical school had a lot of child patients whose parents didn’t want them to fall behind in their studies when they went back to school; tutors were always in demand.

One day early in his summer vacation, Kaoru visited the hospital to tutor a junior high schooler in math and English, and then had a light lunch in the cafeteria. His father was a patient in this very hospital. Kaoru had just heard that there was a possibility that the cancer had spread to his father’s lungs; his mood was black. His father had recently gone into his annual litany. This year, he said, we’re going to see those longevity zones in the North American desert. But the words had rung hollow. And then came—as if on cue—the indications that the cancer had spread.

Kaoru was sitting in the cafeteria, sighing over his father’s illness and his family’s future, when he saw Reiko Sugiura and her son Ryoji.

The cafeteria was on the third floor of the hospital, surrounding a courtyard on three sides; the walls facing the courtyard were of glass. There was a fountain in the courtyard, and sitting at a table in the cafeteria one was eye level with the top of its spray. The cafeteria was so carefully decorated, and its food so pleasant to the taste, that it felt more like a stylish outdoor café than part of a hospital. Gazing at the water from the fountain had a truly relaxing effect.

Kaoru’s eyes were drawn naturally toward the beautiful woman being shown to an empty table.

Her tanned body was sheathed in a summery beige dress, and her face was so nicely formed that it was eye-catching even without the aid of cosmetics. If it weren’t for the child at her side, she could have passed for ten years younger than what Kaoru guessed she had to be.

The woman and boy sat at the table the waiter indicated, which happened to be diagonally adjacent to Kaoru’s. Kaoru watched them seat themselves, and, after that too, he found his attention drawn to the woman, his eyes riveted to the legs stretching out from beneath her minidress.

He realized this was the same mother and child he’d seen at the hotel pool two weeks ago. One of his students’ grades had gone up so much that the kid’s parents had given Kaoru an all-summer free pass to that pool. On the first day he’d gone to swim there he’d encountered this pair, sitting poolside in deck chairs.

From the first moment he’d laid eyes on the woman in the green bathing suit, he was sure he’d seen her somewhere before, but when and where he couldn’t say. Kaoru was normally confident in his powers of recall, but poke about as he might in the recesses of his memory he couldn’t place the woman. The experience left him with an unpleasant aftertaste that wouldn’t go away. A woman as beautiful as this he wouldn’t expect to forget, and yet evidently he had. At the time, he’d tried to put her out of his mind, telling himself he was mistaken, but then something about her finally triggered memories of the star of a soap opera he’d watched as a child. He wondered if it was the same woman.

The boy made an odd impression, particularly his physique. The blue swim cap that he wore pushed back on his head, the goggles, the check-pattern shorts that Kaoru could tell at a glance weren’t for swimming in, his skinny bowed legs, and most of all his abnormally white skin. He resembled an “alien corpse” Kaoru had seen on some fake TV show a long time ago. Everything about the boy looked strangely off-kilter. The pair stuck in Kaoru’s memory: this woman he’d seen somewhere before and this weird-looking boy.

And now they were sitting at the next table over. Kaoru, sitting by the window so he could gaze down at the fountain, found he could catch their reflection faintly in the glass. He observed this instead of staring at them directly.

After a few moments, Kaoru figured out why his first impression of the boy had been of unbalance. It was his hair, or rather his lack of it. When Kaoru had first seen the boy poolside, his swim cap had been missing the bulge that would normally have told of a full head of hair.

Today, too, the boy was wearing a hat when he sat down at the table, but after a few moments he took it off, revealing his head to be perfectly devoid of hair.

Kaoru realized what that meant. The boy was here to be treated for cancer. He’d assumed mother and child were both here to visit a patient, but now it turned out that the mother was accompanying her son to chemotherapy. Hideyuki was undergoing chemotherapy, and his hair too had fallen out, but somehow seeing a child suffer that side effect was even more heart-rending. Kaoru thought about that day at the pool, that swim cap hugging the boy’s bare scalp directly—no wonder he’d left such a peculiar impression.

Kaoru rested his head on his hand and watched the beautiful thirty-something woman and her son, who was probably a fifth or sixth grader, eat their lunches without talking. Without being conscious of it, he was comparing them to his father, hospitalized here. His father was forty-nine, while this boy had to be eleven or twelve. Both were taking anti-cancer medication.

The mother in her airy beige dress looked too bright and cheerful for a hospital. Once in a while she raised her head and glanced out the window. She didn’t look like she was tasting what she ate—she was just eating to eat, looking at no one in particular with an expression that could have been a smile or the equivalent of a sigh.

She paused with her spoon in the air, then returned it to the plate, then started to bring it to her mouth again, and then suddenly shot a glance in Kaoru’s direction. At first her gaze was sharp, as if to ask, What are you looking at? But as her eyes met Kaoru’s her gaze softened. Kaoru found himself unable to look away.

It seemed she recognized him from the pool. She looked like she wanted to say something. Kaoru bowed his head slightly, and she answered with the same gesture.

And then her attention was taken up by her son, who chose that moment to toss aside his chopsticks and spoon and throw a tantrum. The sight of Kaoru fled her mind.

Even then Kaoru continued to watch the two. He was powerless to resist—it was as if his consciousness had been uprooted and physically carried to where they were.

Several days later, in the courtyard this time, Kaoru had the opportunity to speak to this mother and her child. By some lucky chance they ended up sitting side by side on the same bench, making it possible for a conversation to start naturally without either one making the first move.

The mother introduced herself as Reiko Sugiura and her son as Ryoji. Ryoji’s cancer, which had first appeared in his lungs, now looked like it had spread to his brain, and his days were filled with tests preparatory to radiation and chemotherapy.

Not only that, but it seemed that the agent that had turned his cells cancerous was none other than the recently isolated Metastatic Human Cancer Virus—the progress of the illness, from first appearance through subsequent metastasis, was nearly identical to Kaoru’s father’s case.

Kaoru felt a sense of kinship. A sense that they were comrades fighting the same enemy.

“Brothers in arms.”

The expression was Reiko’s, but it echoed Kaoru’s thoughts. However, Kaoru doubted her words, having observed their expressions in the cafeteria the other day. It was resignation he’d seen then, wasn’t it? At the very least, their faces hadn’t been those of people dedicated to battling an illness. Kaoru still remembered the affectless way she’d eaten.

He took this opportunity to clear up the doubt that had been nagging at him since their first encounter.

“Haven’t we met somewhere before?” It embarrassed him as he said it, it sounded so much like a pickup line, but he couldn’t think of any other way to ask it.

Reiko responded with a laugh whose import escaped him. “I get that a lot. I’m told I look like an actress on an old TV show,” she said shyly.

It sounded like a lie to him. She didn’t just look like the actress—he couldn’t help but think they were one and the same. But if she was the actress, and was lying so she could escape her past, then he didn’t feel he should press the issue.

When they parted, there in the courtyard, Reiko gave him their room number and said, “Why don’t you come visit us sometime? Please.”

Three times they’d met, he and Reiko Sugiura. Now more than ever, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

3

It was the very next day that Kaoru took Reiko at her word and knocked on the door to Ryoji’s room.

Reiko greeted him, with a smile that might have been a bit overdone, and showed him into the room. Ryoji was sitting up in bed reading a book, his legs dangling over the side. As a medical student, Kaoru knew how much the room cost the moment he entered. It was a private room with a private bathroom complete with bathtub. The daily rate was five times that for a normal shared room.

“Thank you for coming,” Reiko managed to say. Evidently she’d only invited him as a social courtesy, not really expecting him to come. Now that he was actually here she couldn’t disguise her happiness. She turned to Ryoji and tried to stir his interest. “Look who’s come to see you!”

It hit Kaoru that Reiko had invited him up as someone for her son to talk to. He should have realized it before.

It was Reiko, not Ryoji, who had piqued Kaoru’s interest. Kaoru didn’t know much about women, but he’d sensed something sexual, some kind of desire, in her unwavering gaze. She had full lips and wide, alluring eyes that drooped a little at the corners; her breasts weren’t especially large, but still there was something undeniably feminine in her five-foot frame. She had a refined air about her that he hadn’t found in women his own age, and it aroused something within him.

In comparison with that, there was nothing for him to hold onto in Ryoji’s gaze. As he sat down facing the boy in the proffered chair, he was astonished at how little light the boy’s eyes held. Ryoji didn’t even try to meet Kaoru’s gaze. He was looking in Kaoru’s direction, but plainly he wasn’t seeing anything. His eyes looked right through Kaoru, their gaze wandering across the wall behind. For a long time, they wouldn’t focus.

Ryoji set his book down on his knee with a finger still stuck in between the pages. Trying to find something to talk about, Kaoru leaned forward to see what the boy was reading.

The Horror of Viruses.

Patients want to know as much as possible about their illness. Ryoji was no exception. Naturally he was concerned about this foreign thing that had invaded his body.

Kaoru informed the boy that he was a medical student, and asked him a few questions about viruses. Ryoji answered him with a level of accuracy and detail astonishing in a sixth grader. Clearly he understood a great deal about viruses. Not only did he understand how DNA worked, he even had his own views on matters at the farthest reaches of current knowledge about the phenomenon of life.

As they went back and forth, questioning and answering, Kaoru began to imagine he was looking at a younger version of himself. He looked on this child, armed with scientific knowledge, the same way his father had looked on him. Kaoru felt like an adult.

But it wasn’t to last long. Just as they had warmed up to each other, just as the conversation was really taking off, Ryoji’s nurse showed up to take him to an examining room.

Kaoru and Reiko were alone now in the small sickroom. Kaoru was suddenly fidgety, while Reiko, who had been leaning on the windowsill, now coolly came over and sat down beside the bed.

“I had no idea you were twenty.”

Kaoru had mentioned his age during his conversation with Ryoji; Reiko had noticed. Kaoru was always being told he looked older than he was; he was used to it.

“How old do I look to you?”

“Hmm. Maybe about five years older …?” She trailed off apologetically, afraid she’d offended him.

“You mean I look old?”

“You look mature. Really … together.” To say he looked old might hurt him; to say he looked “mature” would sound like a compliment, she evidently figured.

“My parents got along well when I was growing up.”

“And that makes kids look older than their age?”

“Well, they always looked like they’d be happy enough to be left alone, just the two of them, so I had to learn to be independent pretty early.”

“Ah.” Reiko’s expression said she wasn’t convinced. She looked at her son’s empty bed.

Kaoru found himself thinking about Reiko’s husband. Something about Ryoji suggested that he didn’t have a father. Maybe there had been a divorce, maybe he’d died, or maybe he’d been absent from the start. In any case, Kaoru had the impression that Ryoji’s relationship with his father was, at the very least, extremely attenuated.

“In that case, maybe my son will never become independent,” said Reiko, still staring at the bed.

Kaoru braced himself and waited for her next words.

“It was cancer …”

“Oh.” He had expected that.

“It was two years ago. Ryoji didn’t mourn his father’s death one bit, you know.”

Kaoru could understand that. The kid probably hadn’t let her see him cry once.

“That’s how it is sometimes.”

But he didn’t mean it. When he imagined his own father’s death an uncontrollable sadness came welling up from the depths of his heart. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to overcome it when he faced the actual event. He realized that, at least in that sense, maybe he wasn’t all that independent yet himself.

“Kaoru, would you mind …” Reiko trailed off again, fixing him with a clinging gaze. “Would you mind watching over his studies?”

“You mean, as his tutor?”

“Yes.”

Teaching children was his specialty, and he had time for one or two more students. But he wasn’t sure Ryoji actually needed a tutor. Just from their brief talk together it was obvious that Ryoji was far more capable than other students his age.

But it wasn’t only that. If the cancer had already spread to his lungs and his brain, Kaoru knew that all the tutors and all the studying in the world wouldn’t make any difference in the end. There was no chance that this kid would return to school. But then, maybe that was precisely why she wanted to hire a tutor, in the hopes that letting him prepare to go back to school and resume his studies would restore his faith in the future. Kaoru knew how important it was for those surrounding the patient to show by their actions that they hadn’t given up hope.

“Sure. I have time to come by twice a week, if that would do.”

Reiko took two or three steps toward Kaoru and placed her hands demurely in front of her, one over the other. “Thank you. Not only will it benefit his schoolwork, but I’m sure he’ll be happy to have someone to talk to.”

“Okay, then.”

No doubt Ryoji didn’t have a friend in the world. Kaoru could understand, because he’d been the same. He’d been just a little of a social outcast at school. But in his case, he’d had a good relationship with his parents that had saved him from feeling lonely. Crazy as his father could be, he’d been the best possible conversation partner for Kaoru. With his father and mother around, Kaoru hadn’t been inclined to wonder why he’d been born into this world. He’d never had doubts about his identity.

What Reiko sought in Kaoru was a father figure for her son. Kaoru didn’t have a problem with that. He was confident he could play that role, and do it well.

But, he wondered: Does she also want a husband figure for herself?

Kaoru’s imagination began to run away with him. He wasn’t as confident on that score. But he wanted to at least try to be the man Reiko needed.

They arranged a date and time for his next visit. Then Kaoru left Ryoji’s hospital room.

4

Kaoru and Ryoji ended up talking with each other a lot, even outside their scheduled lessons. Usually their talks ended up focusing on general science topics. Kaoru was reminded of his own childhood, when his desire to understand the world had led him to delve deeply into natural science.

At one time, Kaoru had desired to formulate a system or theory that would encompass and explain things normally dismissed as non-science—paranormal phenomena. But the more he learned, the more he came to see that no matter what unified theory he came up with, there would still be phenomena that couldn’t be accounted for within it. That realization combined with his father’s illness turned his exploring impulses into an interest in a practical field of study, namely medicine.

Kaoru snapped out of his reverie and looked at Ryoji, a younger fellow-inquirer into the workings of the universe.

Ryoji was sitting cross-legged on his bed as always, rocking gently back and forth. Reiko was in a chair by the window, watching them talk, and she must have been fairly sleepy, for she’d started moving her head back and forth in time with her son’s movements.

“So is that what you’re interested in right now?”

Ryoji had been peppering Kaoru with questions about genetics.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Ryoji turned his normally hollow gaze forward and began to stretch where he sat on the bed. He was smiling like he always did, although there was nothing funny about what they were discussing. It wasn’t a healthy smile. It was the desperate grin of someone at the end of his own life scorning the world. Kaoru thought he’d gotten used to it, but it could still annoy him if he looked at it long enough. If his father smiled like that, he’d give him a good talking-to—he’d rip into him, father or not.

There was only one way to wipe that smile off Ryoji’s face: goad him into a passionate debate.

Kaoru changed the subject. “So what are your thoughts on the theory of evolution?” It was a natural progression from genetics.

“What do you mean?” Ryoji squirmed and rolled his eyes at Kaoru.

“Okay, how’s this for starters? Does evolution move randomly or toward a predetermined goal?”

“What do you think?” This was one of Ryoji’s less pleasing habits. He always tried to ferret out his interlocutor’s thinking first, instead of coming straight out with his own opinion.

“I think evolution moves in a certain direction, but always with a certain latitude for choice.” Kaoru couldn’t bring himself to give a ringing endorsement of mainstream Darwinian evolutionary theory. Even now that he was taking his first steps toward becoming a specialist in a natural science, he couldn’t completely abandon the idea that there was a purpose behind it all.

“The direction theory. That’s pretty much what I believe, too.” Ryoji leaned toward Kaoru, as if he’d accomplished something.

“Shall we start with the emergence of life?”

“The emergence of life?” Ryoji looked truly astonished.

“Sure. How you look at the emergence of life is an important question.”

“It is?” Ryoji furrowed his brow and looked like he wanted to get out of this question but quick.

Kaoru didn’t appreciate this attitude of Ryoji’s. For a kid like him it should be fun to play around with questions like this. The question of why life on earth was able to gain the ability to evolve was intimately connected with the question of how life first emerged on earth. Kaoru, at least, had gotten a lot of enjoyment out of debating this with his father.

“Well, let’s move on, then. Let’s grant that life emerged, by some mechanism we don’t yet understand. So, next …” Kaoru stopped to let Ryoji step in.

“I think the first life on earth was something like a seed. That seed contained the right information so that it could sprout, grow, and eventually become the tree which is life as we know it, including humankind.”

“Are there no variations?”

“Yes and no. The biggest tree grows from the tiniest seed. The size of the trunk, the color of the leaves, the type of fruit—all that information is already contained within the seed. But of course the tree is also influenced by the natural environment. If it doesn’t get sunlight it’ll wither, if it doesn’t get enough nutrients the trunk’ll be thin. Maybe it’ll be struck by lightning and split in two, maybe its branches will break in a gale. But no amount of unpredictable influence of that kind can change the basic nature of the tree as contained in the seed. Come rain or snow, a ginkgo tree will never bear apples.”

Kaoru licked his lips. He didn’t mean to contradict Ryoji. He basically agreed with him, in fact.

“So you’re saying that if sea creatures learn to walk on land, if giraffes develop long necks, it’s all because they were programmed that way from the start?”

“Well, yeah.”

“In that case, we should assume that there was some kind of will at work before life began.”

Ryoji responded innocently. “Whose will? God’s?”

But Kaoru wasn’t thinking about God per se, just an invisible will at work both before life began and during the process of evolution.

He found himself imagining a school of fish fighting with each other to get to land. There was an overwhelming power in the thought of all those fish, enough of them to dye the sea black, jumping around as they sought dry land.

Of course it was possible that sea life had never intended to go on land, but had simply succeeded in adapting to it after orogenic processes had begun to dry up the water. That was how the mainstream evolutionary thinker would explain it.

But the image that came to Kaoru’s mind was of those hollow-eyed fish, yearning day in and day out for the land, dying at the water’s edge and making mountains of their corpses. Mainstream evolution had it that a certain fraction of them had simply been lucky enough to adapt. Kaoru simply couldn’t believe that. The transition from a marine to a land-based living environment involved changes in internal organs. Their insides had to be remade to allow for the transition from gill breathing to lung breathing. What kind of bodily trial and error had resulted in those changes? One kind of organ had been reborn as another. It was pretty major, when you thought about it.

Right in front of Kaoru was Ryoji’s bald head. Because Ryoji was hunched over, the top of his head came up to the tip of Kaoru’s nose. At this very moment, within that emaciated little body, a violent cellular conflict was being enacted. As it was within Kaoru’s father Hideyuki. He’d lost most of his stomach, part of his large intestine, and his liver. And still, more as-yet-unknown cancer cells had taken up residence in some new spot in his body and were writhing there even now.

An unexpected inspiration came to Kaoru.

Cancer cells invaded a normal organ, changing its color and shape and constructing new bulges, until the normal functioning of the organ was impaired and it died. The obviously negative aspects of this were what stood out, but at the same time it was possible to detect in the cancer’s actions a certain groping towards something. By infiltrating the blood and lymph to penetrate cells elsewhere, it was experimenting with transplanting its immortal nature bit by bit. But to what end?

To create somewhere within the body a new organ adapted to the future. Maybe the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus was nothing but a sort of trial-and-error attempt to create a new organ.

In the process, large numbers of human beings would die, just as most of the fish had died at the water’s edge. But just as after a hundred million years sea life had finally made it onto the land, someday, after countless sacrifices, maybe the human race would find itself with a new organ. Humanity would have evolved. Maybe an evolutionary leap comparable to the movement from the water to the land was impossible without something like a new organ. When would it happen?

Human cancer deaths were surging upward, but without knowing when the cancer cells had started their work it was impossible to know if the human race had just begun its fumbling toward evolution, or was about to complete it. The only thing certain was that the pace of evolution was accelerating. The time it took for apes to evolve into humans was shorter than what had been needed for sea creatures to evolve into amphibians, so much shorter that there was almost no comparison. So it was possible. The intervals in the evolutionary process were gradually getting shorter, so maybe it wasn’t too soon for this to be evolution, too.

Kaoru wanted to think so. He wanted to turn his attention to anything that would afford him hope. He wanted to believe that his father would be the first one to successfully evolve, rather than just another sacrifice.

To be reborn. Kaoru would have wanted that, if it were possible. No doubt everybody wanted to live again. The gift of eternal life.

Since it was a property of the MHC virus to create immortal cells, it was only natural to fantasize about human immortality. Maybe even Ryoji had a chance.

Kaoru almost said so, but bit back the words. Anything that sounded like an affirmation of the illness might have the effect of loosening the boy’s attachment to living.

He heard faint snoring right behind him. Reiko, who had been nodding off for some time, had finally lowered her face to the table and gone to sleep. Kaoru and Ryoji looked at each other and giggled.

It was still early, not even eight o’clock. Outside the window, the evening cityscape was starting to emerge from the summer dusk. From below the window came the sounds of highway traffic, suddenly loud.

Reiko’s elbow twitched, knocking an empty soda can to the floor, but she didn’t awaken.

Kaoru spoke cautiously. “Your mom’s asleep. Maybe it’s time I was leaving.” The lesson had ended long ago.

“Weren’t you about to say something to me just now, Kaoru?”

Ryoji looked discontented, as if he hadn’t had his fill of talking yet.

“We’ll pick up where we left off next time.”

Kaoru stood up and looked around the room. Reiko had gone to sleep with her right cheek pillowed on her hands and her face turned in his direction. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was half open, and the back of her hand was wet with drool. Fast asleep, she looked quite cute.

It was the first time he’d thought that about a woman ten years older than him. Kaoru felt affection for her entire body, and harbored a momentary desire to touch her.

Ryoji reached out and shook her shoulder. “Mom, Mom.” She still didn’t wake up.

“It’s no good. She’s out like a light.”

Ryoji trained his innocent eyes on Kaoru, and then on the extra bed provided for relatives accompanying the patient. “Mom gets tired taking care of me, so I like to let her sleep when she can. She’ll have to wake up in the middle of the night tonight anyway,” he said, as if he weren’t making a veiled entreaty.

Kaoru felt an unaccustomed warmth in his body, as if Ryoji had managed to peek inside his heart. He realized that what the boy was really saying was, Would you pick her up and move her to the extra bed real gently so she doesn’t wake up?

If he could manage to pick her up, it was only about six feet to the bed. Reiko’s knees beneath her short culottes were pressed tightly together as if to fend off any attempts to touch her. Carrying a woman to bed was nothing for someone of Kaoru’s physical strength, but his guard went up at the thought of touching her—he wasn’t sure he’d be able to control his desires in the face of that stimulus.

“When she’s like this you couldn’t move her with a lever.” Ryoji’s expression as he said this was suggestive; then he pointedly turned his face away from Kaoru, even as he seemed to be looking right through him. It was as if he knew Kaoru was interested in his mother as a woman, and was egging him on.

Look, I know you want to touch my Mom. It’s okay. You have my permission. I’ll even give you the opportunity.

Ryoji was provoking him, biting back laughter while he did it.

Kaoru wordlessly set up the extra bed. It wasn’t so much that he was caving in to Ryoji’s challenge as that he was eager to yield to whatever he felt on touching Reiko. If his feelings were going to deepen, let them. As yet he didn’t understand the effect physical contact with her would have on his psychological state.

Kaoru placed his arms behind Reiko’s neck and under her knees, and in one motion lifted her up and placed her on the bed.

As he laid her down, her lips brushed against his neck, just for a moment. She opened her eyes slightly and flexed her arms so as to hug him closer, then loosened her grip with a contented look on her face, and fell back to sleep.

Kaoru stayed silent and motionless for a little while, afraid she’d wake up if he moved. For several seconds, his body covered hers. With his face between her chest and belly, he could feel the resilience of the flesh of her abdomen; his eyes were trained on her face. He was looking up at her face from below, essentially. He could see the fine lines of her jaw, and above it the two black holes of her nostrils. He’d never seen her face from this angle before.

At length he stood up again. As he separated himself from her body, he asked himself, repeatedly: Am I falling in love with her?

The touch of her lips was still vivid on the skin of his neck.

“Well, then, I’ll see you next week.”

Kaoru put his hand hesitantly on the doorknob, so as not to reveal the pounding of his heart.

Ryoji still sat cross-legged on his bed, rocking back and forth, cracking his knuckles. Unlike a few moments ago, his face held no look of provocation or mockery now—he’d stifled all expression.

“Good night.”

Kaoru slipped out of the room. He could feel Ryoji’s unnatural smile fixed on the door as he shut it behind him.

Kaoru had a flash of intuition. This meeting was not mere coincidence. His future would be intimately tied with Reiko and Ryoji.

5

Among Kaoru’s pleasures in life were his visits to the office of Assistant Professor Saiki in the Pathology Department. Saiki had been a classmate of his father’s in this very university, and now, with his father in this unfortunate condition, Saiki was always ready to lend an ear or some advice. Officially, he wasn’t Kaoru’s advisor, but he was an old friend of the family, someone Kaoru had known since childhood.

These days there was a specific purpose to Kaoru’s regular visits. Cells from the cancer torturing his father were being cultured in Saiki’s lab, and Kaoru liked to come by to look at them under the microscope. To adequately fend off this enemy’s attacks, he felt he needed to know its true visage.

Kaoru left the hospital proper and entered the building containing the Pathology, Forensic Medicine, and Microbiology laboratories. The university hospital was a motley collection of new and old buildings; this was one of the older ones. The Forensic Medicine classrooms were on the second floor, while the third housed Pathology, where he was headed.

He climbed the stairs and turned left into a hallway lined with small labs on either side. Kaoru stopped in front of Professor Saiki’s door and knocked.

“Come in,” Saiki called out. The door was open a crack; Kaoru stuck his head in. “Oh, it’s you.” This was Saiki’s standard response on seeing Kaoru.

“Is this a bad time?”

“I’m busy, as you can see, but you’re welcome to do what you like.”

Saiki was involved in examining cells taken this afternoon from some diseased tissue; he barely looked up. That was fine with Kaoru; he’d rather be left alone to make his observations in freedom.

“Don’t mind if I do, then.”

Kaoru opened the door of the large refrigerator-like carbon dioxide incubator and searched for his father’s cells. The incubator was kept at a constant temperature and a nearly constant level of carbon dioxide. It wouldn’t do for him to keep the door open long.

But the plastic Petri dish in which his father’s cells were being cultured was in its usual place, and he had no trouble finding it.

So this is what immortality looks like, he thought. It mystified him, as it always did.

His father’s liver had been removed—having changed from its normal reddish-pink to a mottled hue covered with what looked like white powder—and was now sealed in a glass jar, preserved in formaldehyde, in another cabinet, where it had been stored for three years now. Sometimes it seemed to squirm or writhe, but maybe that was a trick of the light.

The liver was dead, of course, pickled in formaldehyde. Whereas the cancer cells in the Petri dish were alive.

The dish contained cells grown from Kaoru’s father’s cancer cells, cultured in a medium with a blood serum concentration of less than one percent.

With normal cells, growth stops when the growth factor in the blood serum is used up. And within a Petri dish, they won’t multiply beyond a single layer no matter how much growth factor is added, due to what is called contact inhibition. Cancer cells not only lack contact inhibition, but they have an extremely low dependence on the blood serum. Simply put, they are able to grow and reproduce, layer upon layer, in a tiny space with virtually no food supply.

Normal cells in a Petri dish will only form one layer, whereas cancer cells will form layer upon layer. Normal cells reproduce in a flat, orderly fashion, while cancer cells multiply in a three-dimensional, disorderly manner. Normal cells have a natural limit to the number of times they can divide, while cancer cells can go on dividing forever.

Immortality.

Kaoru was fully aware of the irony in the fact that immortality, the object of man’s deepest yearnings from time immemorial, was in the possession of this primeval horror, this killer of men.

As if to demonstrate their three-dimensional nature, his father’s cancer cells had bubbled up into a spheroid. Every time Kaoru looked they had taken on a different shape. Originally, these had their source in normal cells in his father’s liver, but now it might be more appropriate to see them as an independent life form. Even as their erstwhile host faced his crisis, these cells greedily enjoyed eternal life.

Kaoru set this dish full of concentrated contradiction into the phase contrast microscope. Its magnification only went up to x200, but it allowed easy color imaging. He could only use the scanning electron microscope when he had time to spare.

The cancer cells, these life forms which had gone beyond any moderating influence, presented a peculiar sight. Perhaps there was something actually, objectively grotesque about their appearance, or perhaps they only looked grotesque to him because of his preconceptions about them as usurpers of human life.

Kaoru struggled to abandon this bias, his hatred of the agent of his father’s suffering, as he observed the sample.

Raising the magnification, he could see that the cells were clumping together. The long, spindly, translucent cells grew as a thicket, stained a thin green. This wasn’t their natural color; the microscope had a green filter attached.

Normal cells would have been evenly distributed in a flat, orderly fashion, with no one part sticking out, but these cancer cells revealed, here and there, a thicker green shadow.

He could see them clearly: a multitude of points, bubbling up roundly, shining. These were cells in the process of dividing.

Kaoru changed the dish under the microscope several times, comparing the cancer cells to normal cells. The surface difference was readily apparent: the cancer cells displayed a chaotic filthiness.

But the surface of the cells was all he could examine: an optical microscope wasn’t powerful enough to show him their nuclei or DNA.

Still, Kaoru gazed on untiring. His heart was heavy with the knowledge that he was wasting his time: just what was he going to learn looking at them from the outside? Still, even as he cursed himself for doing so, he examined the external part of each and every one of them.

The cells all looked alike on the surface. Thousands of identical faces, all in a row.

Identical faces.

Kaoru raised his face from the microscope.

Totally out of the blue, he had compared the cells to human faces. But that was what they looked like: the same face thousands of times over, gathering and sticking together in a clump until they formed a mottled mass.

Kaoru had to look away for a while.

That image came to me intuitively. Was it for a reason?

That was the first question to consider. His father had taught him to pay attention to his intuition.

It often happened that Kaoru would be reading a book or walking down the street and suddenly a completely unrelated scene would present itself to his mind’s eye. Usually he didn’t inquire into the reason. Say he was walking down the street and saw a movie star on a poster: he might suddenly remember an acquaintance who resembled the movie star. If he didn’t register having seen the poster, which was entirely possible, it would seem as if the image of his acquaintance had come to him out of nowhere.

If it was a kind of synchronicity, then Kaoru wanted to analyze it to find out what had synched up with what. He’d been looking at cancer cells under x200 magnification, and something had been triggered so that the cells looked to him like human faces. Now: did that mean something?

Pondering it brought no answer, so Kaoru returned his gaze to the microscope. There had to be something which had elicited the comparison in his imagination. He saw narrow cells piled up in three dimensions. Little glowing globes. Kaoru muttered the same thing as before.

No doubt about it, they all have the same face.

Not only that, but it was clearly not a man’s face, not to his imagination. If he had to choose he’d say it was somehow feminine. An egg-shaped, regular face, with smooth, even slippery, skin.

This was weird. In all the times he’d looked at cells through the phase contrast microscope, he’d never thought they looked like human faces.

6

Kaoru was in a hospital room face-to-face with Ryoji, but his mind was on the sounds coming from the bathroom. Reiko had been in there for some time, with the water running. She wasn’t showering; maybe she was washing underwear. While tutoring Ryoji he’d seen Reiko hurriedly gathering up underwear that had been hung up to dry in the room.

Distractedly, Kaoru set about answering Ryoji’s questions about his father’s condition.

He gave him a brief rundown, but Ryoji’s body language said he wanted to hear more. Maybe he wanted to sketch in the future of his own illness based on what he could learn of Kaoru’s father’s.

Kaoru stopped the conversation before Ryoji could start to guess that the cancer had spread to his father’s lungs. Partly he hesitated because he thought the knowledge might have a negative influence on Ryoji, but partly he simply didn’t want to say it out loud.

When the cancer had become heavy on his lungs, Hideyuki’s face had started to betray weakness; he’d started to talk about what would happen after he was gone—to talk about entrusting Kaoru with his mother’s care.

Look after Machi, okay?

At the sight of this weakness, Kaoru was seized with a desire to deliver the full force of his anger upon his father. And just how am I supposed to comfort Mom after you die, he wanted to say. Quit laying these impossible tasks on me!

Now as he sat talking about his father’s condition with Ryoji, also lying flat in a hospital bed, his father’s image came to him, and he had a hard time speaking. Not noticing that Kaoru had fallen silent, and insensitive to the reason why, Ryoji produced a forced-sounding laugh.

“Now that I think about it, Kaoru, I talked to your father once.”

They’d both been in and out of the hospital with the same illness. No matter how big the hospital, it wasn’t unlikely that they’d come into contact.

“Really?”

“He’s the tall guy in 7B, right?”

“That’s him.”

“He’s pretty strong. He’s always frisky, slapping the nurses’ butts and stuff like that.”

That was Hideyuki alright. He’d achieved a certain notoriety among the patients for the cheerful way in which he battled his illness, never seeming to lose heart. They said that seeing him act so cheerful, so unafraid of death, made it possible for them to hang on to the hope necessary to gamble on long odds. He’d lost his stomach, his large intestine, and his liver, and now it looked like the cancer had spread to his lungs: his time, it appeared, had come. But regardless, in front of other people he put on a display of high spirits he couldn’t possibly feel. The only exception was when he was alone with Kaoru: then he allowed his weak side to show …

“What about your Mom, Kaoru? How’s she doing?” Ryoji asked, without much evident concern.

Reiko came out of the bathroom, spread the laundry out on the extra bed, and then disappeared back into the bathroom.

Kaoru followed her with his eyes, but the expected sound of running water never came. It seemed that Reiko just didn’t want to be there. Maybe because the topic of Kaoru’s mother had come up.

The Metastatic Human Cancer Virus can also be spread through contact with lymphocytes, the attending physician had said. Kaoru’s first fears had been for his mother. He imagined they’d ceased sexual relations as soon as they’d been made aware of the risk, but there was a good chance she’d already contracted it by that point. Recently, Kaoru had finally been able to prevail on his mother to have her blood tested.

The results were positive. She had yet to manifest any symptoms, but it was a fact that the MHC virus had already attached itself to her DNA. In other words, the retrovirus’s base sequence had been incorporated into the chromosomes in her cells.

At the moment, the process was paused at that step, but at any time her cells might begin to turn cancerous. In fact, there was every chance that it had already begun, and it just wasn’t yet apparent on the surface.

The mechanism that determined when and how the provirus attached to the chromosomes would turn the cell cancerous was not yet understood, so the disease’s progress from this point could not be predicted with any accuracy. But if it moved on to the next step, then his mother’s cells would start producing new copies of the MHC virus.

Even if I get sick, I don’t want to have surgery, she’d proclaimed, as soon as she’d heard the results. Since there was no way to head off metastasis, surgery was doomed from the start. All it could do was slow the progress of the disease, not cure it. After watching her husband suffer, she had a strong aversion to seeing her own body carved away piece by piece.

But what bothered Kaoru most was seeing his mother stray into mysticism, thinking that if modern medicine couldn’t cure her, she’d try to find her own miracle elsewhere. The person she really wanted to save was not herself, although she knew she’d someday come down with cancer, but her husband, in the last stages of his.

With a passion that wouldn’t blink at selling her soul to the devil, she started reading old writings on North American Indians. Her desk was stacked high with primary sources sent from who knew where.

The mythical world holds the key to a cure for cancer, she insisted, almost deliriously.

Again from the bathroom came the purposeful sound of running water. Ryoji reacted by glancing toward the bathroom.

“My mother’s a carrier,” said Kaoru in a low voice.

“Oh. So are you …?”

Ryoji asked his question with no emotion whatsoever, and Kaoru slowly shook his head. He’d had his blood tested two months ago, and the results had come back negative.

Hearing this, Ryoji actually laughed. Not necessarily out of relief that Kaoru was uninfected, though. Rather, it was a scornful, even pitying cackle. Kaoru glared at him.

“What’s so funny about that?”

“I just feel sorry for you.”

“For me?” Kaoru pointed at himself, and Ryoji nodded his head twice.

“Yeah. You’re strong and healthy, so you’re probably going to live a long time. Just thinking about it …”

Under his motorcycle-loving father’s influence, Kaoru had taken up motocross, and under Hideyuki’s tutelage he’d improved his showing with every race he’d entered. He’d grown up muscular and fit in a way that nobody could have predicted from a childhood spent on a computer from morning to night. Kaoru’s muscles were visible even through his T-shirt, and yet this scrawny kid was pitying him. To Kaoru it sounded like he was laughing at something Kaoru had inherited from his father, and he fought back vigorously.

“Living’s not as bad a thing as you seem to think it is.”

Part of him could understand Ryoji’s feelings, of course. Kaoru didn’t know when or how he’d been infected, but here he was at age twelve—between surgery, chemotherapy, and repeated hospitalizations, his life had been nothing but an endless round of suffering. Kaoru could see why he’d want to generalize from his experience and believe that everybody must be feeling the same way.

“Yeah, but everybody dies.” Ryoji turned his hollow gaze toward the ceiling. Kaoru no longer felt like arguing with him.

Death filled everything, everywhere. There in front of him was that bald little head. It was a solemn fact.

Nobody who hasn’t experienced it can understand the misery of chemotherapy. Overcome with violent nausea, you lose your appetite, and anything you do manage to eat, you bring up again soon enough; you can’t get any sleep. That was Ryoji’s life, and that was how his life was going to end in the not-too-distant future. Kaoru knew it. What could he possibly say in the face of that?

Kaoru felt tired. Not physical fatigue. It was like his heart was blocked and screaming. He wanted to soar; he wanted to laugh, freely and from the heart. He wanted to spend time in close bodily contact with another human being.

“I never wanted to be born in the first place,” Ryoji said, ignoring Kaoru’s unresponsiveness. At that very moment, Reiko stepped out of the bathroom and into the reverberations of Ryoji’s statement. Without the slightest change in her expression she crossed the room and went out into the hall.

Why did you have me? Perhaps she left because she couldn’t bear her son’s accusations, or perhaps she simply had an errand to run. There was no way of telling.

But Kaoru had been paying attention to her movements. And now two questions raised their heads. First of all, was Reiko infected with the MHC virus? And, second, by what route did Ryoji become infected with it? These were questions Kaoru couldn’t come right out and ask, as they touched on private family matters.

“Well, I think I’ll be on my way now.” He couldn’t be by Ryoji’s side any longer. Plus, he wanted to follow Reiko.

Kaoru left the boy’s bed and opened the door to the hallway. He wanted to come into closer contact with Reiko, both bodily and with what was inside her. Maybe his interest in her amounted to a kind of love; he couldn’t tell. He felt that she was urging him out of the cramped hospital room and into the world outside.

Compelled by this stimulus, Kaoru wandered the long corridors of the hospital, looking for Reiko.

7

He had an idea where she was, or at least he thought he did.

My only peace these days comes from going to the very highest point in the hospital and looking out over the city.

A few evenings before, Kaoru had seen her standing outside the restaurant on the top floor of the hospital, nose pressed against a window, and he’d asked her what she was doing. She’d explained her actions with those words.

The sun would be setting soon, silhouetting the skyscrapers in this subcenter of the city, bringing them into beautiful relief. Kaoru knew that this was her favorite time of day for gazing at the city.

He got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor, and when he stepped into the hallway and looked left he could see a woman standing there, leaning against a pillar. Kaoru approached her without speaking, until they were standing side by side.

The setting sun streaked Reiko’s face with crimson. Her cheeks glowed seductively as they reflected the sky’s shifting hues.

She knew as soon as he came up to her; she could see his reflection in the glass. She addressed his reflection with a faint smile.

“I’m sorry.”

Kaoru couldn’t figure out what she was apologizing for. Maybe she was recognizing his skill in tutoring her difficult-to-deal-with son, but in that case a thank-you would have been more appropriate. Kaoru was embarrassed for a response.

He decided not to ask why she’d apologized. “You really like high places, don’t you?”

“I do. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived my whole life hugging the ground.”

Did she mean she’d always lived in one-story houses? If so, it was a stark contrast to Kaoru’s own living environment. He still lived with his mother in their apartment tower overlooking Tokyo Bay.

Reiko changed the subject in an effort to dispel the oppressive atmosphere; in an enthusiastic voice she started talking about dreams. She started right in, like a shot, with what she wanted to do first when her son had recovered from his illness. The precondition itself—her son recovering—being utterly impossible, she was free to dream whatever unrealistic dreams she felt like. Among the more realistic ideas she mentioned was taking a trip overseas.

So when she changed tack and asked Kaoru, “What’s your dream?” he was able without hesitation to come up with the family trip to the North American desert that they’d planned ten years ago.

Kaoru gave Reiko a brief account of what they’d talked about that late night ten years ago—the relationship between gravity and life, the mysteries of life itself, and how those led to the possible existence of longevity zones.

He then explained in simple terms how his father’s promise to take him to the desert had fueled further interest in global longevity patterns. Then came his father’s cancer, which had prompted him to deeper research, and the belief that there had to be a relationship between longevity zones and the number of cancer victims.

This last point piqued Reiko’s interest, and, still leaning against the glass, she turned to face Kaoru.

“What kind of relationship?”

“I’m not entirely sure yet, but the statistics show certain peculiarities that can’t be ignored.”

Kaoru warmed up to his explanation, as he could see that Reiko had pricked up her ears.

“It was not just coincidence that led me that night into associating gravitational anomalies with longevity. I had a flash of intuition. Most scientific discoveries are the result of intuition. Inspiration comes first, then reason. It might not be far off to think that I was responding to some kind of suggestion that night.

“When my father’s cancer spread to his liver, I started researching longevity zones worldwide. It wasn’t just my imagination. It’s been confirmed: there are spots on the globe where people live longer. I analyzed all kinds of data. If they had something in common, I was going to find it.

“I finally narrowed it down to four particularly well-known longevity zones: Abkhazia, an area of the Caucasus on the shores of the Black Sea; Vilcabamba, a sacred valley on the border between Peru and Ecuador; Hunza, a mountainous region surrounded by the Karakoram Mountains and the Hindukush and cut off from the surrounding area; and Sanaru Island, in the Samejima archipelago of Japan. I wasn’t able to visit these places myself to investigate, so I read everything I could get my hands on that related to them, and compiled my own statistics. When I did that, one thing stood out. It’s a bit too early for me to make a definitive judgment, but it would seem that these places have not seen a single death from cancer. Doctors and biologists from around the world have investigated longevity zones, and they’ve left countless reports. None of them record deaths from cancer.

“The reports all agree in pointing to diet as a possible cause for this low cancer rate. But this is nothing more than a guess, seeing as how we haven’t yet fully explained the mechanism that produces cancer. There’s no denying that people in these areas live on a simple diet consisting mainly of vegetables and grains, but data suggests that their consumption of tobacco and alcohol may even be higher than other areas. At the very least, we aren’t able to say that their exposure to carcinogens is lower than normal.

“All of this makes me wonder. Why is it that these longevity zones have so few people suffering from cancer? And then … Listen to this. Cancer cells have the ability to make normal cells immortal. Is that somehow related? And how are we to account for the fact that these longevity zones match up perfectly with areas of unusually low gravity?

“There’s got to be a satisfying explanation, but I haven’t been able to come up with it yet.”

Kaoru paused for breath. His excitement had risen to a peculiar pitch as he talked.

Reiko was silent for a time, looking at Kaoru. Then she licked her lips and spoke.

“This MHC virus that’s suddenly everywhere—where did it come from?”

Her question struck Kaoru as beside the point.

“Why ask me?”

Reiko’s eyes were open wide and her expression was serious: she evidently really wanted an answer. At that moment Kaoru found her unbearably adorable. He forgot all about the fact that she was ten years older than he; he wanted to place his hands gently on her cheeks and draw her to him.

“Don’t laugh. It’s just that I wondered, for a second, if the MHC virus might just possibly have come from one of these longevity zones of yours.”

Kaoru could guess at her train of thought. He’d read a novel once about someone whose entire body had been overrun by cancer; only, instead of dying, the cancer had made him immortal.

Maybe people in those areas have learned to coexist with cancer, and that’s why they live so long. Most likely Reiko’s imagination had moved along those lines. Maybe it’s not that those areas are free of cancer. Maybe they’re full of it, in fact. Maybe it’s just that nobody dies from it. Maybe the cancer virus started there …

“Maybe a virus somehow picked up these people’s cancer chromosome and the result escaped into the world as the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s all much too difficult for me to understand, I’m sure. It was just a thought. Forget about it.”

Reiko turned her gaze to the world below. Over the last few minutes the sky had changed color dramatically, and that change was reflected even more vividly in Reiko’s expression. Deep shadows pooled in the hollows of her eye sockets. The darker it got outside, the more the window began to function as a mirror. Against the backdrop of skyscrapers Kaoru saw Reiko’s face reflected in the glass as if it was floating disembodied in the darkness.

“Metastatic cancer victims are especially numerous in Japan and America.”

It was true: the geographical distribution of the victims showed marked variation. Japan and America each had roughly a million patients with the disease, and the advanced nations of Europe had several hundred thousand, while remote areas of the type where the longevity zones were located had hardly reported any cases at all. Kaoru was trying to imply that her hypothesis had holes.

“What about the desert area you mentioned, in North America? It has abnormally low gravity, so it wouldn’t be surprising if people there lived longer, would it?”

“It’s just a guess.”

“So you have no proof.”

“I suppose you could say all this has just been a game for me.”

The word seemed to come as a shock to Reiko: she became visibly discouraged. “Oh.” Now her discouragement turned into a frown; she made as if to turn away from Kaoru.

“What’s wrong?”

Kaoru was a bit taken aback by this sudden change in her.

“I was hoping for a miracle. It’s all we have left,” she said, still looking away.

A miracle, Kaoru thought in disgust. Reiko was about to fall into the same trap as his mother.

“I think you’d better stop hoping for a miracle.”

“I won’t stop.”

“You have other things you need to be doing.”

He wanted Reiko to keep her wits about her. But she wasn’t listening to him now.

“I was just thinking, maybe all the inhabitants of those longevity zones get viral cancer at some point. But before the cancer cells incapacitate their internal organs, some factor turns their cells immortal, and the cancer becomes benign. Its bad side disappears, and the cancer is able to coexist with human beings. Their cells are able to undergo mitosis more times, with the result that they live longer. How’s that for a theory?”

He’d never seen Reiko go on like this before. She wasn’t making reason the arbiter of truth and falsehood anymore: she was judging subjectively, based on how much hope the result would allow her. You could find two or three pieces of evidence to support any hypothesis if you allowed your judgment to be swayed by your desire for a particular result, Kaoru knew. This wasn’t going to help her son. He understood the desire to cling to a god. But how was he to deal with her clinging to what she knew was nothing more than idle speculation? It might make for good fiction, but Kaoru didn’t have time to take such fancies seriously if he wanted to make it as a doctor.

For her part, Reiko was prepared to believe in her imagined world with all her might. Kaoru knew he’d sown the seeds for this. He wished he’d never mentioned any of it.

“Please, just forget everything I told you.”

“No way. I can’t. That place you were trying to get to has something, some factor that can eliminate cancer’s negative properties, that can change it from something malignant to something benign.”

Kaoru held up his hands as if to calm her down, but to no avail. She was more enthused than he’d ever seen her.

“I think you need to go there after all—you need to get your hands on whatever it is that can turn death into life.”

“Now hold on a minute.”

Her face was close to his now, and she’d grabbed hold of his hand.

“Please!” The soft touch of her hand reinforced the message.

“I’m tired of living like this. Ryoji’s going to start his fourth round of chemotherapy soon.”

“I’m sure that’s tough on you.”

“I’d go with you if I could.”

In that moment, what had started out as a family trip suddenly turned into something different. Imagining a journey to the North American desert alone with Reiko made Kaoru feel hot inside. That low-gravity point at the Four Corners area—it felt like a deep crevice, a vortex, sucking everything in. He was being pulled in by low gravity … No, at this moment Kaoru was being pulled in by this pair of eyes right in front of him.

She wore no makeup except for a very little lipstick, and she gave off a perfume that seemed to be the natural scent of her skin. Kaoru and Reiko were enveloped in the shadows where the fluorescent lights of the hallway were blocked by a large pillar. The window was now a perfect mirror, reflecting the occasional passerby in the corridor.

Before he knew what was happening, Kaoru was returning her grip on his hands. Hand toyed with hand, fingers intertwined with fingers, and eyes checked each other’s intentions.

The last sound of footsteps disappeared from the hallway, and as if they’d been gauging the moment when silence would grace them, they drew each other close in an embrace. They seized the moment when the seventeenth-floor corridor was empty.

Arms encircled backs in embrace, body communicated to body the pulsating of blood vessels. The individual rhythms of their blood synchronized, cells were stimulated through thin cloth layers. Kaoru became erect, his swelling pressing against Reiko’s midriff.

Kaoru needed her lips, so he pulled his head back and tried to turn her face up towards his; Reiko didn’t respond, but only dug her fingers deeper into his back. She pressed her forehead into his jaw and forced his head sideways—she seemed to be actively rejecting his kiss. After several tries and several rebuffs, Kaoru finally understood.

She’s infected too.

The MHC virus was known to have been transmitted via saliva. Reiko must be rejecting him out of fear for his safety. He began to understand her unexplained course of action that evening. Earlier, when Ryoji had said, “I never wanted to be born in the first place,” she’d left the room without a word. Maybe Ryoji had been infected while still in his mother’s womb. He’d finally let these recriminating words escape, and she’d found she couldn’t bear to remain.

However, the fear of infection did nothing to cool Kaoru’s ardor. He gently parted his body from hers, cradled her cheeks in his hands, pleaded to her with his eyes that he’d understood the situation, and then placed his lips on hers in a way that brooked no refusal.

This time, Reiko didn’t even try to reject him.

He placed one hand on the back of her neck, the other on her bottom, and pulled her toward him. Such was the force of their coming together that their teeth collided softly, with a lascivious sound composed equally of the softness of lips, the hardness of teeth, and saliva.

They pressed their mouths together until they’d sucked out all their breath and could no longer sustain the intensity. Then their lips parted and they touched cheek to cheek, listening to each other’s tortuous gasps. Reiko stretched up to her full height so she could bring her lips close to Kaoru’s ear.

“Please,” she said, between ragged breaths.

He couldn’t tell if the vibrations at his ear were gasps or sobs.

Reiko wanted to save not only her son, but herself.

“Please … help.”

“I’m not God.”

It was all Kaoru could do to say that much. The only thing he understood clearly at this moment, with his organ engorged with blood and his mind not behaving rationally, was that he had taken his own first steps into Death’s territory. He felt no confusion, no regret over having obeyed his body’s commands and held Reiko and kissed her. He felt that no matter how many chances he had to live this moment over, he would always make the same choices. Reiko’s body emanated a power that could not be opposed.

“Please. I know you’ll go there.”

Now even Reiko was spurring him on to visit the low-gravity zone. The fiction whose seed he himself had planted, to which Reiko had given form, was now taking root within Kaoru.

8

As Kaoru entered his father’s hospital room, he found Professor Saiki just getting up from the chair by his father’s bed.

“Hey,” Saiki said on seeing Kaoru. He raised a hand and made as if to leave the room.

“That’s alright, stay a while.” If he was leaving because he felt bad about disrupting Kaoru’s visit with his father, then Kaoru felt a duty to press him to stay.

“I can’t. As you know, I’m quite busy.” And it didn’t seem like mere politeness: Saiki was twitching as if he did indeed have pressing business.

“Oh. Well, then.”

“That’s right. I just popped in by special request,” Saiki said, glancing at Hideyuki. Then he raised his hand again, said, “Later, then,” and left. Kaoru watched him walk away, then went to his father’s side.

“How are you feeling, Dad?”

Kaoru gazed down at his father for a moment, studying his color and the set of his jaw, before taking Saiki’s place in the chair.

“Annoyed,” Hideyuki said in a monotone, eyes raised to the ceiling.

“What happened?”

“Saiki. He brings nothing but bad news.”

Saiki was an old classmate from med school, but as he’d elected to go into research rather than clinical medicine, he wasn’t directly involved in Hideyuki’s case. Which made Kaoru wonder all the more what sort of bad news he could have been bringing.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know Masato Nakamura?”

Hideyuki’s voice was hoarse.

“One of your friends, right?”

Kaoru recognized the name Nakamura. He’d been a coworker of Hideyuki’s on the Loop project; Kaoru believed he was currently a professor in the engineering department of a provincial university.

“He’s dead,” said Hideyuki, curtly.

“Really?”

“He had the same illness as me.”

Kaoru had heard people say that when someone your own age dies it invariably comes as a shock, making you feel it might be your turn next.

“You’re still alright, Dad.”

Kaoru couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound commonplace. Hideyuki slowly shook his head where he lay, as if to say that meaningless words of encouragement wouldn’t do him any good.

“Do you know Komatsuzaki?”

“No.” Kaoru had never heard this name.

“He joined the Loop project after me.”

“Oh?”

“He’s dead, too.”

Kaoru swallowed hard. Death’s shadow was creeping ever closer to his father.

Hideyuki proceeded to list three more names, summing up with a simple “They’re all dead.”

“Doesn’t it make you wonder what’s going on?” he continued. “All those names I mentioned belonged to people I worked with on the artificial life project, or who were at least connected with it in some way.”

“And all of them died from MHC?”

“How many people in Japan have been infected with this virus?”

“About a million, maybe?” That included people like Reiko and Kaoru’s mother who had been infected but hadn’t yet gotten sick.

“That’s a whole lot, but it’s still no more than one percent of the population. Whereas, me, I don’t know anybody who’s not infected.”

Hideyuki cast a sharp glance at Kaoru; at first he seemed to be searching Kaoru’s soul, but then his expression relaxed into one of prayer.

“You’re okay, right?”

Hideyuki brought a hand out from under his sheet and touched Kaoru’s knee through his jeans. No doubt he wanted to hold his son’s hand, but was afraid of skin-on-skin contact. With his wife already infected, all it would take to rob Hideyuki of the will to fight the cancer would be knowing that Kaoru had contracted the virus too.

Kaoru averted his eyes from his father’s weakening gaze.

“Were there any problems with the test results?”

Kaoru felt like his father could look right through him, but he forced himself to speak through his fear. “I told you there’s nothing to worry about.” True, two months ago his test results had been negative, but there was no telling what next month’s test would reveal.

Kaoru turned away, pretending to be reacting to the sound of footsteps in the corridor. He flashed back to the scene in Ryoji’s room yesterday afternoon; the mental images brought with them stirrings of the blood and of the flesh, resurrecting the sensory fluctuations that had rocked his body.

The evening before last, he’d been forced to limit his contact with Reiko to kissing. They’d been in a hallway, and they’d only been vouchsafed a few minutes. Considering they were in a hospital, it was about as much as they had any right to hope for.

The next afternoon—yesterday—he’d gone back to Ryoji’s sickroom to retrieve the pathology textbook he’d left there, and he arrived just after Ryoji had been taken off to Radiology for some tests. Kaoru hadn’t known it was time for his tests; Reiko hadn’t told him. But to all appearances it looked as if he’d timed his visit to coincide with the boy’s absence.

He knocked softly, and immediately Reiko opened the door, but just a crack. Her face was wet and she was holding a towel—she must have been washing her face when he knocked. There was a sink next to the door, and the ten-watt fluorescent bulb above it was lit. She’d been taking off her makeup there, rather than in the bathroom.

Patting her face with the towel, she spoke in a quiet, controlled voice.

“You forgot something yesterday.”

“Sorry, I should have called first.” Kaoru lowered his voice in response. There was no sign of Ryoji.

“Come in.”

She took his hand and guided him into the room, then shut the door. They stood in front of the sink, in front of the mirror, facing each other. She finished wiping her face. She was letting Kaoru see her features unadorned by cosmetics. There were crows’ feet around her eyes, appropriate to her age, but they only made her look more attractive to him.

A partition stood between them and Ryoji’s empty bed; Kaoru nodded toward it, as if to ask why he wasn’t in it.

“The nurse just took him away.”

“Tests?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“A scintigram,” she said in a shaky tone that suggested she was unfamiliar with the word.

A scintigram, a precursor to chemotherapy, took two hours at a minimum, since it involved injecting a contrast medium into the subject’s veins. Nobody would be coming in until the test was finished. For that brief interval, Reiko and Kaoru had been left with a private room all to themselves.

With Ryoji’s test regimen reaching this point, Reiko found herself face to face with the prospect of her son entering chemotherapy. She was dejected. A bitter battle was beginning. Anticancer drugs harm normal cells in the process of attacking cancer cells. She knew she’d have to watch her son suffer from lethargy, loss of appetite, nausea, and the prospect hurt her more than anything, especially as she knew that his enduring this suffering wouldn’t guarantee the extinction of his cancer cells. All it would do would be to slow their rate of reproduction, and thereby delay the final moments. This cancer was destined to metastasize, and there was no way to prevent it.

Kaoru didn’t know what to say to this mother whose son had been taken away from her. Platitudes would only make it worse.

But Reiko looked him in the eye and said, “The miracle will come if we wait for it.”

She enfolded Kaoru’s hands in hers; it seemed to be a habit of hers.

“I just don’t know.”

“I’m sick and tired of living like this.”

“Me, too.”

“Well, do something! Please! Help us! I know you can.”

Like I can do anything! Kaoru felt like screaming, but managed to keep himself from saying anything.

Reiko’s bangs were still wet and several strands clung to her forehead. Beneath them her eyes were moist and pleading. Her mouth quivered as if she might break out into sobs at any moment; Kaoru’s heart went out to her. If only he could help. He wanted to, badly. He couldn’t stand by helplessly and watch this magnificent body laid low.

The faucet next to them hadn’t been shut off all the way—a little trickle of water came out of it. The sound filled the room and stimulated his desire. The noise of the water itself was what urged him into action.

Reiko looked at the faucet, and tried to free one hand to turn it off. But Kaoru only gripped her hand tighter, pulling her toward him with great force.

At first she made as if to resist, a complex series of emotions clouding her features. Conflicting feelings raged within her—Kaoru knew this by the touch of her skin. Her obligations as a mother, and her desires as a woman.

Still holding her to him, he shifted positions and tried to lay her down on the bed. But she resisted slightly, so that she ended up sitting on the floor with her back pushed up against the edge of the bed.

Pinned against a sickbed missing its owner, hunched over with death a burden on her shoulders, Reiko tried to confront the sexual impulses pressing in on her. The specter of death was assaulting her from everywhere, except the direction from which lust came, boiling up as if to prove that she was still alive. Then she thought of how her son at this very moment was undergoing cruel tests, and the knowledge enervated her desire. Her maternal instincts began to crowd out her sexual needs.

But not Kaoru. He was beyond reining in now, as his mind and body came together in pursuit of a single goal.

He didn’t care that Reiko was infected with MHC. He was aware of the data showing that the virus spread even more easily through genital contact than oral, but for the moment that knowledge was clean gone from him.

He sat down next to her, intertwined with her, on the floor of the sickroom. He placed his mouth over hers, nimbly undid the buttons of her blouse. These bold, playboyish actions surprised even him: he was relatively inexperienced at romance.

While Kaoru basked in his memories of the previous afternoon, Hideyuki obstinately hammered away on the dangers of exposing oneself to the virus.

… Your blood test came back negative? … I was your age once—you’ve got to be careful with women … You can’t let yourself get careless … Don’t give in to momentary temptation …

The words went right over Kaoru’s head. He couldn’t look his father in the eye. The pure, simple act of loving a woman had become a betrayal of his father’s expectations.

“Hey, kiddo! Are you listening to me?”

Hideyuki threw a monkey wrench into the workings of Kaoru’s reverie. It had been ages since he’d called Kaoru “kiddo”. Kaoru gradually let himself be pulled back to the present moment.

“Don’t worry, I said.”

Hideyuki still showed no signs of softening his suspicious gaze.

They stared at each other in silence for a while. They exchanged more information that way than they’d been able to communicate in words. Then Hideyuki reached out and touched Kaoru’s knee once more.

“Don’t you get it? You’re my greatest treasure.”

Kaoru placed his hand over his father’s.

“I know, Dad.”

“I don’t want you giving in to this. You’ve got to fight it. You’ve got to concentrate all your intelligence on confronting this enemy that wants to destroy your body, your youth.”

Reiko was imploring him to help; his father was ordering him to fight. He felt pressure from both sides. But if he had been infected with MHC, if he was at risk of developing metastatic cancer, then those imperatives would cease to be things external to him. He’d have to rouse himself to action in order to protect his own body.

Hideyuki returned to his previous topic. “When Saiki was here he was telling me how all my old colleagues were succumbing to this disease, one after the other, and it struck me. I know a lot of cancer victims.”

“I guess so,” Kaoru grunted. He, too, knew a lot of carriers of the MHC virus.

“Maybe there’s a reason.”

“Like, maybe researchers are particularly susceptible?”

“This should be right up your alley. You’re the one who ferreted out those longevity zones from the gravitational anomaly map. Listen to me. I want you to make a distribution map of people with MHC in Japan and America. Or a breakdown of infected people by occupation. Anyway, just gather all the data you can and come up with some statistics.”

“Okay. I’ll give it a try.”

“I’ve got a feeling about this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have so much sickness around us.”

Still looking up at the ceiling, Hideyuki stretched his hand out to the sideboard and groped around as if searching for something. Kaoru noticed a stack of printed matter there, dozens of pages. He picked them up first and showed them to his father. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

The first page contained the following sequence of letters:

Kaoru recognized it at a glance: it was a chromosomal base sequence.

“Saiki left those.”

“What chromosomes was he analyzing?”

“This, of course,” Hideyuki said, tapping his own chest. Now that the daily wash of tests was suggesting that the cancer had spread to his lungs, all he had to do to indicate the cancer virus was to point, with contempt, at his chest.

This is the complete base sequence of the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus.

Moved, Kaoru looked at the sequence of letters again. The dozens of pages he held in his hands contained the base sequences for nine genes; they held thousands, even tens of millions of letters; they held the blueprint for the virus that bedeviled them.

9

First off, Kaoru decided to visit the lab that maintained the massive memory banks of the Loop. The history of the imaginary universe known as the Loop was stored in 620 terabytes of holographic memory; even now, twenty years later, it was safe and sound.

To get to the lab, it was faster to take the New Line than the old subway system. Kaoru left the university hospital and headed for the station.

He only walked for a few minutes, but by the time he boarded, his T-shirt was wet with perspiration. It being early afternoon, there were few passengers. As a result, the air conditioning cooled the air a little too efficiently for Kaoru. In no time, his T-shirt felt clammy and cold against his skin.

He had a seat and took from his briefcase the stack of printouts he’d just gotten from his father, containing the entire base sequence of the MHC virus. The sequence consisted of the letters A, T, G, and C, representing the different varieties of nucleotides. He could, he knew, stare at it forever and it still wouldn’t get him anywhere in particular. But he had nothing to do. If he’d had a paperback he’d be idly flipping through it right about now, but as it happened his briefcase contained nothing else to pass the time with.

A gene is essentially a unit of information, and the MHC virus had a mere nine of them. By way of comparison, a human being has something like 300,000 genes—so the virus’s total was fairly small.

Each gene can be represented by a sequence of a few thousand to a few hundred thousand bases; three bases form one amino acid. So, for example, a string of three thousand letters (ATGC … and so on) means that a thousand amino acids have all joined hands to create a protein.

Kaoru scrutinized page after page, and when his eyes got tired he lifted his head and gazed out the window at the scenery. The print was so small that trying to focus on it through the jostling of the train was making him queasy. Above each row of letters was a series of numbers in multiples of ten, allowing the viewer to tell at a glance what number in the sequence each letter was.

By scanning these numbers it was an easy matter to figure out how many bases constituted each of the nine genes. They ranged from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands. In order, they were:

Gene #1: 3072 bases

Gene #2: 393,216 bases

Gene #3: 12,288 bases

Gene #4: 786,432 bases

Gene #5: 24,576 bases

Gene #6: 49,152 bases

Gene #7: 196,608 bases

Gene #8: 6144 bases

Gene #9: 98,304 bases

Kaoru stood up and moved over to the door. The breeze from the air conditioner had been hitting him on the left side of his body. He especially disliked this kind of unnatural chill; if the cost of sitting was freezing, he’d just as soon stand.

As he leaned against the door he idly pictured Reiko’s face. But visions of his father’s attenuated features kept coming to mind.

The research center where he was headed was a partial leftover of the place where his father had once worked. Kaoru knew that twenty-five years ago, upon finishing his doctorate, his father had been invited to join the Loop project, and that his father had devoted the next five years to researching artificial life. He didn’t, however, know the specifics of what his father had been researching. It had all been before Kaoru was born.

Every time he tried to ask, his father became close-mouthed. But the project hadn’t ended well: that much Kaoru had been able to guess. Hideyuki was the type to jump up and down and celebrate when his work was successful, but he’d clamp his mouth shut tight in the wake of failure. Once Kaoru recognized the signs, he realized it wouldn’t do to keep rooting around.

But this time—maybe it was his age, or maybe his illness had softened him—when Kaoru had made to leave his father’s sickroom with the sheaf of papers in his hand, Hideyuki had stopped him with a word.

“Kiddo.”

Then his father, on his own initiative, had brought up the topic of his research some two decades before.

“My area was to come up with a computer simulation of the emergence of life.”

His explanation was simple: for years it had been his dream to elucidate how life had first appeared on earth. But, as Kaoru had guessed, the experiment had come to an unforeseen conclusion, and it had been put on ice. His father didn’t use the word “failed”. As far as he was concerned, the experiment as an experiment could be considered a resounding success. But he still couldn’t figure out why it had come out the way it had.

“The Loop … well, you might say it turned cancerous.”

By which he meant that all the patterns in the program had been assimilated into one set pattern: all diversity vanished, and the program ground to a halt.

To Kaoru it sounded like his father was rambling. He didn’t know what to make of all this. And it was no wonder: he knew nothing about the project’s methodology, and he couldn’t see it as a whole.

But he did have a desire, first of all, to understand what it was his dad had been working on. And, second, he wanted to find out whether or not it was a coincidence that most of his father’s colleagues from the lab had died from the MHC virus.

So it had been Kaoru’s idea to visit the research center. His father had given him the name of a surviving colleague and done what he could to ensure that the visit went smoothly.

Word from his father would doubtless have reached somebody at the research center by now. Kaoru had every expectation that he’d be received courteously.

He glanced down at the paper again.

There was something about the total number of bases in each gene that was tugging at him. The top page held nine numbers, ranging from four to six digits, each number representing the bases in one gene.

3072

393,216

12,288

786,432

24,576

49,152

196,608

6144

98,304

Kaoru had a special ability when it came to numbers; it was this ability that was sending up a red flag now. But he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. He felt like there was something these numbers had in common. Yes, he was sure of it. His intuition on that point was strong.

To clear his mind he gazed at the scenery outside the window. On both sides of the tracks tall buildings clustered; the streamlined train threaded its way between them silently.

The train slowed down as it approached a platform. He saw a building under construction, and beyond it another painted in bright primary colors.

The station was in a cluster of four skyscrapers, each a thousand feet tall, organically connected into a single city-within-a-city. It had an English name; everybody knew it.

The Square Building.

“Square.” He knew what it meant: a quadrilateral with each side the same length. But it had another meaning, as well.

Kaoru looked down again at the printout, concentrating on the nine numbers.

“It couldn’t be,” he murmured. He recalled that the English word “square” also referred to the process of multiplying a number by itself. And with that, it came to him.

3072

=

2^10 x 3

393,216

=

2^17 x 3

12,288

=

2^12 x 3

786,432

=

2^18 x 3

24,576

=

2^13 x 3

49,152

=

2^14 x 3

196,608

=

2^16 x 3

6144

=

2^11 x 3

98,304

=

2^15 x 3

It was astonishing: each number equaled two to the power of n times three.

Kaoru made some quick mental calculations as to the probability of nine random four to six digit numbers all turning out to equal 2n x 3. There were only eighteen such numbers in all the possible figures up to six digits.

Kaoru didn’t need to come up with the exact probability, though: it was breathtakingly close to zero.

Why do this virus’s gene sequences come out to 2n x3?

The chances of it happening were basically zero, and yet it had happened. These nine numbers had surmounted that wall of improbability. It couldn’t be a coincidence. He had to proceed under the assumption that it meant something.

He could remember coming to the same conclusion during that debate with his father ten years ago. That time the topic had been the emergence of life. Oh, and superstitions, jinxes … It was best to think that behind every amazing coincidence was some entity pulling strings.

An announcement came on to say that the train had reached Kaoru’s station. The voice sounded to Kaoru like it was coming from far, far away.

Kaoru was expelled from the train doors onto the platform. If his father was to be believed, it was only a ten minutes’ walk from the station to the research center.

Kaoru wandered the hot platform, looking like an apparition. The sudden transition from the chilled train interior to the oppressive heat outside had left him tired.

He placed the stack of papers back into his briefcase and followed his father’s directions to the research center.

10

The center was indeed not far from the station, but the road was hilly, and by the time Kaoru arrived he was drenched in sweat again. He stood in front of an old-fashioned building behind an embassy and compared the address to what he’d written down. No mistake. The fourth and fifth floors of this building held the laboratory maintaining the Loop data.

Kaoru took the elevator to the fourth floor, where he asked the receptionist to page a Mr Amano. This was the name Hideyuki had given him.

When you get to the lab, have them page a guy named Amano. I’ll let him know you’re coming.

Hideyuki had stressed this step a number of times.

The woman at the desk picked up her intercom receiver. “There’s a Mr Kaoru Futami to see you, sir.” Then she smiled at Kaoru and indicated a couch in the hall. “He’ll be with you in a few moments.”

Kaoru had a seat and waited for Amano to show up. While he waited he surveyed the place, taking in the fact that this was where his father had worked before Kaoru was born. Had he walked past this very reception desk every morning on his way to his lab?

“Sorry to keep you waiting.”

The voice came from a completely unexpected direction. Kaoru had been expecting Amano to appear from the main section of the floor, behind the receptionist, but instead he approached Kaoru from the elevator landing. Kaoru stood and bowed slightly.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Kaoru Futami. My father’s always saying how much in your debt he is.”

“Not at all, not at all. I’m in his debt, actually.”

Amano took a business card from his card case and handed it to Kaoru. As a mere medical student, Kaoru of course didn’t carry business cards, so he had to take Amano’s without offering one in return.

Beneath the name of the research center was the man’s title, Professor of Medicine, and his name: Toru Amano.

Kaoru was puzzled to find a medical professor in what seemed to be a computer research center. But come to think of it, his own father had a medical background. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising after all.

“What’s your specialty, if I might ask?”

Amano smiled, showing the dimples in his cheeks. “Microbiology.”

He was a small, slender man. He’d been junior to Kaoru’s father by two years, so he had to be in his late forties, but he certainly didn’t look that old. He could easily have passed for mid-thirties.

“Well, I know you must be busy, so …”

“It’s nothing. Why don’t I show you around?”

Amano guided Kaoru to the elevator and pushed the UP button.

The upper floor had a similar reception area; Amano led Kaoru past it without stopping.

He brought him to a large private room. Two walls were filled entirely with books, and several computers sat on the desk.

Amano sank into his chair, motioning Kaoru toward the chair for guests.

“I’m told you’d like a detailed explanation of Dr Hideyuki Futami’s research.”

“That’s correct.”

“How is he, by the way? How’s his health holding up?” It didn’t appear that Amano was just asking to be polite: he seemed sincerely worried. If it was proven that the cancer had spread to Hideyuki’s lungs, the situation would be essentially hopeless, but Kaoru glossed over that.

“About as well as can be expected.”

“He taught me quite a lot, you know.” Amano got a look of nostalgia on his face and continued. “Things have changed these last few years. It’s gotten … quiet.”

Kaoru assumed he meant the research center. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen anybody here besides the receptionist and Amano. He suspected the reason had something to do with the virus.

“My father told me that many of you who participated in the Loop research have died of cancer.”

“Very many indeed.”

“Is there a specific reason?”

“Well, I don’t believe there’s been any statement to that effect.”

Kaoru couldn’t believe it was a mere coincidence, though, and if some kind of cause-and-effect relationship could be established, it would be epochal. It might lead to the discovery of a new way of treating viral cancer.

“Do you know where the first victim was discovered?” As a microbiologist, Amano should know a lot about that sort of thing.

“It’s been hard to get exact data, because it’s hard to distinguish it from previous varieties of cancer, but the MHC virus was first discovered in an American patient.”

Kaoru had heard rumors to that effect, that America had been the birthplace of the disease.

“Where in America?”

“The victim was a computer technician living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.”

Amano frowned, as if he’d just noticed the curious commonality. The MHC virus had been first discovered in the body of a computer technician. The infection rate among researchers at this facility, a computer-research center, was much higher than average. Of course, it wasn’t totally beyond the realm of coincidence, but …

Amano’s frown only lasted an instant. The coincidence struck him, but he immediately decided it wasn’t worth assigning a special explanation to, and so he erased the frown.

And then he stood up quickly, as if in confirmation of what Kaoru guessed to be his thought process.

“Oh, yes. There’s an old, old videotape you might like to take a look at.”

“A videotape?” Kaoru felt himself tense up; he didn’t know why.

“It’s something Futami-sensei’s staff put together. A sort of introduction to their research aims and methods. Part of their job was to elicit budgetary contributions from various sources. The video was just a promotional tool, but it’s the best and quickest explanation of the purpose behind the Loop.”

Amano went through the door first, urging Kaoru to follow. “This way, please.”

The hallway snaked through several turns as it led through the complex of laboratories. Finally, Amano showed Kaoru into what looked like a reception room. It had a table and sofas.

There were no windows; the room had to be in the middle of the building. The furnishings put Kaoru in mind of an art gallery—framed pictures adorned the walls.

What was strange was that there was exactly one picture on each wall, at exactly the same height, at exactly the same distance from the corners, in exactly the same size frame—as if they were icons hung to keep away evil spirits or something. Each frame contained a modernist painting incorporating photography.

Kaoru’s eyes were riveted to the pictures. They seemed to have captured in photographs some rectangular piece of modern art from four sides and then distorted it; as he looked around the room he got the feeling that he was inside some kind of angular construction. Modern art objets usually gave a cold, hard impression. And what about the aesthetic sense that had placed, not the object itself, but pictures of it at the same point on all four walls? It was as if the fact that they were pictures was emphasizing a certain obsessiveness.

Kaoru looked closely at one of the pictures to see if he could make out the name of the artist. There was a signature, a foreign name, but it was hard to make out. A “C …” and an “Eliot …” “Please. Have a seat.”

At the sound of Amano’s voice behind him, Kaoru remembered where he was. He sat on the couch to which Amano was pointing, and noticed a 32-inch television facing him. Amano must have pulled it out of the cabinet while he wasn’t looking.

Amano opened another cabinet and took out a videotape. The tape had a label on its spine, and the label had a title written on it in large characters.

LOOP

There was no way he could miss it.

11

The video began by explaining the concept of artificial life. The program was aimed at a general audience, and its makers had assumed they needed to nail down the basics first.

Amano glanced at Kaoru and laughed. “Shall we skip this part?”

He felt it was safe to assume that any son of Hideyuki Futami would have a precise grasp of what artificial life was. Kaoru nodded, and Amano fast-forwarded.

The screen displayed a succession of geometrical patterns, appearing, changing, flickering, and disappearing.

Artificial life did not mean a biotech lab with people cutting and pasting DNA to create man-made monsters. Nor did it involve cloning technology. It was a computer simulation: man-made life forms appearing and disappearing on computer monitors.

It was fair to say that the idea behind artificial life had come from the Life Game, a computer game in general circulation toward the end of the last century.

In its earliest forms, it was rather like playing on a chess board. The computer screen was filled with intersecting lines in two dimensions, like a chess board, only with a far greater number of squares. Each square was known as a cell. A cell could be either alive or dead: a “living” cell was black, while a “dead” cell had no color. A glance at the board showed only the “living” cells, colored black. Each cell bordered eight other cells on the top, bottom, left, right, top right, bottom right, top left, and bottom left. Rules were determined for the cells. For example, it might be decided for a “living” cell that if it bordered on two or three “living” cells, and neither more nor less, it would survive to the next generation; if it bordered on no “living” cells, only one, or four or more, it would “die”.

At the beginning of play, living and dead cells were randomly determined, and play proceeded from one generation to the next, time advancing digitally, with cells living or dying in each generation. If a cell had two or three cells adjacent to it, it would be sustained by these neighbors and live on, while if it had one or no cells nearby, it would die of loneliness, and likewise, if it had four or more neighbors, it would die of overcrowding.

Since the living cells were represented by black squares, with each passing generation the monochromatic pattern on the display changed.

The principle behind the game was quite simple, but in actual play a wide variety of patterns was possible, with highly suggestive results. One pattern found squares spreading slantwise after a certain number of generations. Another pattern saw what looked like repeated tremors. Some patterns were stable, with no change at all. Some patterns negotiated with each other, changing shape on the board like living beings. These changes continued until all the cells had died out, or the patterns all became fixed, with no further movement.

As they developed the concept of the Life Game, researchers started to detect what seemed like signs of life within their computers. The first element of the definition of life is that it can reproduce itself. As soon as self-propagating patterns were discovered in the Life Game, researchers from many disciplines began to lend their expertise, in the hopes that keys to the beginning and evolution of life on earth might there be found.

It was this chain of events which led to Hideyuki Futami, with his background in medicine, to work with computers on the artificial life project. No doubt Amano the microbiologist had similar reasons for joining the center. Science had progressed to a point where it could go no further without breaking down the walls between disciplines and enabling a more dynamic exchange of ideas.

Amano stopped fast-forwarding at an appropriate place and pressed PLAY.

“There. Now it gets into the aims of the Loop research.”

Hideyuki’s face was onscreen now. Kaoru felt a tightening in his chest as he saw his father’s youthful countenance—this had been filmed not long after his marriage. His hair was still thick, his whole being suffused with passion and confidence. The firmness of his muscles was evident even through his clothing.

Come to think of it, this was the first time Kaoru had seen video of his father from before Kaoru’s birth. He hadn’t been expecting it—it was surprise as much as anything that shook him.

The image changed to a vast desert in America, to a superconducting super accelerator some thirty miles in diameter, part of a project long since abandoned. Aerial shots showed the exterior, and then the scene cut to the interior. The huge ring-shaped research facility, once a useless hulk, was now filled, the video revealed, with a huge number of massively parallel supercomputers. The numbers were incredible. Six hundred and forty thousand computers buried beneath the desert sand: a truly overwhelming sight.

Then the scene made another abrupt shift, this time to the skyscrapers of Tokyo. The camera went underground again, into a maze of abandoned subway tunnels branching out like a spider’s web. Here, too, were installed 640,000 massively parallel supercomputers. Underground, where the humidity was low and the temperature was relatively constant year-round, was the ideal place for the computers.

This joint Japanese-American collection of massively parallel supercomputers—a staggering 1.28 million in all—was there to sustain the Loop.

Hideyuki reappeared onscreen. Having shown off the hardware that drove the Loop, it was time to explain the software.

Hideyuki pointed to a computer screen and narrated in precise, well-chosen words while the process of cellular division was demonstrated through symbols. The Hideyuki Kaoru knew was inclined to speak quickly and animatedly, but the Hideyuki on the video averted his eyes from the camera and spoke somewhat shyly, although not without confidence.

Kaoru already understood what Hideyuki was explaining now. Although it had been research in progress then, from a standpoint twenty years on, it was fairly easy to comprehend. But what was their methodology? These were the first detailed images Kaoru had seen of the project, and his interest was captured.

The monitor Hideyuki was pointing at showed the development of the cell of some organism, and next to it the same process recreated artificially and represented symbolically. A natural cell and a man-made one, side by side. Over time, they both took roughly the same shape. The process by which the real organism formed was translated into symbols and manifested in the computer simulation. Upon the incorporation of various algorithms, the shape of an organism appeared on the monitor.

The idea behind the Loop project, a joint Japan-U.S. undertaking, had been to create life within the virtual space of the computers, pass on DNA from generation to generation, and incorporate the mechanisms of mutation, parasitism, and immunity, thereby to create an original biosphere to simulate the evolution of life on earth. In short, to create another world exactly like the real one, on computers.

At this point, Amano paused the videotape and turned to Kaoru.

“Do you have any questions thus far?”

“Well,” Kaoru spoke up. “What field, exactly, was this research supposed to be useful to?” This had been nagging at him for some time. Where did the funding come from? What kind of practical application would this research have had? Judging by what he’d seen, the budget was probably big enough to require government support. Solving the riddles of life on earth, the mechanism of evolution, would be sure to satisfy academic curiosity, but he doubted it’d make money for anybody.

“We were taking the long view. We knew that at first it would be of only limited use. But once we opened up the field, there was no telling what kind of developments would pop up later. The number of possible applications was literally infinite. Fields like medicine and physiology for starters, but also microbiology, physics, meteorology … And not just science: we expected it to have implications for everything from understanding movements in stock prices to figuring out social-science problems such as population increases.”

Amano paused and laughed.

In fact, the fruits of the Loop research had proven useful on a wide variety of fronts. It became possible to know the point at which earth’s environmental and ecological balance would be destroyed, allowing for the development of management strategies; there were epochal advances in the study of at what point in the brain’s development consciousness appeared. The contribution to medicine was huge, as treatments for several serious illnesses came to light.

The rest of the video was spent mostly on methodology. Hideyuki used diagrams to explain how through the application of chaos theory, nonlinearity, L-systems, genetic algorithms, and the like, the program was able to learn and evolve.

As an example, fragmentary images of cellular division were interspersed into the narrative. A shot of a cell dividing and redividing until it grew into an organism pulsated its way across the screen as if on fast-forward. The network developed dynamically, rather like a cancer cell growing capillaries. Even though Kaoru knew it was a mechanical simulation, it looked remarkably alive.

Having concluded its explanation of the methodology and thus its introduction to the project, the video ended with an invitation to the viewer to follow the real-life progress of the experiment.

Kaoru found it a pretty convincing promo.

Creating a computer simulation of the beginning and evolution of life wasn’t a particularly unusual thing: it had been done several times in several different places. What amazed Kaoru was the scale of this project: the minute level of detail, the innumerable parameters that had been fed into the program. He figured it had to be the first time anything like it had been attempted.

What the experiment did was to take the some four billion years since life had begun and compress them into an accessible digital time frame. Billions of years had been abbreviated on the computers into ten or so years of real time, while still perfectly recreating in the virtual space the complexity of the real world.

Kaoru was curious about the subsequent progress of the research.

“How far did the Loop go?” he asked Amano, who was rewinding the tape.

“Didn’t Futami-sensei tell you?”

“He told me that the pattern turned cancerous, that’s all.”

Amano looked troubled. “Well, that’s about the size of it.”

“I’d like to know more about the sequence of events, though.”

“I’m sure you realize that even if you had the time to look at it, your life would end long before you finished.”

Kaoru sighed intentionally.

“Okay, why don’t we move to a different room and talk over coffee? I’d like to hear more about your father’s condition, actually.”

Amano led Kaoru into a larger but drearier room that looked like it was used for meetings or training sessions. It contained steel desks and folding chairs, and instead of modern art the walls held a map of the world; all in all it was an unremarkable room, sort of like a school classroom in miniature.

They sat at a table facing each other, and from nowhere appeared the receptionist to place cups of coffee in front of each of them.

It looked hot, at least: steam rose from the disposable cups. Amano wrapped both hands around his cup and brought it to his mouth. This room was windowless, too, and the air conditioning was turned up too high. Up to now Kaoru had been so wrapped up in what he was hearing that he’d been oblivious to the cold inside the center. As he watched Amano take advantage of the warmth of the coffee Kaoru finally noticed that his own arms had goose-bumps from the cold.

In between sips, Amano began to relate the history of the virtual world.

He spoke like an old man telling him storybook stories: relating the simulation in the form of a story was probably the most primal, direct way to go about it. In any case, it didn’t strike Kaoru as inappropriate. Simulation it may have been, but it was also life, and it was natural for its history to contain storylike elements.

Perhaps that was why Kaoru was able to become comfortably absorbed in Amano’s tale. It was fun to reexperience the history of the world. But only until just before the end.

12

“… But even after we implanted RNA, which meant the ability to self-replicate, for a while it remained a normal, chaotic world. It put some of the staff in a bad mood—they were afraid it would change nothing at all.

“But there were a few who had a more upbeat outlook. After all, real life had developed along much the same lines. Primitive life began, single-celled organisms, and then just stayed like that for three billion years with very little change, no signs of evolving.

“One day, just as we’d expected, complex life forms began to appear—just as the Cambrian Explosion came along in real life. We have no logical explanation for why varied life forms appeared at just that moment. Extremely simple life forms, similar to single-celled organisms, begat many-celled organisms, through a mechanism that was identical to how it happened on earth, they say.

“The life that emerged then became the prototype for the natural world that would later develop. Some life retained the same form and became naturally extinct, while some life began to evolve into more complex forms. The family tree branched out, the phenomena of parasitism and symbiosis appeared, life emerged that moved in fascinating ways. Things that moved like worms burrowing their way through the earth. Things that moved swiftly through the seas. Things that soared through the air like birds. And things that stagnated, giving up on evolution and remaining single cells forever. These can probably be likened to bacteria and viruses. There were things whose pictorial representation was large but which didn’t move: these took forms like those of trees on earth.

“Of course each living thing had information that corresponded to genes, and every time they reproduced, a certain percentage of errors crept in, mutations that resulted in evolution in a positive direction, stagnation, or extinction. We’d done a good job of incorporating natural selection, the competition to survive.

“Observing this process, we were astonished to see something emerge that could only be gender. In the natural world, too, it’s considered a mystery why species branched into male and female. In our world, too, a bifurcation occurred that clearly couldn’t be explained except through reference to male and female.

“Some simple life forms were still able to reproduce without coupling with another of their species, but complex life forms now had to mate within their species in order to self-replicate. Just as we’d predicted, once the gender distinction arose, genetic information came to be combined in more dynamic ways as it was passed down to the next generation: this made for diversity, and evolution picked up speed.

“Please don’t misunderstand. I didn’t actually witness this myself—I heard some older colleagues talking about it. But it’s pretty exciting, don’t you think? The idea of artificial life forms inside a computer having sex is pretty interesting, is it not?

“With the Cambrian Explosion as a jumping-off point, life changed into complicated patterns with wondrous speed. One minute huge life forms that resembled dinosaurs appeared, and the next minute they were extinct.

“What came next was life forms that incubated the next generation’s information inside the parent generation until it had achieved a certain degree of maturity, and only then divided. I’m sure you recognize what I’m talking about: mammals.

“Things went on like this for some time, until the appearance of what seemed to be the ancestors of the human race. I’ve pulled that scene up and watched it myself. Imagine it, if you can. At first they moved like orangutans. Then, through a long period of trial and error, their walking became smooth, free of the awkwardness it displayed at first.

“At this point the amount of genetic information was extraordinary, and soon thereafter there emerged a life form that we guessed must be humanity. It was obvious that this life form was aware of itself, that it possessed intelligence. Obvious, because these life forms were actually observed making what seemed to be signals to one another.

“By exchanging digital signals, zeros and ones, these life forms were able to manipulate more and more information. As a result, their survival rate went up. It was unmistakable: they’d acquired language.

“By analyzing the clusters of zeros and ones they exchanged, we were able to translate their exchanges of information as language. Of course, the beings within the Loop didn’t consider themselves to be interacting in binary code. As far as their awareness went, they were utilizing complex language the same as you and me.

“Once we’d analyzed their language so that we could interpret it using machine translation, it became a much more interesting world, they say. You could call up any scene on the display as a three-dimensional image, and it was just like you were a character in a movie.

“These artificial life forms began making their own history. Similar individuals came together in groups, states fought wars and engaged in political machinations. They advanced their civilization and designed their own world as if it was their own. It’s said that watching it was like watching human history itself.

“The price was that as their history advanced the level of information being generated rose, and time began to move more slowly. The computers had a limit to their processing ability.

“The first three billion years from the creation of the earth had only taken a half a year on the computer. But the speed began to slow as life began to emerge, and especially after it evolved into intelligent forms on a level with human beings. At the end it took the computers two or three years to advance the Loop a few centuries.

“The Loop, as a virtual world, was recognizable and knowable to the staff of the research center. But it was utterly impossible for the sentient beings within the Loop to know us, their creators. To them, I imagine we were God Himself. As long as they were within the Loop, they were unable to comprehend how their world worked. The only thing that would have enabled comprehension was for them to get outside of their world.

“The progress of their civilization was marvelous. Their cities contained entertainment districts with flashing neon signs; they overflowed with sound and color. All manner of media sprang up, dramatically broadening the reach of information, and people lived lives filled with the pleasures of the musical and verbal arts. Their lives were no different from ours by this point. They had artists just like Mozart or da Vinci, who played the same historical role as in reality, adding vibrancy to their culture. Their world was beautiful, but at the same time it began to have an air of decadence. Some of our staff members were enraptured, while others began to whisper forebodings of doom. There were signs all over the place that something unpredicted was about to happen.

“And the premonitions were right on target. The Loop, the entire living world, began to turn cancerous …”

Amano paused there for a breath, and to bring his coffee cup to his lips. It was empty and he knew it; the gesture was simply something to do with his hands. Had he been a smoker, he would have lit a cigarette at this point.

“What do you mean, turned cancerous?”

Amano shrugged slightly and lifted his hands in a pose of surrender. “The Loop biosphere came to be monopolized by identical genes. It lost diversity and began moving toward extinction.”

Kaoru looked at the ceiling, as was his habit. He tried to make sense of what Amano had told him.

They had created a three-dimensional virtual space inside an ultrafast supercomputer system, a world that didn’t exist in reality, and they’d named this space the Loop. The space itself was large enough that from the point of view of the life forms within it, it might as well be considered an infinite universe. The experimenters had established conditions of soil, topography, and physics so that the world would be just like the primeval earth. Mathematically speaking, it was a world supported by the same formulas and theories as the real world. Not only the speed of gravitational acceleration and the boiling temperature of water, but the very landscape was identical to that of earth.

Carbon, hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, sodium, oxygen, magnesium, calcium, iron, and the rest of the 111 elements had been deposited, each according to its properties. Rules were laid down so that they would act exactly as they did in the universe enveloping the earth: two hydrogen atoms (H_2) and one oxygen atom (O) when combined would form a water molecule (H_2O), and this would react with a nitrogen molecule (N_2) to form ammonia (NH_3).

Fundamentally, no reason exists in the world to explain why two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, when combined, have to form water: the rules are simply set up that way. And who made the rules? If you had to give it a name, it would be God.

The fact that evolution in the Loop proceeded exactly as it had in the real world was suspected to be due to the first primitive RNA life form that had been caused to be born. Or, rather, since the physical conditions of the Loop had been precisely modeled on those of the real world, evolution there probably couldn’t help but follow the path it had already followed in the real world.

One of the purposes of the Loop was to enable researchers to trace the actual process of evolution. If evolution in the Loop followed the same path as it did in reality, then the results of the Loop’s evolution would predict the future of the real world.

Suddenly chills ran along Kaoru’s spine. The Loop predicted the future of life on earth. All life would turn cancerous.

What in the world? That’s exactly what’s happening now.

Cancer cells reproduced with no respect for persons, they were sexless, and they were immortal to boot. At the moment there were only a few million victims worldwide, but there was always the chance that the numbers would shoot up due to some mutation or population explosion in the MHC virus. It would be the same as what had happened in the Loop. Was it just a coincidence? Or was the Loop in fact an accurate prediction of the future?

As he sat before Kaoru, Amano was not about to assert a scientific connection between the results of the Loop and reality. And it was no wonder. How many people would believe such a ridiculous story?

Kaoru struggled to mask his shock with rationality as he asked, “What was the cause? Why did the Loop’s life forms turn cancerous?”

Amano answered him in clipped tones. “That’s easy. It was the appearance of the ring virus. But that emerged in a way we simply don’t understand, as if by magic.”

“You’re saying that a single virus managed to influence all of the patterns in the Loop?”

“Yes. It shouldn’t be that hard to believe. Not when a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can affect the weather on the other.”

The butterfly effect. Kaoru guessed it wasn’t all that strange that the ring virus could change the fate of the Loop world. What he didn’t understand was why it had appeared.

“Are there any theories as to the emergence of the ring virus?”

“Theories?”

“You know, like maybe one of the staff members introduced it into the program.”

“Security was perfect.”

“Well, maybe it was a computer virus.”

“That’s not impossible. In fact, they say most people took that view.”

Something appeared to be bothering Amano; he seemed to sink into thought.

“Excuse me, but is there anybody from the original staff I can contact?”

Amano smiled wanly. “I’m the only survivor,” he said, then hurriedly put a hand over his mouth. Hideyuki Futami wasn’t dead yet. Kaoru didn’t let it bother him, but laughed bitterly.

Amano quickly added, “My participation in the project was limited to the very final stage, just before it was shut down. You’d be better off consulting the father of the whole project, Cristoph Eliot, but he’s hidden himself away …” Amano fixed Kaoru with a meaningful gaze and then continued. “Oh, I do know of one person who was fairly close to the center of the project. An American researcher. Supposedly an odd duck—he had problems with teamwork.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Wait a moment,” Amano said, and stepped out of the room. When he returned, several minutes later, it was with a file under his arm. He flipped through it. “Ah, there it is,” he muttered, glancing up at Kaoru without raising his head. “Kenneth Rothman.”

Kaoru repeated the name. He was an old friend of his father’s. He’d visited five years ago: there were photographs of Rothman and members of the family standing on their balcony overlooking Tokyo Bay. Rothman had been in Japan to speak at a conference, and Kaoru’s father had put him up for several days.

Those days were deeply etched in Kaoru’s memory. Rothman’s appearance left quite an impression, from his thin goateed face to the gold chains that flashed around his neck and wrists; his manner, too, was impressive, from the cynical smile he’d flash during scientific discussions to the cutting logic with which he’d announce his pessimistic analyses of the future.

“Has Futami-sensei told you anything about this man?”

“Yes, he’s a friend of my father’s. I’ve met him myself once, five years ago. I remember his beard, mostly. Where is he now?”

Amano flipped through the file again.

“According to this, he moved from Cambridge to the laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico, ten years ago.”

New Mexico. The name sent a jolt through Kaoru’s brain. He looked around the room, then stood up and took a close look at the world map on the wall.

Los Alamos, New Mexico. He held down the spot with his finger: it wasn’t far at all from the Four Corners of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, where his family had been planning to go.

Kenneth Rothman had moved there ten years ago. The first MHC victim had been in New Mexico. The coincidences were piling up …

Kaoru shut his eyes tightly. He couldn’t help but feel that an important clue lay hidden there. Hoping against hope, he asked, “Is it possible to contact him?”

Amano’s answer was brusque.

“I sincerely doubt it.”

“Why is that?”

“The last I heard from him was six months ago. What I heard then grabbed me, but I haven’t been able to contact him since.”

“Grabbed you how?”

“Something about having figured out the MHC virus, and that Takayama held the key … Tantalizing, isn’t it?”

“Takayama? That’s someone’s name, I take it? Whose?”

“I’ll give you the short version. The cancerization of the Loop came about through the emergence of an unknown virus and a series of events linked to it. At the center of those events were three artificial life forms: one called Takayama, one called Asakawa, and one called Yamamura. It’s been determined that these three life forms played important roles in the cancerization of the Loop.”

“The artificial life forms have names?”

“Of course.”

“So Kenneth Rothman disappeared, leaving behind nothing but the name Takayama?”

“Yes. I didn’t think much of it—in this day and age, when I lost contact I simply figured that the cancer must have gotten him, too.” Amano threw up his hands. “Especially in his case. He had his own laboratory in a remote town called Wayne’s Rock. It was the kind of situation where he could slip out of touch at any time and nobody would be too surprised.”

“Wayne’s Rock?”

“Wayne’s Rock, New Mexico. Basically a ghost town in the middle of the desert.”

Kaoru sighed and turned back to the map, placing his fingertip on one particular spot.

Wayne’s Rock, New Mexico.

He had the feeling Rothman was waiting for him there, in his lab.

His finger still on the map, Kaoru turned back to Amano. “Have you watched the whole series of events involving Takayama and Asakawa?”

Amano shook his head. “No. I think only a few staff members watched it. The memory is stored in America, not here.”

This aroused Kaoru’s interest still more.

“Would it be possible for me to … see it?”

“It would take a while, but it wouldn’t be impossible. I think you’d be wasting your time, though,” was Amano’s answer. Kaoru’s finger was still on the map.

13

It had been some time since he’d gone out onto the balcony at home and gazed at the night sky. Even from a hundred yards above he could tell that no ripples disturbed the black surface of the bay. It was a hot, windless evening. The humidity bathed him where he stood.

He saw the sky differently this evening—he couldn’t help but do so after everything Amano had told him this afternoon about the contents of the Loop. As a child, so full of the desire to understand the universe, he’d stared at the glittering stars with a passion born of the feeling that if he just looked long enough he’d understand.

What’s at the end of the universe? That was the kind of naïve question that had presented itself to him. Staring at the cosmos now, it was utterly beyond his imagination what might lie outside the universe.

Kaoru tried to imagine himself as a denizen of the Loop. Assuming he were a being aware of time and space, how would he interpret that universe? It would most likely appear to be expanding. The Loop had gradually grown with the changing passage of time. Before the program had been started, there had been nothing there at all. A mountain of silicon chips, yes, but no time, no space. But from the moment the staff had started the program, space had grown at an explosive rate. The Big Bang.

The Loop space did not exist within the massively parallel supercomputers enshrined beneath the ground, just as a nature scene on a movie screen was not actually contained within that screen. That space existed neither inside nor outside the computers. It was only experienced as space by beings able to recognize it as such. As life forms evolved and their awareness grew, that space must have expanded, as if fleeing before the eyes that sought to recognize it.

Kaoru turned his eyes to the actual sky. The universe he was looking at was expanding, but he wondered suddenly if it wasn’t simply trying to get far away from earthly DNA and its powers of recognition. He couldn’t discard the possibility that the real universe was a hypothetical space just like the Loop. Would that interpretation cause any inconvenient problems?

No, it wouldn’t. In fact, he felt that regarding the real world as a hypothetical space was getting closer to the truth. Maybe the ancient ways of thinking—the Buddhist idea that form is emptiness, or the Platonic notion of the ideal world—did a better job of capturing the reality of things.

And if one assumed the universe was a virtual space, then there was the possibility that it was being observed through an open window in space, just as humans had been able to peek into the Loop world. Make the right time and space adjustments, and images of a particular moment in a particular place would unfold on the monitor in 3D.

Kaoru placed one hand on his other arm, then moved it to his chest, his belly, and below.

Do I just think I have a body, when really there’s nothing at all?

But there was that little organ located just below the center of his body, and there were desires which emanated from it. He couldn’t believe those were without reality. As he touched it, stroked it, he thought of Reiko’s face.

There was nobody behind the glass door at his back. The television was showing something different from a while ago. His mother was probably shut in her room, absorbed in Native American myths.

Kaoru glanced behind him, and then allowed his organ to tower in the direction of the window that might be there in space somewhere; allowed it to insist on its existence.

Kaoru wanted to shout to the night sky: This flesh can’t be a fictional construct. Reiko’s body can’t be a fictional construct.

14

There in the awkward darkness, Koru considered the two facts of which he’d just been made aware. Both were pieces of extremely bad news, and it was taking him a while to accept them. He knew they were coming, but now that they’d come he couldn’t help but go unnaturally rigid as he looked down at his father.

Up until a few minutes ago Kaoru had been in Ryoji’s sickroom. As soon as Ryoji had been taken away for his test, Kaoru had locked the door from the inside and lost himself in passion with Reiko. Afterwards, he’d stopped by his father’s room. What he’d heard there felt like a punishment for lewd acts in an inappropriate place. The scent of Reiko’s skin still lingered in his nostrils, and he could still feel the soft touch of her skin here and there on his body. On a deep cellular level his excitement had yet to subside. Now he regretted coming to his father’s room while still in the throes of afterglow.

His father seemed to have physically shrunk a size over the last few days—the swelling of the sheet over his chest was pitifully small. When Kaoru was a child his father had been a giant in his eyes. He could beat on his father’s muscular chest with both fists and his father wouldn’t flinch in the slightest. His physique had been out of place on a scientist, but now it hardly disturbed the flatness of the sheet.

So it wasn’t that much of a surprise to hear that the cancer’s spread to his lungs had been confirmed. But still it was news he hadn’t wanted to hear—he’d been putting off thinking about it for so long—and revulsion was his first reaction, followed by something like anger as the facts sank into his head.

“Don’t just stand there. Have a seat.” Whereas Kaoru’s expression as he stood there was one of rage, Hideyuki’s was soft. Kaoru only then realized that he’d been standing ever since hearing the two pieces of bad news.

Kaoru did as his father said and sat down on a stool. Suddenly his anger receded; he felt drained.

“Are you going to have surgery?” His voice sounded hollow to himself.

Hideyuki had the answer ready. “No, not this time.”

Kaoru was of the same opinion. Cutting the cancer out of his lungs wasn’t going to prolong his life. The end result was all too clear. Chances were, an operation would actually shorten his life.

“Right,” was Kaoru’s response to his father’s determination.

“But never mind about me. This has turned into something really nasty.” Hideyuki was referring to the information Saiki had just brought him.

The second piece of news had to do with the results of animal experiments conducted simultaneously but independently in Japan and America. Until this point, it had been thought that the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus only affected humans: only humans could catch it, and only human cells would turn cancerous under its influence. But experiments on mice and guinea pigs had just revealed that animals could contract the disease, as well.

It wasn’t yet clear whether this was the result of a mutation in the virus, or whether its ability to infect non-humans was simply something that had been overlooked up until now. What was important was the threat of animals in close contact with humans, dogs or cats or even smaller animals, becoming carriers of the virus. If this happened, it was to be expected that the virus would spread even more explosively than it already had. Events in the real world were taking on an even crueler resemblance to the end stages of the Loop. There, the cancerization had affected all life-form patterns. If the analogy held up, the MHC virus wouldn’t cease its attack until all life on earth became cancerous.

Even if Kaoru hadn’t gotten the virus from Reiko, it would invade his body somehow, by some route or another. It was inevitable. At least, that was how he tried to rationalize his relations with her, even as he closed himself off to imagining the doom that awaited him.

His father’s voice reached him as if over a great distance.

“Huh?”

“Hey, are you listening to me?”

“Sorry.”

“You spoke to Amano, right? Tell me your impressions.”

It was a vague enough question.

“Well, a few things bother me about what he said.”

Hideyuki nodded. “I’ll bet.”

“Dad, was it really only recently that people started to notice that reality was starting to look like the way the Loop wound up?”

“The Loop project started thirty-seven years ago and lasted for seventeen years. The program was shut down five years after I joined. That was twenty years ago. That world had disappeared from my memory. It’s really only in the last few days that I’ve started worrying about the way the Loop ended.”

Kaoru found this statement of his father’s totally unbelievable.

Ten years ago, when Hideyuki had steered the conversation away from the Loop, refusing to tell Kaoru how the project had turned out, it had to have been because he was bothered by the way it had ended. All life forms within the virtual space losing diversity, turning cancerous, and going extinct—it wasn’t the kind of story to tell a ten-year-old kid. No doubt Hideyuki hadn’t wanted his son to project that story onto the real world and thereby fall into an unhealthy obsession with the end of all things.

Because he’d felt that a child’s view of the future of mankind should be sunny, Hideyuki had distanced his son from the Loop. Which meant that in at least a corner of his mind Hideyuki had been worried all along about the conclusion of the Loop experiment.

“Dad, about the reason that the Loop turned cancerous …”

“It was the appearance of the ring virus.”

“Could somebody have introduced it into the program?”

Hideyuki was silent for a while, as if pondering the idea.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because nobody could explain how the virus came to be. It couldn’t have emerged naturally. So if it couldn’t have been born on the inside, isn’t it most natural to think it was brought in from the outside?”

“Hmmph.”

“Isn’t it?”

“If people could just start introducing things once the program had already started to evolve, it would have nullified the whole experiment. Security was flawless.”

At this point, Kaoru mentioned a name. “You know Kenneth Rothman, right?”

Still face up on the bed, Hideyuki turned his eyes toward Kaoru.

“Did something happen to him?” he finally managed to choke out. He was bracing himself to receive another death notice.

“Do you know where he is?”

“I heard he was in New Mexico, still researching artificial life, but …”

“Yeah, supposedly he moved to the laboratories in Los Alamos. But nobody knows where he is now. And just before he went missing he mentioned something that sounded pretty important. He said he’d figured out the MHC virus, and that Takayama held the key.”

“Takayama …”

“Dad, did you watch the scenes in the Loop involving Takayama?”

Kaoru’s question sent Hideyuki deep into his thoughts again. His eyes darted around desperately as, with his weakened vitality, he tried to recall something.

He was clearly shaken. It was only natural that his memory should become somewhat opaque after several major surgeries and his long battle with cancer. But still it was setting Hideyuki’s nerves on edge that he could find no answer to his probings into the darkness of his memories.

“I … I don’t think so.”

Kaoru decided to ease his father’s struggles by changing the subject. “Oh, Dad, another thing. The MHC virus has been sequenced, right?”

“Saiki brought by a printout of it two days ago.”

“Well, have a look at these figures.”

Kaoru showed the printout to his father; he’d highlighted with a marker the total number of bases in each gene.

“What about them?”

“Look at the number of bases.”

3072—393,216—12,288—786,432—24,576—49,152—196,608—6144—98,304.

Hideyuki read the nine numbers off in order. But by the look he turned on Kaoru it was evident he hadn’t noticed anything special about them.

Kaoru enunciated clearly as he explained. “Get this, Dad. All nine of these numbers equal two to the nth power times three.”

Hearing this, Hideyuki looked over the numbers again at some length, before crying out. “Nice catch!”

The old light returned to Hideyuki’s eyes as he lost himself in their scientific back-and-forth; it only lasted an instant, but that was long enough for Kaoru to notice. It pleased him at the same time that it made his chest tighten. How long had it been since his father had praised him like this?

“Do you think it’s a coincidence, Dad?”

“It can’t be. What are the chances of all nine numbers—some of them six digits—turning out to equal two to the nth power times three? Extremely low. Any time something overcomes that kind of improbability, it means something. You were the one who told me that, that night ten years ago.”

Hideyuki gave a weak laugh. Kaoru replayed in his mind his memories of that night and his family’s back-and-forth; a summer as hot as this one and a childhood dream fanning anticipation of a trip to the North American desert. That place, once a fun-filled destination for a family vacation, had changed drastically for him, but it still drew him with great force.

As Kaoru and Hideyuki sat there reminiscing about times spent together, the hospital corridor outside burst into a commotion.

Two or three people ran past, creating a sense of tension not often felt in a non-emergency ward. Apprehensions stirring, Kaoru listened closely.

He heard what sounded like a woman’s scream mingled with a male voice barking commands. The woman’s voice sounded familiar. He was sure of it: it was Reiko.

“Excuse me,” Kaoru said, glancing at his father and getting up.

He opened the door and looked up and down the hall. He saw a woman scurrying down the corridor away from him, following two men in guards’ uniforms. She was wearing a casual yellow housedress; the zipper on her back wasn’t zipped all the way up. Kaoru himself had fumblingly unzipped that dress not long ago; he knew the white neck above it. This was Reiko.

She wore sandals with no socks; a further glance showed that she was in fact only wearing one sandal. This made one shoulder rise and fall with her strides. She must have been in quite some hurry as she’d left her son’s sickroom.

Realizing the situation must be urgent, Kaoru chased her, calling her name.

She didn’t even look back, but followed the two guards around a corner and through the door to the stairs, beside the elevator.

She was screaming; just what her screams meant was not clear. It sounded like she was calling out a name, but with all the noise, Kaoru couldn’t make it out.

“Reiko!”

Kaoru sped after her, opening the stairwell door as it slammed shut in front of him and rushing in. In the stairwell was a freight elevator, and beyond that the fireproof door to the emergency stairs. This door opened from either side, in case of emergency, but any unauthorized entry by this means would show up on the security monitors, bringing guards at a run. Of course, the system was also designed to prevent people from jumping to their deaths.

Reiko and the guards opened the door to the emergency stairs, and over their shoulders Kaoru could see the child. The outside wall had a window in it, marked with a red triangle: this window opened from the outside or the inside, so that firemen could use it as an entrance in an emergency. The window was open now, and curled up on the windowsill sat Ryoji.

The boy turned a mocking gaze on the panicking adults and continued to kick and dangle his legs in his usual way.

As soon as they saw Ryoji, the guards stopped in their tracks and began trying to talk him down.

“Calm down.”

“Don’t do it.”

“Come down from there.”

“Ryo!” Reiko croaked, not at her son but at the narrow square of ceiling above him.

Ryoji seemed to notice Kaoru standing behind his mother. Their eyes met. Then Ryoji rolled his eyes back in his head until only the whites were visible, and leaned back. Kaoru’s last glimpse of Ryoji’s eyes showed him something no longer alive.

The next instant, Ryoji threw himself toward the sunset behind him and disappeared.

15

Kaoru sat next to the bathtub with his hand in the running water, adjusting the temperature so that it would be on the tepid side. At first the water felt a bit hot to the touch, but as he grew accustomed to it he decided it was close to body temperature. Then he got in and sank back until the water was up to his shoulders. He soaked a while. Once the last droplet had fallen from the tap, the bathroom was silent. It was unusual for him to take a bath on a weekday afternoon like this.

He lay back until his head rested on the rim of the tub, closed his eyes, and pricked up his ears. He hugged his knees and curled into the fetal position. He had the feeling that his heartbeat was being picked up by the water, making wavelets in the tub.

He tried to empty his heart, but it was no use. The same scene kept replaying in his mind.

It was nearly a week since Ryoji had jumped to his death from the hospital emergency stairs.

Help me. Help Ryoji.

Ryoji had ended his young life before Kaoru’s very eyes, forsaking his mother’s wishes.

The sight of Ryoji jumping had made a strong impact on Kaoru. The moments just before and after, the empty look in Ryoji’s eyes as he leaned backward, Reiko’s scream. The images, the sounds, the most fragmentary details were tragically etched into Kaoru’s brain. They’d appeared in his dreams every night for the last week.

Immediately after Ryoji had jumped, Kaoru and Reiko and the others had rushed to the window to look out. They could see the boy’s body twisted unnaturally from its collision with the concrete. They could see rivulets of blood, all flowing in the same direction, shining reddish-black in the setting sun. Reiko fainted on the spot; Kaoru picked her up. He made arrangements for Ryoji’s body to be taken into the emergency ward, but he already knew just by looking that it was too late. The chances of surviving a twelve-story drop onto a concrete surface were virtually nil.

Sometimes he dreamed about the stain Ryoji’s blood left on the concrete. The stain was still there, in a corner of the hospital courtyard. The boy’s life was gone, but it had turned into a shadow which lingered on the surface of the walkway. Kaoru couldn’t make himself go near it.

Ryoji’s suicide was an impulsive act, but there was something premeditated about it, too. When he made his move he’d dashed straight for the window in the emergency stairwell. He must have known the windows there were the only ones that opened from the inside. He must have had his eye on them for some time.

The motive for his suicide was obvious. He’d finished the scintigram, and was now facing his fourth round of chemotherapy. He must have been filled with revulsion at the thought of that miserable struggle starting again. And it was a struggle against an enemy he couldn’t defeat. Sooner or later, his life would end, and until then there would be only agony. He must have begun to weigh the question of which was better, to prolong his life a little and thereby ensure more suffering for himself, or to cut his life short and spare himself the pain. Perhaps he’d taken into consideration the way his mother suffered watching him.

With the MHC virus ravaging his body, Ryoji had chosen death. Kaoru could understand his feelings—could understand them painfully well. This was something that touched him—a catastrophe that would befall him in the not-too-distant future. This was an enemy Kaoru himself would have to fight. He understood Ryoji’s act. But that didn’t mean he wanted to end up the same way.

You’ve got to concentrate all your intelligence on confronting this enemy that wants to destroy your body, your youth.

Those were his father’s words. If he wanted to escape death, he’d have to fight, and he’d have to win. And he had only one weapon, just like his father had told him: his intelligence.

Kaoru sank deeper into the bathtub. Now the water was up to his earlobes. Do I have that kind of strength?

The more he thought about it the stranger it seemed. All these events connected with the MHC virus springing from somewhere close to him, closing in on his body as if he’d been assigned to save the world.

You’re overestimating yourself.

Unable to stand the heat any longer, he got out of the tub.

Saving the world actually had a nice ring to it. He wouldn’t mind looking like a hero, playing at savior. But he had a personal matter he had to attend to first. Nothing world-class—something far more local in scale. This evening, for the first time in a week, he had a rendezvous planned with Reiko.

He wiped himself clean of perspiration and then put on a brand-new T-shirt and jeans.

He hadn’t seen Reiko since Ryoji’s funeral. Since then, she’d refused even to meet him. Finally, she’d offered to speak with him for an hour this evening. This would be his only chance. Kaoru would have only tonight to find out why Reiko had closed her heart to him.

16

Reiko’s condo was on the edge of a wooded hilltop. The building was an ostentatious one, three stories, red brick exterior.

Kaoru went around to the entrance, pressed the buttons for her room number, and waited for a response. The speaker came to life and he heard Reiko’s voice softly say, “Come in.” A moment later, the door slid open.

He’d already assumed that Reiko was financially comfortable due to the fact that she’d been able to put Ryoji in a private room at the hospital. As he walked down the carpeted hallway to the elevator, he saw his assumption borne out.

Of course, he’d never tried to find out where the money came from. He never asked, and she never volunteered the information. However, she’d hinted that her husband had been socially successful. He’d been older than her; he’d died of cancer a few years ago.

Hers was a corner apartment on the third floor. Before he could even ring the bell, the door opened. She must have been watching through the peephole, estimating his time of arrival.

It had been a week since he’d seen her. She opened the door a crack and stuck her head out. They were face to face. Her hair was combed back and held in place with an elastic band. He noticed a few strands of white.

“Come in.” Her voice seemed to recede within itself.

“Long time no see.”

She showed him into her living room, where he sat on a couch. For a while neither spoke. Kaoru felt uncomfortable. He didn’t know why she was acting so cold toward him, and not knowing that, he didn’t know what he should say or how to start.

Reiko wordlessly placed a glass of iced barley tea before him, and then sat down facing him.

“I’ve been wanting to see you.” He reached out for her, but she avoided his touch. She sank back into the sofa, maximizing the distance between them.

The same thing had happened at the funeral. Flattering himself that he was the only one who could heal the pain of losing her only son, Kaoru had tried to put his arm around Reiko’s black-clad shoulders, but she’d rejected the gesture, twisting away from him. Inexperienced with women he may have been, but even Kaoru could get the message if it was repeated enough times. But he couldn’t fathom the reason behind her persistent refusals. One day they’d been in intimate physical contact, and the next she recoiled from his touch.

Reiko hugged herself tightly, rubbing her arms with her hands as if chilly. But the air conditioning was at a reasonable level, and the room was far from cold. In fact, it was still too hot for Kaoru.

He observed her exterior, hoping to understand the pain in her heart, hoping that if she’d closed herself off to him out of anguish at losing her son, he might yet find a way to comfort her.

He wanted to say something that would give her courage, ease her heart, but the only words that came to him sounded so weak and forced, even to himself, that he was embarrassed to speak them. “Cheer up”—he couldn’t bring himself to say that if his life depended on it. And so there was no way to start a conversation.

“How long do you intend to sit there without saying anything?” She said this coolly, looking at the floor. This bothered Kaoru—she’d made it so he couldn’t say anything, and now she was reproaching him for his silence.

“Knock it off already,” he finally managed to say.

“You …”

She held her head in her hands and shuddered violently. She was crying: every now and then he could hear a sob.

“I want to relieve your sadness somehow, but I don’t know how to do that.”

Reiko groaned and looked up at him, biting her lower lip. Her eyes were red from weeping, and her cheeks were wet with tears.

“I wish I’d never met you.”

Kaoru was shocked.

“So you hate me now?”

That just can’t be, he wanted to shout. If she really hated him she wouldn’t have consented to meet him. She could have spared herself this awkward scene simply by continuing to ignore his phone calls. And yet she hadn’t: she’d set up this tête-à-tête, albeit on the condition that it last only an hour. There had to be something she wanted to talk to him about, some legitimate reason for meeting him.

“He knew.” Her voice was suddenly, unexpectedly calm.

“What?”

“About you and me.”

“That we’re in love?”

“In love? So that’s what being in love looks like?” A self-mocking smile appeared on her face.

Kaoru sat bolt upright, startled. What being in love looks like?

“What did he know?”

“What you and I were doing in that room.”

She couldn’t go on. Kaoru swallowed and said, “He couldn’t have known.”

“He was a sharp boy. He picked up on it. We were so stupid. How could we … how could we do something like that?” Her heart was starting to crumble.

“But …”

“He wrote it in his note.”

“Huh?”

“What do you think he wrote?”

Kaoru swallowed again, bracing himself.

Reiko imitated her son’s voice. “‘I’ll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out.’”

Oh, no.

Kaoru thought of Ryoji in his swim cap, smiling, standing by the side of the pool in his baggy trunks, repeating the words over and over. I’ll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out. I’ll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out. I’ll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out.

They’d taken every precaution. They’d only been together when Ryoji was gone for two-hour tests. Even then, the act itself had been over in less than ten minutes. After it had been accomplished, they’d spent the rest of the time on the edge of tears, eyeing each other with lethargy or regret. Kaoru would sometimes kiss away Reiko’s tears and whisper, “I love you.”

Reiko rocked back and forth as if having a seizure, as if reading Ryoji’s suicide note had stolen her reason.

Kaoru let her weep for a while. There was nothing else he could do. She’d calm down eventually, once she’d cried herself out.

He tried to imagine things from Ryoji’s perspective. His mother had seized on the occasions of his tests, moments when he’d been in the worst pain, to abandon herself to pleasure. To Ryoji it must have amounted to betrayal. His mother was supposed to be fighting this illness side by side with him, but instead, she’d sent him off to fight it alone while she got her kicks. No wonder he felt disillusioned. No wonder he’d lost the will to fight. Kaoru had assumed that Ryoji’s suicide had been a form of surrender to the illness, but the reality turned out to be something else again.

Up to now, Kaoru had grieved relatively little over Ryoji’s death, knowing that the poor kid was destined to die soon anyway. His time would come soon enough, so if he wanted to shorten its remaining length himself, maybe it was better that way. Kaoru had almost felt relief.

But if Ryoji’s mother’s actions had triggered his suicide … Ryoji’s thinking suddenly seemed a little more complicated than Kaoru had imagined.

No doubt Reiko felt the same. She’d paid extra for a private room, she’d hired a tutor on the assumption that her son would return to school someday, and she’d generally tried to show an enthusiasm for life. When you know somebody’s going to die, love is letting that person see that you’re willing to fight right by his side. She’d wanted to show Ryoji that she would stick by him until the very last moment, but instead she’d simply sped him on his way.

No wonder Ryoji had despaired. And now Reiko was wracked with remorse for having driven her son to that despair, to his death. She’d turned the brunt of her rage on Kaoru, her partner in crime. Kaoru finally understood why she’d fled when he’d tried to put his arm around her at the funeral. Standing in front of Ryoji’s memorial tablet, she didn’t want to be seen touching him even for an instant.

What Kaoru needed was time to think. He was still young—he didn’t know how to deal with something like this. It would’ve been easier if he’d wanted to end their relationship. But he had no intention of doing that. He desperately wanted to find some way to fix things, to overcome this seemingly hopeless situation.

“Can you give me some time?” He decided to be honest with his feelings. He wanted to wait a while, then consider rationally what they should do.

“No.” She shook her head violently.

“But I don’t know what to do.”

“Neither do I. That’s why …”

Therein lay his salvation. She hadn’t called him here today to put an end to their relationship once and for all. She was admitting that she herself was lost, that she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t make this decision alone.

He’d promised only to stay for an hour, but outside the window the autumn sunset was already upon them. It had been the rainy season, early summer, when he’d come to know Reiko. They’d only been together for three months. It felt longer to Kaoru.

The majority of their time together that evening was spent in silence. Sometimes the gaps when they couldn’t think of what to say lasted ten minutes or more. But still, Reiko never told him to go home. Kaoru thought he sensed something unnatural in her attitude. Several times she’d be on the verge of saying something, only to bite the words back.

“Reiko, you’re hiding something from me, aren’t you?”

This made up her mind for her, and she looked up at him. Her expression challenged him.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

It took him a few seconds to process what she was saying.

“You’re pregnant?”

“Yes.”

Their eyes met, and he knew she was telling the truth.

The shock ran up and down his backbone. He simply couldn’t grasp this. Death and birth had been almost literally bumping elbows in that little hospital room. The world’s cruel irony rankled him. He felt the presence of an ill will invisible to the eye.

“I see.”

He heaved a deep sigh.

“What do you think I should do?” Reiko asked.

“I want you to have it.”

Saying this, Kaoru leaned forward. He hadn’t just been playing when he started this relationship. If there was a child on the way, then he was prepared to raise it—he wanted them to live together.

“What are you saying?!”

Reiko took a newspaper from the magazine rack by the couch and threw it at him. It was this morning’s edition.

He knew what she was trying to tell him without even looking at it. He’d read the article this morning.

The article accompanied a photograph of a stand of desert trees in Arizona, in America. The trees had been discovered by chance along US Highway 180 between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. According to the article, most of the plants, short trees and shrubs growing low to the brown earth were covered from their trunks to the tips of their leaves with strangely-shaped swellings. Of course there are relatively common plant viruses that cause unnatural growth or withering, but these specimens suggested a viral infection on a scale never before seen. The very shapes of the trunks, branches, and leaves had been altered. All signs pointed to the work of a virus. In fact, some were theorizing that the culprit was a mutated version of the MHC virus. Not content to ravage the globe’s human population, it seemed that the virus had extended its reach to encompass not only animals but even plants. The sight of these grotesque trees seemed to signal the end of the world. A gloomy article, ending on a doomsday note.

Reiko was a carrier; she just hadn’t gotten sick yet. The probability was high that the child within her would be born infected with the cancer virus, too. And if that child were to be born into a world in which the cancer threatened every living thing …

It was all too easy for Kaoru to say that he wanted her to have the baby. She lashed out at him.

“You tell me, where in this world is there any room for hope?”

In the Loop, the ring virus had come in the end to have sway over every life-form pattern, hounding them all to extinction. Kaoru was beginning to know how that felt.

It’s starting. Reality is coming to take after the Loop.

“Just give me some time, okay?”

He was forced to beg. He couldn’t come to any conclusions right now.

“Will a way open for us if we put off deciding? I’m sick and tired of this. Disgusted. I don’t want to have an abortion. Can’t you see that? It’s like this child has come to take the place of the one I lost. Of course I want to have it, to raise and protect it. But I just can’t, not when I think that this child might meet the same fate. To be born into the world only to suffer, to die so young … Help me, please. I don’t know what to do anymore!”

He wanted to sit next to her, to let her whisper her pleas into his ear; he wanted to hold her and deliver her from her confusion. But he was afraid it was too soon for that. He fought down the urge.

“So you’re not considering an abortion?” He pressed the point, and she slowly shook her head.

“I don’t have the strength for that, even.”

So she didn’t mean to abort the child; still, that didn’t necessarily mean she was determined to have it.

Kaoru searched as much of her soul as he could perceive from her eyes, and he thought he caught a glimpse of a decision. She wouldn’t abort it, but neither would she give birth to it. Which must mean … was she on the verge of choosing suicide?

Kaoru had one wish now. He wanted Reiko to go on living. In order to ensure that, he had to somehow prove to her that the world was worth living in, both for her and her unborn child. And not just for them, either: he had to learn the value of life for himself. How could he convince anybody else that life was worth living if he himself was willing to abandon the world to cancerization, to loss of genetic diversity, to doom?

I’ve got to prove it to her so that she can’t possibly deny it.

There was only one way: he had to change the course of the world.

How much time would it take? Two, three months? If he hadn’t settled things by the time Reiko’s belly started to swell, there was every chance she’d choose death. Three months was about all the time he had, then: her nerves wouldn’t let her hold out any longer.

“Give me three months. Please. I’m asking you to trust me.”

“Three months?!” She gave a feeble scream. “I can’t. Something’s going to happen to my body, I know it.”

“Two months, then.”

She stared at him resentfully.

“I can’t promise anything,” she said at last.

“You have to promise me. For the next two months you can’t kill yourself, no matter what happens.”

Kaoru placed both hands on the table and leaned toward her. Overwhelmed by his sudden intensity, she recoiled at first, but then a look of relief, of eerie lucidity, came over her. Her indecision seemed about to give way, in one direction or the other. If she could just settle on a direction for now, her suffering would be lessened, at least a bit.

He felt it best to distance himself from her for now, if only to redeem himself from the dishonor of being physically denied. Two months would be about right.

“Two months,” she murmured.

“That’s right. Let’s meet again two months from now. Until then, you have to keep living, no matter what.”

“Just stay alive?”

“As long as your heart keeps beating and your lungs keep breathing, and you think of me once in a while, that’s enough for me.”

She showed him a faint smile.

“I don’t know about that last part.”

It was the first flash of brightness she’d shown that day. It reassured him.

He needed her to trust him unquestioningly. If she started to inquire—if she asked him, for example, whether or not he was confident in what he was about to do, he wouldn’t have satisfactory answers to give her. He felt he had several clues in hand. The unexplained fact that the number of bases in each gene of the virus came out to equal 2n x 3. The fact—only a hunch, actually—that the virus had emerged someplace in the vicinity of Kaoru himself. If he could discover the secrets of its creation, maybe that would lead him to the means of its destruction. He had two months. He’d have to face this situation burdened with the knowledge that Reiko’s fate, and his, depended on it.

17

In the elevator, on the way up to the twenty-ninth floor, Kaoru’s ears began to ring. The elevator was designed to be unaffected by the change in air pressure, but today he felt a pressure on his inner ear that he’d never felt before. Simultaneously, an afterimage flickered before him.

The sound of Ryoji’s bones cracking as his body hit the concrete still lingered in Kaoru’s ears. He hadn’t actually seen the boy falling; his impression was that he’d heard the body’s impact as he himself was running to the window. It was nothing more than that, just an impression, but still the memory of the sound refused to fade away. Now, as the elevator climbed, something had triggered that memory, reviving images Kaoru had never actually seen.

In a somewhat depressed mood, Kaoru opened the door to the apartment and called out, “I’m home.”

No reply. Thinking nothing of it, he took off his shoes and placed them in the cabinet by the door. When he looked up again, his mother Machiko had appeared as though out of nowhere.

“Would you come here a minute?”

She grabbed his arm and dragged him to her room before he could respond. Her eyes flashed with the excitement of discovery.

“What is it, Mom?”

Flustered, he offered no resistance, but let himself be dragged along by her intensity.

It had been some time since he’d set foot in his mother’s room. Once the room was neat, but now it was piled high with disorderly stacks of books and magazines and photocopies. His mother’s expression had changed, too. In fact, she looked like a changed person. Although they lived together, Kaoru felt it had been a long time since he’d really looked at her face.

“Would you tell me what’s going on?” Kaoru’s nerves were frayed, it being so soon after Ryoji’s suicide. He worried about his mother’s psychological state.

She seemed blissfully unaware of Kaoru’s concern.

“I want you to take a look at this.”

She handed him a magazine. The Fantastic World, the title read in English.

“What about it?” he asked in disgust. The title told him all he needed to know about it. Machiko grabbed the magazine from his hands and flipped through it. Opening it to page forty-seven, she handed it back to him with uncharacteristic roughness.

“Read this article.”

Kaoru did as he was told. The article was titled “Back from the Brink: A Full Recovery from Final-Stage Cancer”.

Another one of these. He understood now. Lately his mother had been pouring all her energy and devotion into looking for a revolutionary way to treat cancer. But she was looking for it outside the bounds of modern medicine, in the “fantastic world” of myths and folk-tales. It was easy enough for him to dismiss it all as just so much alchemical nonsense. But she was his mother, and he had to humor her even if it was uncomfortable. He started reading the article.

Franz Boer, a retired surveyor living in Portland, Oregon, had been infected with the MHC virus several years ago. The cancer had spread throughout his body, and doctors had given him three months to live.

But he’d rejected the doctors’ recommended course of treatment, instead embarking on a journey. As part of his trip he spent two weeks in a certain unnamed place. When he finally returned to Portland after a month, the doctor who examined him shook his head in disbelief. His inoperable cancer had completely disappeared. Cells were collected from the 57-year-old man and tested to see how many times they had undergone cellular division. The result was a far greater number of times than was normal for a man his age.

In other words, Franz Boer had gained two things in that unidentified place: a reprieve from his sentence of death, and, not the same thing, longevity. But Boer, who lived alone, died in an accident before he could tell anybody where he’d obtained his miracle. Now everybody was frantically trying to figure out where he’d gone and what he’d done.

There was little to go on. One persistent reporter had learned that, soon after he’d been told he was dying, Boer had rented a car in Los Angeles. But there was nothing to indicate where he’d be going.

That was the gist of the article.

Machiko watched eagerly for Kaoru’s reaction. Stories of miracle recoveries were everywhere these days. But he knew she was expecting something from him. He raised his head slowly with a quizzical expression.

“What do you think?” she asked.

Boer had probably taken a plane from Portland to L.A. Renting a car there, it was possible he’d been heading for the Arizona-New Mexico desert. It fit.

“I know what you’re trying to say: Franz Boer was making for the longevity zone I’ve been talking about for so long.”

His mother didn’t bother to nod. She just leaned closer with her burning gaze. That gaze told him that she was sure of it.

“There’s one more piece of evidence.”

“And what would that be?”

“Look at this.”

She brought out from behind her back a foreign book and handed it to Kaoru.

The title read North American Indian Folklore. Beneath the title was an illustration of the sun with a man standing beneath it on a hilltop catching the sun’s rays full in the face. The man wore a feathered headdress, and his figure was blackened, silhouetted by the sun, as he stood in an attitude of prayer. The book looked to be old: its cover was faded and the edges of its pages dirty from handling.

As soon as Machiko handed him the book, Kaoru turned to the table of contents. It ran to three pages, seventy-four items. Each heading contained at least one word he was unfamiliar with. Hiaqua, for example—he’d never seen that word before, but he could tell at a glance it wasn’t to be found in an English dictionary. He flipped through a few more pages, until he came to a series of photographs. One showed an Indian on one knee with bow and arrow.

Kaoru looked from the book to his mother’s face, seeking an explanation.

“It’s a book of North American Indian folktales.”

“I can see that. What I want to know is, what does it have to do with that article you just had me read?”

Machiko shifted her weight. Her glee at being able to teach her son something came out in her body language.

“The Native Americans had all sorts of myths and traditions, but they had no written language, so most of them come down to us through generations of oral transmission.”

She took the book back and paged through it.

“That means that most of these seventy-four tales were gathered and recorded by non-Indians. Look.” She pointed to a page. “See? At the beginning of each story there’s a notation by the title saying who collected it, when, and where. It also says what tribe the story was handed down in.”

Kaoru looked at the title of the story Machiko was pointing to.

“How the Mountaintops Reached the Sun”

—the Shopanka tribe

Next there was an entry telling how a white man had come in contact with the Shopanka tribe, heard the story, and written it down. Only then, at last, did the book go on to say how the mountaintops in fact reached the sun.

All seventy-four stories were short, mostly a page or two, and had similar titles—lengthy phrases, not single words.

“Kaoru, I’d like you to read this story.”

She had the book open to what seemed to be the thirty-fourth story: at least, it had the number 34 written above the title.

The title turned a light on in his brain.

Another coincidence?

The title was: “Watched by a Multitude of Eyes.”

The title was in the passive voice. There was no indication of who was being watched by what.

Kaoru stepped back, groped behind him for a chair, and sat down. He started reading. Without realizing it, he’d slipped into Machiko’s world.

Watched by a Multitude of Eyes

—the Talikeet tribe

[In 1862, at the height of the Civil War, a covered wagon train was crossing the Southwestern desert on its way west. A white minister, Benjamin Wycliffe, got separated from the wagons and was rescued by the Talikeet. He lived with them for several days.

One calm evening, the Indians gathered around the campfire to hear one of their elders speak. The Reverend Wycliffe happened to be nearby, and he heard the tale. The flames reaching up into the night sky combined with the elder’s singsong voice to make a powerful impression on Wycliffe’s mind. He recorded this story that very evening.]

All living things were born from the same source, long long ago. The sea and the rivers and the land, the sun and the moon and the stars, are birth-parents to people and animals, and love them mercifully, but they themselves are contained within the womb of a being larger than themselves. Man feels the land to be filled with spirits because his heart is connected to the heart of this being. When man does something bad, this great being is pained in his heart, and this causes disaster to fall upon man.

Once when the stars were flowing across the sky on the stream of the being’s blood, one of the stars came down to earth as a man called Talikeet. He married a lake named Rainier, and they had two sons. They lived together with their children happily on the land in the womb of the great being, never disobeying the will of the spirits.

The brothers grew up strong and were able to help their father and mother. They were skilled and courageous hunters, always bringing home game for their parents.

Then one day, Talikeet’s leg began to hurt, and he told this to his wife and children. They worried about him, but only Talikeet himself knew the reason why his body hurt.

Before he had drifted down to this land, he had been aware of being watched by a multitude of eyes. Men were permitted to hunt animals and eat them. Bigger animals were permitted to catch smaller animals and eat them. But they must not eat too much. And they must not store up too many animals they had killed. They must respect and honor the animals they hunted. To see that this was done, the great being who was also the father of all nature set a huge eye on a mountaintop. The eye which was set on top of the mountain was very large, but it was the only one, so it could not watch all men in all directions at all times. Eventually men began to hide from the eye and do things that went against the will of the great being.

Then the great being placed eyes within men’s bodies so that they could not escape his sight.

“It is that eye which is causing me pain now,” Talikeet explained to his wife and children.

“But, Father, I do not think you have disobeyed the will of the great being.”

“I’m sure I did without realizing it,” said Talikeet. Then he died.

The brothers and their mother were very sad, and they resented the actions of the great being.

Time passed, and then the older brother’s waist began to pain him. Then the younger brother’s back began to hurt. When they showed each other their bodies, they found fist-sized “eyes”, one on the older brother’s waist and one on the younger brother’s back. They were surprised and asked their mother Rainier for help.

Rainier went down the river and visited the forest spirit. There she learned how to help her sons.

This was the forest spirit’s answer. “Go due west and wait for a warrior to appear. Once you are sure of his true intentions, then follow his guidance.” So she took her sons and journeyed due west, waiting for a warrior to appear. The “eye” on the older brother’s waist grew larger, while the “eye” on the younger brother’s back even wept great tears.

Finally a powerful man appeared astride a beast and guided the brothers to a pass in the mountains.

They crossed many rivers. The prairies turned to deserts, and the mountains stretching down from the north broke off. Going around them to the south, they reached a high hill. Standing on the hilltop looking west, they saw water flowing from a mountaintop through a valley until it became a river which flowed into the great sea to the west. Looking east, they saw a like river flowing into the great sea to the east. They were on a bow-shaped ridge connecting valleys on either side of the mountains, at the source of two rivers flowing into the two seas.

At the very highest point of the ridge the warrior dismounted from his beast. They walked to a waterfall and climbed up it. A black cave gaped at the top of the waterfall, and inside the cave lived the Ancient One. The Ancient One told the brothers about the creation of heaven and earth. He knew much about the past, as if he had experienced it all himself, so the older brother asked the Ancient One his age. This was his answer.

“Look at me and decide for yourselves. Tell me what you think.”

But the answer came to neither brother, so they could not tell him.

Instead of telling them his age, the Ancient One said, “I have been here since the birth of all things.”

The brothers asked him to take away the eyes on the older brother’s waist and the younger brother’s back. He answered, “Very well. But from this day you must keep watch here instead of me.”

Then the Ancient One disappeared. At the same time, the “eyes” fell from their bodies, rolled over the stone floor, and turned into black rocks. The brothers became immortal, and watched over that land. With its rivers flowing into the sea east and west, it was a good land for keeping watch.

As soon as she saw he’d finished reading, Machiko spoke. “You understand what this means, right?”

Kaoru didn’t much care for this kind of story. He wasn’t a great reader of fiction to begin with, and he found folktales and myths in particular to be too incoherent, too lacking in reality. He had a hard time grasping them even when he did read them.

This one was like that. It developed too fast—what was it trying to say, exactly? The words sounded like they had significance, but they could be interpreted to mean anything. Kaoru felt that, no, he didn’t exactly “understand what this means”.

“Are the other stories pretty much like this, too?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

“This ‘Ancient One’. Are we to understand him literally as an old man?”

He imagined the Ancient One was a metaphor for something, along with the Multitude of Watching Eyes. Did the Ancient One represent a longevity zone? What did that make the Watching Eyes? It didn’t make sense to him.

“Here’s the problem,” Machiko said, taking out the map included at the end of the book and unfolding it before Kaoru. It was a map of North America, showing the names of the major Indian peoples.

“Folktales and myths: are they completely made-up? According to some scholars, myths are based on historical facts from early in a people’s existence. They contain that race’s deepest wishes. Traces of the Great Flood, for instance, we find all over the world, and it’s common knowledge now that the legend of the ark was at least somewhat based on fact.

“So let’s assume that the story you just read, Kaoru, has some element of fact in it. Okay? Now the Talikeet were part of the Okewah people of western Oklahoma.” She pointed with her pinky to a point on the map representing the current residence of the Talikeet tribe.

“It says in the story that the brothers went due west from here.” She began to move her finger to the left of the page, but then stopped. “Where were they heading? According to the story the hilltop they stood on was at a southern gap in a great mountain range, at the source of two rivers, one flowing to the great western sea and one flowing to the great eastern sea. Geographically, those mountains have to be the Rockies.”

She moved her finger along a north-south line, stopping at a point where the Rockies ended their long march down from Canada. The point was directly west from the Talikeet homeland, and just to the south of it stood a mountain of some twelve thousand feet. Which meant that the spot Machiko was pointing to was a huge valley supporting a bow-shaped strip of land. In the desert.

She traced an X over the bow-shaped rise with her finger. Just to the left of that spot could be seen the thin line of the Little Colorado River, which fed into the Colorado River, which flowed into the Gulf of California—the Pacific Ocean. Just to the right of that spot could be seen the uppermost reaches of the Rio Grande, which flowed into the Gulf of Mexico—the Atlantic Ocean. The sources of these two rivers flowing into the world’s two great oceans came together at this point, divided by this ridge, part of the Continental Divide.

It was the Four Corners region, where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado met. Site of the negative gravitational anomaly, where a longevity zone might, conjecturally, be located. Not far from the research labs at Los Alamos. Near where the deformed and swollen trees had been found. Right where Kaoru had drawn an X on his gravitational anomaly map ten years ago.

Kaoru felt dizzy. If he stood on that hill and looked west, he’d see water bubbling up from the side of the mountain that would eventually reach the Pacific Ocean; if he looked east he’d see a similar sight. Glittering water slicing its way through a desert wasteland.

The landscape presented itself before his mind’s eye. He was standing unsteadily with one foot on either side of that ridge. He’d never been there, but from the contour lines on the map he could imagine it with clarity. But what shook him wasn’t that. It was his own guesswork … The longevity zone he’d speculated about was now taking on the air of reality. Something was waiting for him there. The thought struck him with awe. Kaoru no longer cared whether the myth was just a made-up story. What was important was how much of his own hope and desire he could pack into the myth he himself was making. His father wanted it. Reiko wanted it. And now his mother did, too.

Machiko put her hand on Kaoru’s knee and spoke to him. Her voice was a whisper, but it was full of assurance.

“You’ll go there for me, won’t you?”

But there were things he still wasn’t sure of.

“You’re positive this is where Franz Boer went, are you, Mom?”

Machiko grinned. “The article mentioned the work he’d been doing, didn’t it? Do you remember what it was?”

“He was a surveyor, wasn’t he?” Franz Boer, a retired surveyor living in Portland, Oregon, the article had begun.

“That was his day job, but he was also a member of the American Folklore Society. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“How could I?”

“This book,” she said, taking up North American Indian Folklore again, “was actually compiled by several people. At the end it says who was responsible for which story.”

In the back of the book there was a list of six editors, and beneath each name was a list of numbers corresponding to the stories in the volume each editor had been in charge of. The thirty-fourth story, “Watched by a Multitude of Eyes,” had been edited by none other than Franz Boer.

“I see.”

So with three months left before he died of terminal cancer, Franz Boer had headed to a certain point in the Southwestern desert to fulfill his last wish. He probably didn’t care if he got his miracle or not—as a folklorist, he’d wanted to visit this place once before he died anyway. If he did nothing, he’d most assuredly die, so what did he have to lose by going? And, as it happened, he’d gotten his miracle.

“This story, ‘Watched by a Multitude of Eyes,’ exists in many variations, and the one included in this book is just the most basic. In one version, it’s an older brother and a younger sister who meet the Ancient One and are granted immortality. In another version, Rainier has trouble recovering from childbirth, so Talikeet visits the Ancient One and brings back spring water which heals her. Some of the stories have different titles, too. But the description of the place is always the same. Right here. This place has the power to heal illness.”

Machiko tapped the point on the map several times. “That’s why Franz Boer went there.”

“That place …”

“Kaoru, didn’t you once show me a map of gravitational anomalies? You’d made a mark in the desert in Arizona or someplace. Can you show me that map again?”

Kaoru wanted to make sure himself. He knew without looking that it was the same place, but still he wanted to check. “Wait a minute,” he said, and went to his room.

He hadn’t looked at that map for years, so he imagined it would take him a long time to find it. He searched his bookshelves and desk drawers with no luck. It was just a scrap of paper—the proverbial needle in a haystack. But it wasn’t a problem. All he had to do was access the same database that he had ten years ago and call up the same information.

He turned on his computer, realizing what an old model it was now. It was on this very screen ten years earlier that the gravitational anomaly map had been displayed.

Kaoru searched his memory for the exact paths he’d taken that night. First, he’d accessed the database on-line. But how had he searched it? First, the category: scientific and technical information. Then, gravity. Under that, gravitational anomalies. Under “area” he chose “worldwide”.

Next it asked for a date: what year’s gravitational anomalies did he want? He wanted the same map he’d seen ten years before, so he searched for the appropriate year.

Finally, a map appeared on the display. He enlarged the area he’d checked before, the North American desert.

His jaw dropped. The contour lines showed no anomalies in that area whatsoever. Ten years ago, when he’d looked, the negative numbers had gotten larger the closer they’d gotten to that point on the map. The gravitational anomalies had zeroed in on that very spot.

But the map before him now showed no such characteristic. His mother and father had both seen it, he was sure. All three of them had held the maps up to the living room light and seen for themselves that the low-gravity areas contained longevity zones.

Kaoru started again, repeating the same procedure as ten years ago. He did it over and over, but each resulting map held only an unremarkable arrangement of contour lines, a meaningless array of numbers.

He couldn’t have misread the map ten years ago. That was impossible. His father’s and mother’s memories could not be doubted, never mind his own. Looking at that map had led his father promise them a trip to the desert. Kaoru still had the signed agreement in his desk drawer.

So where had that information come from ten years ago?

Kaoru got a pain behind his temples. What had his computer been connected to ten years ago? The thought made the blood rush from his head.

He turned off the computer and closed his eyes. His long-held vague image of the longevity zone in the desert began to rise again before his eyes.

It has to exist. I know it.

The world’s outlines were fragile: one poke and it would all crumble into nothingness. But in the face of that fragility Kaoru found assurance. If he’d been able to call up the same information he’d found ten years ago, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt this way—perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to make up his mind.

He saw a bow-shaped hillock, and rivers swallowed up by the gentle rise of the land. In his imagination he could command the perspective of hawks circling overhead. The deep-carved valleys, the cool green of the trees cradled within them. Maybe the Ancient One still kept watch over the world, flanked by springs that fed into the Pacific and the Atlantic, water that circulated throughout the world like blood or lymph through the body. Incurable illness and ageless immortality; the rising and falling of the tides caused by fluctuations in gravity; life and death. All the contradictions fused into one and rose out of the desert sands. Everything suggested it. Everything whispered to him that he should go there.

Suddenly Machiko was standing behind him. Kaoru turned to look at her, and said, “I’ll go, Mom.”

“How will you go?”

“I’ll have Dad’s motorcycle flown to L.A., and then I’ll ride out into the desert.”

She nodded over and over.

PART THREE

Journey to the End of the Earth

1

Darkness filled his rear-view mirror. The eastern horizon was gradually brightening, but night still ruled the sky as a whole. At the moment, Kaoru was nothing but a figure making its way through darkness toward the dawn. The few clues he’d found had led him to this mission, this burden, to search out a way to combat the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. All around was blackness, and he had to chase the faintest hint of light.

There were few cars on the interstate highway crossing the Mojave Desert at night, so for a long while he didn’t need to glance in the rear-view mirror. But as signs of dawn began to press in upon him from the front, he checked it more frequently. The sky was definitely escaping night’s dominion now, embracing the dawn. The landscape’s transformation was beautiful to Kaoru’s eyes. The brown earth received the corroding rays of the morning and in turn stained the darkness behind him red. On either side of the highway mountain ridges began to appear in silhouette.

Both hands gripping the handlebars of the XLR, the 600CC off-road bike his father had bought ten years ago, Kaoru turned his head to see his surroundings. He wanted to savor the landscape racing by with his own eyes, not through a mirror.

He’d been dreaming of this desert wasteland since he was ten. And now he’d come all the way to America and ridden six hours straight to see it.

It had been late yesterday afternoon when he’d picked up the XLR. He’d shipped it to America air freight. Then he’d had to pack for this race across the desert. It had been nearly ten when he’d finally left L.A. He’d considered getting a good night’s rest in a hotel and departing the next morning, but when he contemplated the vast desert to the east of him he couldn’t contain himself. He simply had to set off immediately.

But it was dark when he left, and had been dark ever since. Though he’d known he was traversing the Mojave desert, he might as well have been riding through mountain meadows for all he could see. But all he had to do was point the bike down the highway leading straight into the darkness and keep the handlebars steady. Now the sun was rising, giving him his first glimpse of the land.

Kaoru was glad he’d set off when he had, and glad he’d kept going. This change in the landscape was not to be missed. That, and he’d avoided wasting a day. There wasn’t much time left. Today was the first of September: he had to come up with some sort of conclusion within these two months, or it might mean the life of not only Reiko, but her newly-conceived child.

For six hours straight he’d been submerged within the thick hum and vibrations of the four-stroke OHC two-cylinder engine. The road was nicely sealed, but still he maintained perfect riding form, never loosening his knee grip. His father had drilled proper biking technique into him. Whenever he’d lapsed into an unsightly splay-kneed pose, his father would slap his knees and yell at him. Keep your knees tight around the tank, kiddo.

And he had, all the way. Shoulders relaxed, weight nicely balanced on the footrests. Kaoru’s father had taken him riding even after his diagnosis, and on those trips especially his father’s words of instruction had sunk deep into his heart. He tried hard to ride with precision.

The trip meter showed he’d come three hundred miles. The XLR’s huge gas tank held thirty liters, good for three hundred and fifty miles of highway driving. Which meant it was about time to fill up: much farther and he’d risk running out of fuel. This highway had stretches of two hundred or more miles with no gas station, so he had to be careful. The luggage rack held a spare polyurethane gas can, but it was empty. He’d meant to stop at a hotel somewhere and lie down on a bed; now he might have come too far.

I’ll stop at the next town and have some breakfast, he told himself. He knew if he didn’t force himself to stop he’d ride his father’s bike until it was out of gas. It frustrated him to have to stop. Watching the change from night to day had proven to Kaoru that the world was revolving on its own; he felt that if he stopped it would go on revolving without him, and he’d be left behind.

Just as the last traces of night disappeared from his rear-view mirror, leaving the land completely covered with light, a town appeared in the distance ahead. It should have a gas station and a place to eat.

Kaoru checked into a motel a little after noon, and then immediately showered and lay down on the bed. He tried to sleep, but the engine vibration had accumulated in his body to the point that his very cells were shaking: he felt itchy and restless. Even as he lay there his body felt like it was still on the bike. The flesh of his thighs in particular, where he’d been squeezing the gas tank, felt like it wasn’t his own.

How long was I riding?

He counted on his fingers. Six hours from LA, then he’d dismounted and waited for the diner to open so he could have breakfast. He’d filled up the tank, then ridden for another three hours. Altogether, then, he’d been riding for nine hours. Another nine hours on Interstate 40 would get him to the vicinity of Albuquerque.

His plan was to turn north on Route 25 before Albuquerque, heading through Santa Fe to Los Alamos and Kenneth Rothman’s last known address. Of course his final destination was the Four Corners region. But before that he figured it was best to find out what had happened to Rothman, and what his last words meant.

Kaoru reached for his rucksack by the bedside and groped around inside it for his billfold and the two photos he should have inside it. He took them out and studied the face they showed him. Still flat on the bed, he held them over his head and spoke to the beloved figure.

Needless to say, it didn’t answer.

Before leaving Japan, Kaoru had visited his father’s sickroom to tell him he was going to America. He’d explained why he needed to go, and his father had nodded and said:

“I see.”

Kaoru had told his father everything, not even concealing the situation with Reiko. It was possible that his father might die while he was away from Japan: if he was going to tell his father at all, this was the time.

Hideyuki had laughed out loud upon learning that he had a grandchild growing within the womb of this woman Reiko.

“Way to go, kiddo.” For a moment the old, healthy Hideyuki was back as he asked with an undisguised leer about Reiko’s appearance. “Is she a good woman?”

“To me she’s the best,” Kaoru answered.

“Can’t leave you alone for a minute!” Hideyuki trembled happily. Then he spoke earnestly. “I’d like to live to see my grandkid.”

When he heard that, Kaoru was glad he’d told his father about Reiko.

He averted his eyes from Reiko’s photographs and put them away in the rucksack again, by touch, not rolling over. His heart beat wildly. Just gazing at her seemed to increase his loneliness.

To distract himself he looked around the room without getting up. On one wall hung a garish round tapestry, and from the ceiling hung a fan, blowing lazily. The sound of the fan bothered him less than the noise of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

All of the furniture and appliances were old, just like the motel itself. He could hear something—a cockroach, maybe?—crawling around under the bed. He’d found one on the kitchen floor earlier. Maybe it was the same one.

Kaoru disliked cockroaches to an unusual degree, perhaps because he wasn’t used to them: he’d never seen one in their twenty-ninth floor condo overlooking the bay.

When he’d checked into this motel, he’d figured on falling asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow—he was that tired. More than the all-night ride, it was the sun beating down on him in the morning that had exhausted him. But unexpectedly, sleep eluded him. Maybe he was too excited: it was his first time in a motel outside of Japan.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, this trip. When he thought of the vacation he’d dreamed of ten years ago, the difference nearly brought tears to his eyes. His problems were too many. He had to save his dying father’s life, he had to come up with answers for Reiko, he had to prove to his child that this world was worth living in—the child who was now just a cell starting to divide …

He listed his goals in order to bolster his courage. He felt excitement, sentimentality, fatigue, vibration, a sense of mission, fear, and heat all wrapped into one sensation; he felt as if an army of ants was crawling around inside his body. If he didn’t find a way to calm his heightened emotions he’d never be able to get to sleep.

He suddenly remembered that there was a pool in the courtyard of the U-shaped motel. Maybe a swim would wash off this creepiness. He got up and changed into swim trunks.

He dived into the empty pool, and then turned over underwater and looked up at the sky. He loved the feeling of moving suddenly from air to water, from one medium to another. Looking up through the water at the sky, he could enjoy both layers at once. The blazing sun looked warped seen from underwater.

He thrust his head above water and stood in the center of the pool. The motel surrounded the pool on three sides, but on the fourth he could see the desert stretching out into the distance. Submerged in water as he was, he was even more struck by how parched and unforgiving the land looked.

He thought he could feel lumps of heat dissolving inside his body. When the last one had melted away, he got out of the pool and returned to his room. His body was telling him he could finally sleep.

2

The sun’s rays just got stronger and stronger. He was wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt and leather gloves, and his jeans were tucked into his boots, and the only skin on his body exposed to the sun was the back of his neck below his helmet. Even so, as he rode he could feel the burning sun all over his body.

He had no street address for the place he was headed. Wayne’s Rock, on the outskirts of Los Alamos, New Mexico, was all he knew. Just before leaving Japan, he’d contacted Amano again and asked him to look up Kenneth Rothman’s last known address. Amano said he’d been living in an old house that doubled as his work space. He had reason to hope that Rothman was still living there, and had cut off contact on purpose, for whatever reason. But even if Rothman was gone, the house at least should still be there in some form. It should at least furnish him with new clues.

On a desert highway with little traffic, it was possible to make travel-time estimates that were exactitude itself. He arrived at Albuquerque right on time, took Interstate 25 northward, and after a time turned onto a state road heading toward Los Alamos. Wayne’s Rock should be this side of Los Alamos.

He stopped at a gas station not far from his destination. Not to fill up—he had plenty of gas—but to ask directions. Like seemingly all the gas stations on the state road, this one had a little convenience store attached, and so at the very least he’d find a clerk; if he passed it up, meanwhile, there was no telling when he’d meet another soul.

Since he was here, he topped off the tank, then went into the store to pay. A bearded, middle-aged man glanced a hello at him.

Kaoru hadn’t even put in a full gallon, so it was a small amount of money that he gave the man. He then asked how to get to Wayne’s Rock.

The man pointed northward and said, “Three miles.”

“Got it. Thanks.” Kaoru turned to leave, but the man stopped him.

“Have you got business there?” The man’s eyes were narrowed and he was frowning at Kaoru. His question was certainly a blunt one, but there didn’t seem to be any ill will behind it.

Kaoru didn’t know quite how to answer, so he kept it short. “An old friend of mine lives there. I think.”

The man’s lips twitched as he shrugged his shoulders and said, “There’s nothing there.”

Kaoru nodded that he understood, and repeated the words. “There’s nothing there.”

The man stared at Kaoru wordlessly. But what was he supposed to do, change his mind just because the guy told him there was nothing in Wayne’s Rock? He had to go and see for himself.

Kaoru forced a smile and said, “Thank you” as he walked out of the store.

There was no one else around. Kaoru wondered, as he headed away north, just how many customers besides himself the gas station had seen today.

He wanted to check the time as he rode, so he lifted his left hand, the one he wore his watch on, from the handlebars. But he found his leather glove was in the way: he couldn’t see the watch. He tried to pull his glove off with his chin, and in the process took his eyes from the road for a split second. When he looked up again, he saw, just beyond a rise covered with desert plants, a line of old trees stretching northward into the desert. Most drivers wouldn’t even have noticed them, but Kaoru was paying attention. He was exactly three miles past the gas station.

He could see what looked like a dirt road running alongside the line of trees. He stopped the bike at the entrance to the road. Up close he realized that what had looked like trees were wooden poles spaced dozens of yards apart; black electrical line sagged from some of them. Power lines, disused for what looked to be quite some time.

If he hadn’t been keeping his eyes open, he probably wouldn’t have realized there was a road here. It was little more than a slightly leveled-off space next to the power poles. The strip was the only place where cacti didn’t grow, raising their gnarled arms skyward—proof that this was indeed a road, or at least had been at one time.

Kaoru scanned the northern horizon, wondering if following the power poles down this road would take him to the village of Wayne’s Rock. The road disappeared over a hill. Wayne’s Rock was invisible from the state road. But Kaoru had the feeling that distant ruins were calling to him.

At least I won’t get lost: all I have to do to get back to the state road is follow the power poles, he thought to himself.

With that he grasped the handles, turned left, and sped off toward the middle of the desert. It was the first time since getting to America that he’d taken the bike off-road.

3

There was a dip in the road ahead of him; he could see it coming, but it didn’t look that big. But when he went over it the bike flew more than he’d expected. He dropped his waist back and into the jump, and when the bike landed he wrestled with the violent motion of the handlebars until with precise timing he stabilized the bike. One mistake and he might have tipped over. He cursed himself for his recklessness, and did his best to avoid the craters in the road from then on.

After some initial ups and downs, the road flattened out and ran straight for a while. The dilapidated wooden poles still ran alongside the road, a dotted line linking civilization and wilderness.

“Aha,” he said. He’d spied some broken-down buildings ahead, in a ravine cut into a hill. Both the road and the line of poles disappeared into the village. At some point, at least, this town had been connected to an electricity supply and phone service. He couldn’t see any poles beyond the village. The lines seemed to end here.

He stopped on a hill maybe a hundred yards before the village. Still straddling the bike, he counted about twenty houses made of brownish stone. Even if there were some on the other side of the ravine that he couldn’t see, the whole settlement probably held only a few dozen houses. He couldn’t imagine what had led the first inhabitants to decide to dwell here. What had they been seeking out here in the middle of the desert? Judging from the way the houses were constructed, the first settlers had gotten here a long time ago. But the whole village was barren and windswept now. He couldn’t see anyone. Even from a hundred yards away he could tell that the place was abandoned.

He remembered the words of the man at the gas station. There’s nothing there. It looked like he was right. This was a ghost town, rotting away until only traces of its former inhabitants remained.

The sunlight was coming from the west now. A look at his watch told Kaoru it was past five o’clock. It wasn’t quite yet time to head back to the state road and look for a town with people living in it.

So Wayne’s Rock was a pile of ruins in the middle of the desert. The place filled him with a primal fear, and he asked himself why. Was it because the place represented for him such a fusion of unnatural contradictions? Why had Kenneth Rothman, a cutting-edge information engineer, chosen to live in such a remote place anyway? There were too many things Kaoru didn’t understand.

But he’d come too far to back down now. He opened the throttle, gunned the engine, and was cheered by the extravagant noise he was able to summon forth. He sped down the road into the village.

On the way he spied a sign of the type common at the edge of American towns:

WELCOME TO WAYNE’S ROCK

It looked like a bad joke to Kaoru.

As he approached, netlike patterns on the walls began to stand out. Sand and gravel, probably blown by the wind, clung to spots where the stone of the walls was crumbling. Several cars stood abandoned on what looked to be the town’s main drag. These, too, were covered in sand.

There was a gas station/convenience store here, too. A single pump stood on the cracked concrete apron; the nozzle was off the hook, and the hose lay on the ground, twisted and black like a cobra, the nozzle its head curled to strike. The store’s windows were boarded up tight, and shards of glass were scattered over the ground.

He rode slowly down the main street, peeking at the empty houses on each side, searching for nameplates or the like.

There were more trees inside the town than in the desert surrounding it. Perhaps people had chosen to live here because there was water to be had. The trees thrived on that water, flourishing in and around the ruins. The street was lined with them, and at first they did indeed give an impression of health. But when the wind stirred their limbs and exposed their trunks, Kaoru noticed the strange lumps and pits in the rough bark. He approached one and inspected it to find that the bark on the swollen parts was a different color from the rest. The trunks were mottled in color like human skin peeling from severe sunburn.

The limbs were affected, too, and even the leaves, which looked so fresh, were covered on the back with ocher-colored spots. Only at first glance were the trees normal: scratch the surface and they were riddled with disease.

He’d only seen the cancerous trees of Arizona in a newspaper photo in which it had been impossible to make out the details of their deformation and discoloration, but from the looks of things these trees were showing the same symptoms. Virus-induced cancer, and pretty far advanced, too. It must have taken years for them to get this bad. This was no recent infection.

Kaoru hurriedly looked around him, apprehensive. If the trees here were so far gone, how bad was the damage to animals and humans?

He heard no sound but the wind, but still somehow he felt as if rattlesnakes, scorpions, or some other poisonous desert creature were burrowing under his feet. Some malicious life form, or its shadow, was hiding here, behind cliffs or cacti, under clods of earth, and it struck fear into him.

He had one foot on the bike’s footrest and one on the ground. Both feet were encased in leather boots. No foreign object could penetrate to his feet, he knew, but still he shrank from touching the earth with them.

He was desperately thirsty. He had some mineral water in his pack on the luggage rack, but to get it he’d have to dismount the bike and place both feet on the ground. He really didn’t want to do that, so he decided to endure the dryness of his throat and ride on deeper into the town.

Some of the houses had walls made of piled-up stone, but some had walls made of carefully worked dried mud. Most of the roofs had caved in: he’d probably be able to stand in the middle of any of these houses and see the sky overhead.

Kaoru actually steered the bike under the eaves of one of the houses and went inside to try. Sure enough, the setting sun was casting its rays slantwise through a broken space in the roof; dust danced in the bands of light, clouds of dirt glowed with the same coloring.

Where had all the people gone? Were they all dead? Had the MHC virus gotten them all? Or had they escaped, moved to a town with a hospital?

“Hello?” Kaoru called into the depths of the house. No response; he hadn’t expected any. He thought he saw the shafts of light quiver from the vibrations of his voice.

Through the crumbling wall he could glimpse a flat space like a plaza. It was surrounded by houses.

He dismounted, pointing the bike toward the edge of the village so he could leave in a hurry. He left the engine running. He reached into his pack for the mineral water and slaked his thirst.

He had a purpose in coming here, and he had to fulfill it. He needed to track down Kenneth Rothman, and to do that he first needed to find Rothman’s residence.

On the ride in he’d carefully looked for names on the houses, but he hadn’t seen Rothman’s. It looked like he was going to have to leave the bike and check each one on foot.

He entered the house criss-crossed by the sun’s rays and walked through it toward the plaza in the back. It looked to be some sort of communal space for the village. An old Spanish-style monument, made of plaster in the form of a woman and surrounded by a railing, stood in the center. It was the focal point of the village, which he could see now consisted of two rows of houses arranged in a semicircle; on the other side of the plaza was a hillside.

Kaoru stood in the middle of the plaza and imagined a view of this village from above. The double line of houses made a fan shape.

Behind the monument was a basin-like indentation in the ground, inside which gaped a circular rim. A well. So there was water here. That’s why the village had grown up here. He peered in, and the stench of fetid water hit him. The whole village looked parched, and yet the well smelled like water.

The shallow-walled basin resembled a snail in shape. You came around from the outside and then down a set of stairs spiraling down to the rim of the well, as if you were tracing the snail’s shell.

The well had no lid. The wind blowing over it made a flute-like sound.

Right beside the well’s edge he saw some small black shapes, about the size of his fist. At first he thought they were rocks, but after staring at them for a while he realized they were dead rats, belly up. There must have been over a dozen in the plaza.

Kaoru’s gaze naturally followed the trail of dead rats, until he realized the black forms were concentrated beneath a tree at the edge of the plaza, a tree that he could tell from here was cancerous. There was a bench under the tree. And sitting on the bench was a human corpse, the same color as the rats. With the sun at its back, the corpse was just a black shape.

Kaoru went toward the bench, stopping about ten yards from it. The corpse was male, and it looked half mummified. Its legs were spread, its arms hung down limply, and its head was thrown back against the back of the bench, jaw thrust forward. Several long strands of beard hung from the chin, a beard that Kaoru had once described as goatish … Only the gold chains around the wrists and neck hadn’t rotted. They gleamed with an inorganic light.

Kaoru gingerly approached the man and examined his face. The Kenneth Rothman Kaoru had met—five years ago, when he’d stayed at the Futami house for several days during a visit to Japan—had an impressively narrow face, its most conspicuous feature being his long beard, and he used to wear gold chains around his neck and wrists such as those here. It seemed reasonable to conclude that this corpse was Rothman’s.

He must have died here at home, without seeking treatment.

Kaoru looked all around, and something snagged his gaze. The hillside was covered with vegetation appropriate to an arid climate, and amidst it he could see flowers about the size of his palm, coming in and out of view as the wind blew the branches about.

A lone tree in bloom. Its trunk was thin, its branches slender, its leaves looked soft, but this tree alone displayed vitality.

All the trees on the hillside were cancerous: he could see the veins in the leaves standing out hideously. This tree and this tree only seemed to have retained its original coloring. And on the end of its drooping branches grew pale pink blossoms.

Some plants propagate through asexual reproduction, and some through sexual reproduction. Kaoru had observed that the ones covering the mountains in this area were of types that reproduced asexually. Blossoms, however, meant sexual reproduction. He’d heard of cases of asexually-reproducing plants suddenly shifting to sexual reproduction, blooming for the first time in their existence, before rapidly aging and withering away. Such a plant couldn’t go on blooming forever, it seemed: the pleasure of producing flowers came in return for dying.

It occurred to Kaoru to pick one of the blossoms and place it next to Rothman’s corpse as an offering.

Plants that reproduce asexually can go on living essentially forever, in the right environment. In the Mojave desert there are confirmed instances of such plants that have survived for over ten thousand years. Just like cancer cells in a Petri dish.

What Kaoru was witnessing now, though, was the opposite: only the tree which had gained the ability to reproduce sexually had escaped the cancer. And of course, before too long, this tree with its blossoms would follow the natural order of things and die.

A programmed death accompanied the pleasure of blooming, while a life form which had turned into cancer would go on living forever, unaging, but never producing flowers. It looked like a clear-cut choice between two alternatives. Which would Kaoru choose? A bright, shining mortality, or a dull life that went on forever? It didn’t take him long to know the answer: he’d choose the life that bloomed.

Kaoru climbed the hill toward the flowers.

4

He snapped off a blossom and turned to descend the slope. As he did so, a sharp, narrow band of light glancing off one of the rooftops arrayed beneath him caught his eye. The roofs were made of stone of the same color as the land; they blended in dully with their surroundings. They shouldn’t be able to reflect light, thought Kaoru, searching for the source of the flash.

A careful look revealed a black rectangle on the roof of a crumbling red-brick building. The rectangular object had a steel rim, and this seemed to have caught a ray of the setting sun.

The panel glowed there on the roof with an alien light. It looked altogether too new to be sitting on a ruined building like that. Maybe such a system was necessary precisely because the village was so far from the main road, but still it looked out of place.

He could tell even at this distance that the black panel was part of a solar power system. It was quite big enough to produce enough electricity for a single household. If each house had possessed one, there would have been no need for the electric poles lining the road into town, but he couldn’t see a similar panel on any of the other roofs in the village. This one seemed to have been specially installed on this house alone.

Rothman had installed his own private research lab at home. Maybe he’d used solar power.

Kaoru laid the blossom down on the corpse’s knee and threaded his way between the houses, looking for the one with the solar panel. He’d marked its position from the hillside, but he quickly lost his sense of direction as though he were in a maze.

He wandered this way and that until he found the approach ahead blocked. He’d strayed into a house, and now he was in some sort of hallway.

The wind whistled as it blew in through gaps in the walls, but here it had no place to go, so it eddied around his ankles. He thought he could hear native American singing, a sort of call-and-response with the wind, or maybe it was the cry of a bird, or the sound of branches rubbing together.

Kaoru fell still and pricked his ears. His sense of hearing was confused: he couldn’t tell what was near and what was far. One moment he thought he was hearing a human voice at a distance, and the next he experienced the illusion that it was whispering in his ear. It was a hoarse, male voice, muttering—he could hear it—by the wall to the right. It stopped, and when it started again the wind had wafted it over to the left-hand wall.

The voice and the whistling seemed to come from everywhere; the sound seemed to gain a vibrato effect as it slipped through the gaps in the walls.

Was it the dryness of the air that kept him from feeling afraid? Totally devoid of humidity, the air seemed to lack the little hands that would have grabbed him and given him chills. The moisture rapidly drained from any exposed skin; soon, he was afraid, he’d feel nothing at all.

He tried to ignore his other senses and concentrate on his hearing. Gradually he came to detect the source of the sound. Still concentrating on it, he ducked through a hole in one wall, then another, and then found himself in a somewhat different world.

There was a faint smell. He was in a two hundred square foot space with crumbling walls, where something he’d never encountered before, a man-made smell that couldn’t possibly exist in nature, pervaded the air.

There was a pipe-framed bed in a corner of the room. It held no bedding, only an old mattress with several springs poking up through it. There was a sturdy-looking table next to it, and next to that two deck chairs, facing each other, looking more appropriate to a beach than a house. A floor lamp lay tipped over on the floor, and an old leather suitcase rested unsteadily against the table. There were shelves built into one wall, but some of them were broken, their contents leaning crazily. Several thick doorstop-like books sat on the bottom shelf.

Everything in the room looked precariously balanced. He suspected that if he took away just one of the shelves, or moved the bedside table just a few inches to one side, everything would collapse like a row of dominos.

From out of nowhere, the hoarse voice was back, breathing in his ear. Kaoru nearly jumped out of his skin. He looked around in every direction.

Nobody was there. The noise died away quickly, leaving an intermittent buzz in its wake. Kaoru glanced at the space between the table and the wall, and saw an electrical cord. Only then did he notice that there was a radio fixed to the table. It sounded like it wasn’t receiving steady current.

Kaoru grasped the cord and moved it around a little. The buzzing decreased, replaced by a man’s steady voice, accompanied by a sad-sounding guitar. A radio broadcast. The man was singing some kind of blues song. Kaoru was able to make out the lyrics: something about a love that had ended long ago.

Kaoru bent down and adjusted the tuner, reducing the static further. This was definitely the source of the voice he’d barely heard floating to him on the wind. For some reason this radio was still turned on, plugged in, and receiving signals. Playing music.

It was unthinkable that the power lines could still be supplying electricity to these ruins. The electricity would have been interrupted long ago.

The rooftop solar panel he’d seen must be providing the electricity. It was the only thing that could explain the radio still playing.

Kaoru followed the cord to the wall socket, then adjusted the volume again. No mistake, electricity was flowing from somewhere.

Press on, he urged himself. The knowledge that this house in the middle of the desert wore a crown of modern science gave him a kind of courage.

In one wall there was a door to the next room. He placed a hand on the knob. It opened easily.

Beyond the door was a short hallway leading to what seemed to be the entrance to a basement. The stairs led underground until they were swallowed in darkness. But on second look it wasn’t total darkness: he could see a little light seeping out from around a door. There was a light on in the basement.

As he stood at the top of the stairs looking down, Kaoru felt like he was being guided.

There’s a light on.

He pondered that fact for a while. Perhaps it had just been left on, like the radio.

A step at a time, he climbed down the stairs.

Stopping in front of the door, he pressed an ear against it and listened for signs of what was beyond. There was no sound, no sign of anybody. The light shining between the door and its frame was fainter than he’d first thought.

He was about to knock, but it came to him how foolish that notion was. In one bold motion he grasped the doorknob, turned it, and walked in.

A single fluorescent bulb hung from the ceiling, dimly illuminating the basement. But in the center of the room shone another light, a special one that meant civilization.

Spacious as the basement was, its purpose was clear. A computer had been set up in the exact center of the room, surrounded by associated cabinets. The monitor was flickering.

Kaoru went around until he was facing the monitor. Beside it sat a helmet, to both the inside and outside of which were attached electronic devices. Probably a helmet display: he’d used something like it as a kid to play virtual reality games. He hadn’t seen one for so long that the sight of this one brought back pleasant memories.

A wired data glove sat next to the helmet, but Kaoru didn’t touch either of them. He headed straight for the monitor.

As if cued by Kaoru’s appearance in front of it, letters began to appear on the screen.

W … e … l … c … o … m … e

The word popped up one letter at a time. Kaoru found the idea juvenile in the extreme. Evidently the system was set up so that the display would sense when someone was standing in front of it and turn on.

He felt momentarily faint, and leaned on the chair in front of the screen. He eased himself into the chair, resting his elbows on the armrests, and caught his breath. Then he spoke to the computer.

“Who are you, anyway?”

The computer didn’t answer him directly. Instead it showed him a scene.

A barren, windswept desert. An undulating landscape. The scene moved, so that the viewer felt like he was running across the desert. The view slid along just over the surface of the land, following a road up and down slopes, until a village appeared before it. Kaoru had seen it somewhere before.

Then he realized it was Wayne’s Rock, albeit a different Wayne’s Rock than the one he knew. The one he saw on the monitor was much smaller, with only a few houses visible, and those were made of wood, not stone. If it hadn’t been for the distinctive hillside in the background, he wouldn’t have even realized what he was looking at.

How long ago is this, he wondered. A hundred years ago, maybe longer? He couldn’t see any people; there was no indication as to the era. The scene screamed Old West, though.

Is this a movie? A natural question.

It didn’t look like computer graphics. He wanted to think it was a real filmic record, but it was much too clear and well-preserved to have been shot a hundred or more years ago. No, what he was seeing was probably the result of the application of some special technology to recreate the old town on shots of the present Wayne’s Rock. But it looked absolutely real.

He heard hoofbeats behind him. So real did they sound that he turned around to look, only to discover speakers attached to the stone wall behind him.

The scene on the monitor was displayed in only two dimensions, but the sound came through in three.

He kept glancing at the helmet and glove next to the monitor. He finally understood what he was being instructed to do.

If you want to experience it in 3-D, put on the helmet and glove.

So he did. And once he had the helmet on, a turn of his head gave his mind’s eye a 360-degree view of the landscape.

The hoofbeats behind him were no longer just a 3-D effect, they were utterly real, echoing in his brain. He could feel the ground shake with them. He should be wearing boots, but somehow he felt sharp pain as a cactus spine penetrated his foot. Human commotion overwhelmed him. A hot wind caressed the back of his neck, and he felt thirsty. Sweat dripped off him.

Kaoru ran on and on, trying to escape the figures bearing down on him from behind. Unable to bear it any longer, he looked back and saw a dozen or more mounted Indians, their feathered headdresses silhouetted against the sun at their backs.

I’m going to be trampled to death.

He tried to jump sideways, out of their path, but just then a muscular arm hooked itself under his armpit and pulled him up. The arm felt firm under his, real to the touch. He smelled sweat and dirt. Before he knew it the rough arm had slung him around and sat him astride a horse.

Kaoru told himself he was dreaming. He knew, or thought he knew, that this wasn’t reality. But as he pressed his face against the Indian’s muscular back and clung tight to keep from being thrown from the horse, he found himself eye-level with a bunch of scalps hanging like ornaments from the Indian’s shoulder. One was still new, still wet on the underside, still smelling of blood.

His eyes swam and his head fell back, though his instincts told him that if he fell off the horse he’d die.

It was at that moment that the boundary between reality and unreality dissolved.

5

He couldn’t figure out how long he’d been bouncing around on the horse. It might have been minutes, but if someone had told him it was hours, he might well have believed it.

They descended into a valley and stopped beside a river. Kaoru was a little surprised at the abundance of water snaking along at the bottom of the deep ravine. From the top of the gorge the river had looked minuscule—he’d never dreamed that it held this much water.

The water was far from clear: it was laden with dissolved brown earth. But in that arid land, just standing in the damp air beside the river was a relief. Kaoru found himself able to share in the group’s consciousness enough to be aware of that.

They rode along the banks amidst the spray for a while until they came to a wide spot the river had carved into the valley. Here they halted. Several of the men looked up at the lip of the gorge and imitated the cries of animals. The rest separated into two groups, one keeping watch downriver, one upriver, guarding against pursuers or ambushers.

The brilliant sun scorched the earth: he could feel the heat through the soles of his feet. He could feel the passage of time.

A trembling disturbed the woods covering the sides of the ravine, and then from behind trees and rocks emerged small bands of women, children, and old people. The women and children outnumbered the men on horseback.

At first the women seemed afraid to approach. They looked at the men on horseback with mingled expectation and tension, joy and fear, and prayer. Then women who spotted the faces they were searching for began to raise screamlike cries, rushing to their men, while the men answered by alighting from their horses and embracing their women. The reunions were conducted with an urgency in direct proportion to the earlier display of caution.

All of the women’s cries sounded like weeping, but a closer listen revealed two distinct types. Some wept for joy, and some for sadness. Those women who realized that the ones they sought were not among the riders fell to their knees, beating the earth with their fists and shouting imprecations. Some women clutched small children and looked up to the sky, and some held the hands of old people and sank down to the ground.

Kaoru suddenly caught on. A tribe of Indians—this area must be their home—had sent its warriors out to battle. How many had gone out? He judged the number of women embracing men and rejoicing over their safety to be roughly equal to the number of women wailing with lowered heads. So: twice as many men had left as returned. A woman who didn’t find her man among those who returned had to assume he was dead. Every wife and family member was displaying heightened emotion—some positive, some negative.

Kaoru watched unmoved. Sizing up the situation he decided he was the only one able to look on as a bystander. He felt out of place, uncomfortable.

But a moment later his certainty as to which world he actually lived in was rocked. A hand grabbed him and dragged him sideways. He saw a weeping woman rushing up to him. Her earnest gaze denied his earlier scornful detachment. A ten-year-old boy grabbed him around the waist. Suddenly plunged into this vortex of emotion, Kaoru felt only confusion.

The woman had long hair that was braided down her back, and her broad forehead was exposed. Heedless of the infant she held at her breast, she threw herself at Kaoru. Kaoru felt suffocated. Still, he received the woman. Her passion moved him to an embrace.

The image of the woman before him merged with the picture of Reiko he held in his mind. They did look alike. The hair was different in length and style, but the shapes of their faces, the drooping eyes, were identical. Perhaps Kaoru simply wanted to see things that way, though. Ever since coming to the desert his desire to see Reiko had been stimulated to new heights.

As they held each other, crushing the baby between them, his hands and arms coming into direct contact with her flesh, Kaoru could feel the woman’s emotions flowing into his own breast, just for a moment. He and this woman must be husband and wife. The boy clinging to his waist must be his son, the squalling infant squeezed between himself and the woman must be his newborn daughter. It came to him that he knew the kind of life he and this woman had led together over the years. Things he’d seen and felt growing up here came back to him. Sadness, but more than that, hatred. A desire to avenge his murdered father filled the depths of his soul.

New information kept coming to him. The woman had come from another tribe to live with this one. The marriage was her second. Her first husband had been killed far upriver. And not just killed. A band of white soldiers and ruffians had tortured him and then left him to die on the rocks.

The woman still nursed resentment over the way her first husband had been treated. The mechanism by which resentment goaded people to war was laid bare to his consciousness.

He now knew that the boy he had thought was his son was in fact the child of his wife by her previous husband. The only living people with whom he had ties of blood were his aged mother and his newborn daughter.

Kaoru tasted anew the suspicion that here was the real world casting its shadow over the virtual space. His relationship with this woman was almost exactly the one he had with Reiko. Except that Ryoji was dead. He’d thrown himself from the fire escape window, leaving behind only bloodstains on concrete. He’d gone to the other side. But the boy clinging to his waist now was weak and unreliable, just like Ryoji.

Kaoru realized that his own body and mind had started to go over to the other world, leaving him only half conscious. “The other world” was how he expressed it, unthinkingly, but he had no idea where it was located.

There was a brief interval of peace. He lived in a tent pitched on a gentle slope, surrounded by his wife and children and his aged mother. How long had they been together? Sometimes several years felt like a single moment to him, while sometimes a day lasted like a day.

It felt to Kaoru that time flowed, sometimes thick and sluggish, sometimes quick and nimble. The time that enveloped him was mottled, with patches of intensity and patches of attenuation.

His daughter, a newborn when first he’d met her, was a toddler now. His stepson showed not the slightest talent for fighting: a warrior he’d never be. The way he stood when using a bow made everybody laugh.

Kaoru was used to this body now. Crouching beside the river he saw reflected in the water a form totally different from his old one. Dark skin, thick neck and burly tattooed shoulders. He could touch this body and feel it react. Only, his facial features were obscured by ripples in the water: he couldn’t get a clear view of them.

He made love to his wife many times, and each time he grew closer to her. His daughter looked at him differently now, too.

The tribe never lived long in one place: always they were forced to move. From the east and the south they were pressed by a tribe whose skin was a different color. West was the only way they could go. The most careful judgment was required on the part of their leaders to keep contact with the enemy to a minimum while securing food and water supplies. One miscalculation would mean the end of the tribe.

There was only one place they could aim for. Fractured and factionalized though the tribe was, everyone’s expectations focused on the same point: the old legends.

“You must head for a place at the southern edge of the great mountains, where rivers flowing into the western and eastern seas have their source. A place where no one has gone before. There you will find a great cavern with a lake in its belly. This will be the eternal dwelling place of the tribe. There the Great Spirit will watch over you so that none may threaten you, and you will live forever.”

There was nothing left to cling to but legends. If they were to be pushed westward anyway, it was only natural to seek the place the legends spoke of.

Though much diminished, the tribe still numbered over two hundred. It wasn’t easy to move all those people. Teams of agile scouts on horseback took turns patrolling the area ahead, and only when they had made sure the way was clear of enemies would they lead the main camp on. Hunters had to be sent out constantly to procure food.

At night families would pitch their tents in any handy place and gather around campfires to eat the meat of the beasts killed by the hunters earlier in the day. They could never eat their fill. Normally they would have preserved leftover meat by smoking it, but they were always too short of food now to even consider that.

Encountering water they would first wash themselves and then move upstream seeking cleaner water to drink. The most important element in their survival was water. He who discovered it would receive the thanks of everyone.

Now they had reached a place from where, by crossing two more peaks, they should be able to find the land the legends spoke of. Almost in sight of their goal, they camped in the woods, marshalling their last reserves of spirit. And chance blessed them with water.

It was children who found the spring. It was said that several of them had been at play, running around among the trees, when they had found a rocky outcropping peeking out from between tree trunks, with a pretty trickle of water running down its face. They called the news to each other, and several adults nearby set out for the spring with vessels in hand.

Here and there they stood, looking around them carefully. Kaoru counted the people climbing the slope of the mountain. Three in front of him, four behind: eight, including himself. The four behind were all women, with his wife and daughter among them. The three in front were all children, and his son was among them, suddenly eager to prove his worth. Only his mother was absent. She was down in the main encampment.

The child who said he’d seen water had spoken truly. There it was, a thin line of water on the face of a boulder sticking out of the mountainside. It was so weak a trickle that they’d have trouble filling their vessels.

As they were debating climbing higher to search for a place where the water flowed more vigorously, the underbrush behind them rustled.

The men who appeared all of a sudden looked different. Many of them wore disheveled blue uniforms. Some wore white shirts with torn jackets tied around their waists, some wore black shirts with hide trousers. At a quick count the enemy numbered over a dozen. An organized platoon it was not. Several of the men held canteens, suggesting that they, too, had simply wandered onto the mountain looking for water. Others held firearms. Blood stained several of the white shirts.

A whisper arose among the band of strangers. The air crackled with tension. There was no time to wonder what to do. With women and children along there was no way to fight. If the strangers wanted a battle, Kaoru’s group would have to flee. But it was best to make no sudden moves, in case their intentions weren’t hostile.

The strangers exchanged words and worried expressions, but Kaoru couldn’t understand what they said. His sense of time was going crazy again. It had only been two or three seconds since he’d seen the strangers, but he felt like several minutes had passed.

Suddenly the three boys started half-running, half-rolling down the mountain, yelling. Rifles had been pointed at their backs, but others brushed these aside, and as if on cue the men surrounded the boys and blocked their way.

The men didn’t seem to want to shoot. The noise would alert the main encampment below, in which case they had next to no chance of surviving. They probably meant to silence every one of Kaoru’s group.

Reaching that conclusion, Kaoru started to turn to face his wife. Then he saw his son’s head split open by a rock as the men held him down.

Mouths covered by thick hands, the children were unable to raise a cry as their brains splattered onto the ground. The blood against the gray of the rock looked like the momentary blooming of a computer-generated rose. Behind him Kaoru could hear men’s boots kicking at stone.

Violent pain shot through his Achilles tendon. It wasn’t that it had been slashed—the bone itself had been crushed. He lost his balance and sprawled onto the boulder. He’d twisted as he fell, so he hit the stone with his side, but he no longer registered pain.

He reached out to try and touch his wife. But before he could, the men began lifting up the women and flinging them into the underbrush.

Kaoru summoned all his strength in an effort to raise himself, but the men held him down. They even grabbed his hair and pressed his head back against the rock so that he couldn’t move.

He heard the dull sound of something being crushed beside his head. He knew he shouldn’t look, but his eyes rolled to the side anyway, following the sound of tearing flesh.

He saw that adorable little body he’d embraced so many times dashed on the stone from the height of a man’s head. All his thoughts focused on his dying daughter, but his body wouldn’t obey him. It wasn’t pain he felt so much as a burning sensation. It was impossible even to know all the places he was injured. The pain was beside the point. He was prepared to die, and fear was a luxury he couldn’t afford at this point. What he found unbearable was the violence being visited on those close to him, their unforeseen extinction.

He watched as once again his daughter’s body was raised up to the same height and then slammed to the ground. She must be dead by now. And so her pliant, lifeless body was abandoned among the rocks.

The man who’d been tossing his daughter’s body about had evidently found something else to entertain him, because he tramped across the grass into the trees.

Kaoru was able to follow his leisurely movements with his eyes. As he walked, the man was rubbing the backs of his hands on his shirttails, which hung down over his trousers. What was he doing? Blood streaked his once-white shirt. Not just blood: bits of flesh clung to the fabric. Was that his daughter’s blood, her flesh? The man kept wiping his hands on his shirt as if shaking off something filthy; finally he rubbed them on his trousers.

He could hear his wife’s voice, faintly. He could tell she was somewhere nearby. But no matter which way he turned his gaze, he couldn’t find her. Perhaps she was sunk down in the underbrush. All Kaoru could see were the men standing or half-kneeling around her.

The hand holding his hair shifted its grip. It forced his head back even more powerfully, so that his throat was fully exposed to the sun directly overhead. He could see another sharp flash of light, not from the sun. This light moved quickly from right to left.

There was a gurgling in his throat, and then a whistling sound. He felt a hot liquid on his chest. His head seemed to have fallen even father back.

The sun’s rays changed hue, gradually growing in intensity, until the background faded into monochrome and the darkness increased. The red sun gradually blackened, and his retinas were steeped in darkness. His hearing alone still seemed to be functioning.

He could hear his wife’s cries. It sounded less like she was wailing in misery than that she was laughing weakly. His ears picked up her voice until the moment his consciousness disappeared. The woman he’d shared his time with, at least in this world.

His own death and the deaths of his loved ones had come at the same time.

6

Kaoru sat for a while slumped in the chair, immersed in darkness. To an innocent bystander he would have looked simply tired. But what Kaoru had experienced was death itself: his body was now just his soul’s empty husk.

The sensations he’d experienced at the moment of death were not the same as losing consciousness. Even when a person has fainted, the brain continues to function. What Kaoru had known for a brief instant was the stopping of his heart, and the gentle sensation of time and space flickering out as his brain died.

He heard a voice beyond the darkness.

“Time to wake up.”

It was a man’s voice, powerful yet restrained.

“Come here,” the voice ordered, before disappearing along with its echoes.

Kaoru shuddered, and then jumped up out of the chair. He sucked in great gulps of air, and unconsciously his body extended itself. He was like a drowning man seeking air, trying to force his head above water.

He tore the helmet display from his head and flung it onto the desk. He ripped off the data gloves and threw them down beside it.

He felt like his heart was being squeezed. He lowered his body into the chair again and tried to bring his breathing under control. The more his body reaccustomed itself to a real environment, the more violently his heart beat. The memories were still fresh and clear.

He realized he had tears streaming from his eyes. Waves of inexpressible emotion, not quite sadness and not quite pain, washed over him.

He collapsed onto the desk and wept. Telling himself it wasn’t real didn’t help to calm his roiling feelings. Looking at his wristwatch and calculating that he’d spent less than an hour and a half in the helmet was no comfort, either. When a minute corresponded to a year, time weighed heavily.

Kaoru had no idea who had made the virtual reality he’d just experienced, or how, but his feelings told him he’d lived a whole life in the other world. He’d loved a woman, had a child, fought for his people, and died, all in the other world. He’d lost his loved ones at the same time as he’d died—they’d been close enough to touch if only he’d been able to reach out his hand, but he’d been unable to save them.

“Laiche,” he was calling. It was a name, his wife’s name; he’d called her by it who knew how many times. He could remember them washing each other’s bodies in the river, touching each other’s skin. The sensations were still fresh.

“Cochise!” That was his daughter’s name. How many mountains had he crossed with her on his back or at his chest before she’d learned to walk?

He could remember their names. But when it came to his own name, his memory was vague. He could remember their faces, but his own was hazy. The pain of the moment of death was now mostly gone from his memory, too. What remained were recollections of his loved ones—and those overwhelmed him.

Kaoru got up shakily, went to the wall, and rammed his shoulder against it. Pain shot through him. He wanted that physical pain, to help him forget the ache in his heart.

I must analyze what this means, he told himself, hoping reason would help drive away the sadness.

The experience Kaoru had gone through was nothing like watching a movie. The only way he could describe it to himself was this: he had been inserted bodily into a virtual space. And that virtual space reproduced reality exactly. How was that possible? The questions were only beginning.

The Loop.

The first idea he had was that this virtual space might be part of the artificial life project.

He knew that it was possible to be present for any moment in the history of the Loop simply by donning a helmet display like the one he’d just used and setting the time and space coordinates. One could be as a god to the Loop life forms, watching them from on high, or one could use the sight and hearing of a particular individual and live a virtual life.

The patterns of the birth and history of the Loop life forms were all saved in a huge store of holographic memory. It was possible to witness any moment in its history.

Which was what made Kaoru guess that the world he’d just visited was part of the Loop. What he’d experienced was a physical expression light years beyond computer graphics, possible only because the Loop contained beings evolved from the program’s initial RNA life forms.

The bodies he’d touched, that he’d thereby grown to love, were real, not constructed. Just thinking back on them, Kaoru was moved.

The death and partings he’d undergone in the virtual world only strengthened his resolve. He couldn’t lose any more loved ones. How much more painful would parting be in the real world? He didn’t want to go through that again. He simply had to unlock the riddle of the MHC. He had to find a way to treat it.

The cancerization of the Loop is affecting the real world.

He was more convinced of that than ever. Just glimpsing a corner of the virtual world had shattered his emotions. The virtual world had affected him: why should it be strange that it was affecting the whole real world?

What did this room mean? Somebody had foreseen Kaoru’s coming and left behind this elaborate system to greet him. He figured that it had to be Rothman, but he couldn’t guess why.

But there had to be a reason. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been led here. And if he was being led, there was nothing else to do but follow whatever guidance was yet to come.

Maybe it was showing me where I should go.

His mother had shared with him that Native American folktale about a warrior guiding people westward. The tribe he’d belonged to in the virtual world had also believed in a place at the southern edge of the Rocky Mountains where they could live forever under the protection of the Great Spirit, and that belief had led them to move ever westward. The course they’d followed was still etched in Kaoru’s brain.

Death had come unexpectedly upon them only two peaks from their destination, but he could clearly remember the path up to that point. Though they’d camped for months at a time, still the journey, that path, had been their life.

Kaoru grasped what he was to do. I’m supposed to go the way the tribe went.

But there was something he needed to do first.

He had to make contact with Amano in Japan. Connecting then and there with Amano’s computer via satellite, he made a single request. Send visuals of Takayama and Asakawa ASAP. It was a request he’d already made once, before leaving Japan.

The Loop functioned on essentially the same scale as the real world. Billions of intelligent life forms living their lives, creating the histories of their ethnic groups. The amount of memory involved must be staggering. Amidst all that, Amano was trying to find the exact moments when the cancerization of the world began. No small task.

But if Amano could isolate that sequence, Kaoru would be able to use the helmet display and data gloves to conduct an investigation in real time. He’d first lock in on an individual in the Loop, searching for a clue as to why the cancer started. Who knew? Maybe that information would open everything up for him.

While waiting for Amano’s response, Kaoru was assailed by an irresistible desire to hear Reiko’s voice. What time was it in Japan right now? With seven hours’ time difference, it should be nine in the morning there. Was Reiko up yet? After experiencing the death of someone he loved in the virtual world, Kaoru really wanted to feel Reiko’s presence close to him. At the very least, he wanted to know how she was doing.

He dialed her number on his satellite phone.

It rang seven times before a drowsy voice said, “Hello?”

So evidently the real world was still there. Kaoru felt indescribable relief just to hear Reiko say “hello”. It was like emerging from a treacherous swamp and finding oneself on firm ground again.

“It’s me.”

A pause, while she collected herself. When she spoke again, the drowsiness was gone from her voice.

“Is that really you? Where are you? How are you?” She fired questions at him, all her worry for him coming to the fore. Kaoru was gratified to hear it.

He answered her queries one by one, and then said, “It’s alright. I want you to just relax and wait for me.”

Then he ended the call. There was no reason to talk forever.

7

He decided to take a nap on the bed while he waited for Amano’s response.

Kaoru figured he was the only one in the world to suspect the connection between the Loop and the cancer virus. It was of course possible that somebody else had arrived at the same conclusion differently, but he hadn’t had any information to that effect, and besides, if it hadn’t occurred to Amano, the man in charge of maintaining the Loop, then Kaoru felt that chances were he was the only person pursuing this angle. He hoped that by following his hunch, he might be able to shine some light on things that nobody had noticed before. He was sure that the Loop’s demise had been investigated any number of times. But that was twenty years ago, before MHC.

The Loop had turned entirely cancerous. Not long thereafter, the real world had seen the isolation of the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, which was now starting to infect non-human populations, too. It certainly looked like it had spread from the Loop.

Then there was the strange coincidence that the nine genes which made up the MHC virus all had base totals that came to 2n x 3. This suggested to Kaoru that perhaps the source of the virus was a computer, something that thought in binary code.

Just as he started to nod off, the computer came to life. He went and sat down at the desk. Just as he’d thought, a reply from Amano. The screen displayed several steps for him to follow.

He followed the instructions, tapping on the keyboard. Then it was simply a matter of letting this computer access the relevant portion of the Loop memory.

Access complete.

Kaoru donned the helmet display and data glove, knowing this time what it meant.

The chronicle he’d been sent covered things seen and heard by a certain individual beginning in the summer of 1990, Loop time.

Everything was there for the viewing. If he specified, say, a time of 1990/10/04/14:39 and a place of 35.41°N/139.46°E, he’d be able to watch everything that took place there and then. By advancing the time coordinates while remaining in the same place, the chronicle would unfold on the display. There was a zoom function for a more exact location fix.

He could watch from a fixed viewpoint if he wished. He could specify, say, the fourth block of the Ginza district, and be able to observe any event taking place there in any age. The observer had the ability to look in absolutely any direction, could dart his gaze in between people on the street, could look around at everything like a ghost. The Loop inhabitants would be unaware of the observer, while the observer would be able to explore their world with the freedom of an invisible man.

Alternatively, the observer could lock into the perceptions of a single individual. This would allow the observer to meld his senses with his chosen character in the virtual world.

What Kaoru had in hand now were the memories etched in the brains of several persons. He wanted to observe the cancerization of the Loop from the perspective of someone intimately involved with it, just as he’d lived the entire life of a Native American man in a few minutes. He had at his disposal the experiences of several people, beginning with the one known as Takayama.

So what kind of life had this Takayama led? Kaoru was curious, but his fear outweighed his curiosity. He could be about to experience more unbearable heartache.

But by hesitating he’d only lose his courage. Kaoru started the program.

Of his own free will, Kaoru plugged into the Loop.

He seemed to be in a downtown coffee shop. Flashing neon signs outside the window cast brightly colored shafts of light into the shop. Takayama, the man onto whom Kaoru had locked, was seated at a table across from another man. The other man was the one known as Asakawa, Takayama’s friend. Asakawa was haggard; the sight of him aroused Kaoru’s pity. But of course he was haggard: the night before, he’d watched a videotape hideous like no other. Seeking someone to rescue him from the straits he’d found himself in, Asakawa had chosen Takayama. He’d called him here to the coffee shop today to explain the circumstances and ask for his advice.

Takayama took a piece of ice from the glass on the table, threw it in his mouth, and crushed it with his teeth. The chill spread through Kaoru’s mouth, too.

Asakawa was scared and keyed up, and as he told his story he was prone to get the order of things mixed up. Takayama was forced to reorganize Asakawa’s account in his own mind.

Asakawa’s miseries all stemmed from a cab ride he’d taken with an overly talkative driver. The driver had related to him an incident he’d witnessed at an intersection.

The driver had been stopped at a light when a motorcycle next to him had tipped over. The rider had died on the spot from what looked like a heart problem. With the glee of a kid telling scary stories, the cabbie spoke of how the rider had writhed and struggled, trying to take off his helmet. Asakawa’s life had changed forever as a result of this useless information.

On the basis of what the cab driver had told him, Asakawa had started looking into sudden deaths. He soon uncovered the fact that along with the motorcyclist, three other young people had died at the exact same time, with exactly the same symptoms, but in different places. One was Asakawa’s own niece. His curiosity was aroused. All four deaths had been recorded as the result of sudden heart failure, but his reporter’s instinct detected something untoward going on. Given the utter improbability of four kids dying of the same thing at exactly the same time, he felt there had to be a more convincing explanation.

He’d decided to look for commonalities between the four dead kids. It turned out that they were friends, and that exactly a week before their deaths they had been staying in a rented cabin in the mountains. Asakawa decided to check the place out: he departed immediately for the site, a members-only mountain resort, guessing that whatever had caused their deaths, they’d picked it up there.

Evidently Asakawa had initially suspected a virus. He thought they might have all contracted the same illness at the cabin, and thereby been scheduled for the baptism of death a week later.

But to his surprise, what Asakawa had discovered in the cabin was a videotape.

At that point, Takayama broke in and said, “First why don’t you let me have a look at that video.”

Asakawa looked to be stifling his irritation. “I told you, if you watch it your life might be in danger.”

Takayama took another piece of ice from his glass, put it in his mouth, and bumped it around a bit. Asakawa seemed to think he was being mocked.

But in the end, mortal danger or no, nothing was going to get done if he didn’t see the video. Takayama decided to go to Asakawa’s place and watch the video he’d brought home from the mountains.

Takayama sat in Asakawa’s living room, eyes glued to the TV screen. Through his eyesight, the images on the tape found their way into Kaoru’s brain.

The images were chaotic and fragmentary. The tape started with an erupting volcano. Next up was a newborn infant’s face in close-up. The sequence was fragmentary, and shifted quickly from one image to the next, but each scene left a strangely vivid impression, underlain by a baby’s cries and other sounds.

The images were neither computer graphics nor the result of filming with a television camera. They were made some other way. One might think of them as shots of another, lower virtual world created by some sentient being within the Loop.

At length there appeared the face of an unknown man, shot from beneath at close range. A close-up of his shoulder showed blood streaming from it. His face was twisted in pain. He went away, and when he came back his face was transformed: the rage was gone, replaced by mingled fear and resignation.

The field of vision narrowed, until it was just a small round patch of sky, through which fist-sized black clumps were falling. They landed on something with a dull thud. Kaoru’s body registered unexpected pain.

What’s going on? he muttered.

No answer was forthcoming. The field of vision narrowed further, until it was perfectly dark.

As the tape came to an end, writing flashed across the screen. It looked like it had been written with brush and ink, but poorly: the characters were all of different sizes. This was what it said:

Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly …

Then the screen switched to something completely different, bright images and voices. Fireworks on a riverbank, people in light cotton robes enjoying a summer’s evening. The dark, creepy visions had been cut off, replaced by a healthful mundaneness.

A few seconds after that, the images stopped entirely.

Kaoru and Takayama looked up from their respective displays at the same time.

Boiled down, one thing became clear.

Those four dead kids had to have all watched this video. And a week later they were all dead, just like the video warns. So there’s a video that kills people a week after they watch it, and the instructions for averting death have been erased. There was no saving those kids.

After watching that video in the cabin, Asakawa had been shaken, and now he was despairing, but Takayama was neither. He couldn’t be happier than to be involved in this game, this death-wager. He was whistling a happy tune. Kaoru began to realize what a stout-hearted subject he’d locked onto.

He tried to take a step back from Takayama’s consciousness so he could analyze things a little more rationally.

Common sense said it was impossible for an intra-Loop life form to construct a videotape that killed anyone who watched it a week later. Of course, it was possible to introduce something from the real world into the Loop that took that form—a computer virus, for example. That would explain everything.

Kaoru put his own doubts on hold again to rejoin the bold and fearless Takayama.

Takayama had Asakawa make him a copy of the tape so they could each apply their intellect to analyzing it.

It wasn’t long before Takayama was informed that Asakawa’s wife and daughter had watched the videotape, which had been carelessly left for them to find. So now Asakawa was driven by the need to save not only his own life, but those of his family.

Takayama began by trying to figure out how the images on the tape had been filmed. His research and guesswork led him to an unexpected conclusion.

The images on the tape had not been created mechanically, by a television camera or any similar device. Instead, the individual responsible had utilized his or her own psychological power to project them directly onto the videotape. Psychic photography, “thoughtography”. Psychic power had imprinted those images onto a blank tape that had been left in the VCR by pure chance.

The Loop was a closed world. Going strictly by the physical laws that obtained there, such a thing was not possible. That wasn’t the way the set-up worked.

Kaoru began to feel as if he were watching a movie—a well-made one, to be sure, but based on some pretty juvenile premises.

The two men investigated the identity of their paranormal thought-projector making full use of the information networks at their disposal. Finally, they settled on a name.

Sadako Yamamura.

At that point, based on what they knew, it was definite that the individual in question was female. They visited the island that had been her home, gathering as much data about her as they could.

What they learned as a result was that this Yamamura possessed power that far exceeded what was thought realistic. They ascertained her movements from birth through her graduation from high school and her move to the metropolis. But then Sadako Yamamura seemed to disappear—some twenty-odd years ago, Loop time.

It was time for a new perspective. They decided to shift the focus of their inquiry to the question of why those images had appeared on that video, in that mountain cabin.

Takayama and Asakawa decided to go back to the cabin, but on the way they took the opportunity of meeting someone. They had discovered that before the resort was built the land was occupied by a treatment facility for a certain viral illness, and that a physician who had worked there was now in private practice nearby.

They called on him, and when they saw his face, Kaoru himself gasped. It was the man from the final scene of the video, the man with the bleeding shoulder, the man with the expression of terror and resignation.

Unable to withstand Takayama’s interrogation, the doctor confessed to having killed Sadako Yamamura twenty-some years previously, and to dumping her body into a well. These days, they suspected, the cabin in question stood atop that well. So Sadako Yamamura, supposedly twenty years dead at the bottom of a well, had projected her rage and resentment straight upward, imprinting those mysterious images on a videotape inside the VCR inside the rental cabin. And it turned out that the woman Sadako Yamamura, in actuality, had possessed physical characteristics of both sexes.

Takayama elected that they crawl beneath the cabin’s floor, remove the well cap, enter the shaft, and look for her remains. The idea was to give her rest, in the hopes that it would release them from the curse on the videotape.

In Loop time, exactly a week had passed. Asakawa was still alive. The riddle had been solved. Asakawa fainted with relief.

But it wasn’t over yet. The following day, as Takayama’s own deadline came, he began to experience inexplicable heart failure. It appeared therefore that exhuming Yamamura’s bones and putting her to rest was not what the videotape was after.

Just before Takayama’s death, Kaoru unhesitatingly switched subjects, locking onto Asakawa instead. Death, even in the virtual world, was a draining experience, one that he’d rather avoid if he could.

The news of Takayama’s death plunged Asakawa back into worry. They hadn’t figured out the mystery of the videotape after all.

Why was Asakawa still alive? There could only be one reason. Sometime over the course of the past week he must have fulfilled the video’s wishes, unbeknownst to himself. It was something he had done that Takayama hadn’t. But what? Asakawa racked his brain. He’d been spared, but unless he could solve the riddle, his wife and daughter would die. What did the tape want?

At that point, Asakawa received an inspiration.

A virus lives to reproduce itself.

He’d stumbled onto it. The videotape was behaving like a virus. What it wanted was to reproduce. He’d had to make a copy of the tape, show it to someone who hadn’t seen it, and thereby help it to increase in number. It all made sense. Asakawa had made a copy of the tape for Takayama. But Takayama hadn’t made a copy for anyone.

Arriving at his conclusion, Asakawa grabbed his VCR, jumped into his car, and sped off for his wife’s parents’ house. His plan was to make copies of the tape, show them to her parents, and save his wife and his daughter.

The dubbing and playback went off safely, but a trial that would prove too much for Asakawa awaited him on the drive back home.

He was about to leave the expressway ramp when he looked in his rear-view mirror to see his wife and daughter collapsed on the back seat. “We’ll be home soon,” he said. He released one hand from the steering wheel and reached into the back seat to touch them. They were cold. Wife and daughter had both died of sudden heart failure at the appointed time. Even making copies of the tape hadn’t dispelled the curse.

In despair and grief, Asakawa forgot himself. Confused, he failed to notice the stopped traffic ahead of him: he rammed the car into it head-on.

As the shock passed through his body, in the instant that he lost consciousness, he was asking himself: Why are they dead? Why am I alive?

The twinned shocks damaged Asakawa’s body and mind beyond hope of recovery.

8

Asakawa’s eyes were open. His gaze was mobile, describing a slow circle around a point on the ceiling. Images passed from his retina to his brain, but he wasn’t actively seeing. He was simply moving his eyeballs passively, randomly.

But even through those unwilled eye movements, Kaoru was able to guess at where Asakawa was now. The white curtain separating his bed from the next, the gleaming I.V. stand—the whole scene brought back painful, yet sweet memories for Kaoru. He was recalling the setting of his passionate exchanges with Reiko. Asakawa was in a hospital bed.

He must have been transported there right after the collision on the expressway. He must have been unconscious most of the time since: the display had been dark for long periods. Asakawa’s retinas were covered in blackness most of the time, but occasionally, like now, he’d open his eyes and gaze vaguely around.

Through Asakawa’s eyes Kaoru registered the faces of two men. One he’d seen hazily several times. From the white coat he wore it was likely that he was the physician attending Asakawa. The other face was new to him.

This second man came closer and peered into Asakawa’s face.

“Mr Asakawa,” the man said, placing a hand on Asakawa’s shoulder.

Most likely he was looking for some sort of reaction to the tactile sensation, but it was no use. Asakawa was wandering in a pit so deep not even Kaoru’s consciousness could reach him; no touch on the shoulder was going to rouse him from this.

The man moved away from Asakawa’s bedside and asked the doctor, “Has he been like this the whole time?”

“Yes.” The doctor and the other man exchanged a few more words. From what they said it was evident that the other man had a great deal of medical knowledge, too. Maybe he was a doctor also.

The man bent over again, peering into Asakawa’s face. In an emotion-filled voice he spoke again. “Mr Asakawa.” His eyes were filled with the charity of one who has undergone the same experience and can sympathize.

“I don’t think he can hear you,” the doctor said flatly.

The man gave up, leaving the bedside. “I’d like to ask you to notify me if there’s any change in his condition.” Kaoru found the man’s expression interesting as he said this. He seemed particularly concerned about Asakawa.

He’d learn nothing more locked onto Asakawa’s point of view. As long as he lay in bed in this in-between state, Kaoru’s chances of being able to gather information were all but nil.

It’s about time to choose someone new to lock onto.

Something told him that the man with the charitable gaze was the best candidate. He’d never seen his face before, but still he felt an inexplicable closeness to the man. Plus, his conversation with the doctor had showed him to be deeply involved with the case.

Kaoru typed some commands and de-assimilated his sense perceptions from Asakawa’s, instead locking onto those of the visitor as he walked out of the sickroom. From that moment Kaoru was no longer bound into Asakawa’s mind: instead, he was privy to the sights seen and sounds heard by his new subject, Mitsuo Ando. But there was no ease in Ando’s heart, either. Kaoru looked to be in for more vicarious suffering. He sighed inwardly. He’d had enough of loved ones dying on him.

It wasn’t long before Kaoru realized he’d chosen the right subject to lock onto.

Ando was the doctor who’d autopsied Takayama, and, just as Kaoru had suspected, he was deeply entangled in the affair of the videotape. He belonged to the forensic medicine department of a university hospital, and together with a pathologist friend he was determined to get to the bottom of things.

As far as they’d been able to ascertain, the number of people who’d died after watching the video was seven. In addition to the original four young people the total now included Ryuji Takayama and Asakawa’s wife and daughter.

In each body they’d detected the presence of a new kind of virus. Ando was quite surprised when his friend told him about the virus; so was Kaoru. He was certain this virus was related to the one ravaging the real world.

Kaoru grabbed a nearby memo pad and started taking notes.

Need to analyze DNA of virus in Loop.

It was too much to hope that it might be the same sequence, but there could be similarities. It should be relatively simple to analyze the genetic information of a virus in the Loop world.

The world as seen through Ando’s eyes was one of unrelieved misery. Kaoru didn’t know why, whether it was simply due to Ando’s personality, or whether there was another reason. Sometimes without warning his retinas would cloud over with tears. No, there must be some deep-seated cause, some incident in the man’s past that had brought this sadness. Kaoru caught glimpses of it in Ando’s present solitary life.

He was interested enough in the nature of the man’s grief to want to search through his past, but there was no time for that now. Ando had just learned of the disappearance of a young woman he cared about, and he was searching for her.

The woman who’d disappeared was Mai Takano, a student of Takayama’s. She lived alone in a studio apartment. He’d been unable to make contact with her for the past week.

She’d been connected to both Takayama and Asakawa, and now Ando suspected that something bad had happened to her, too. He decided to visit her apartment—there was always the possibility that she too was infected with the new virus.

Her apartment was empty. But the video, the one that killed its viewers in a week’s time, was in her VCR. She’d evidently watched it. And all but a few seconds of it had been erased.

Ando wasn’t sure how to interpret these findings. If she’d watched the video, there was no hope for her. She was probably already dead somewhere. It was just that her body hadn’t been found yet.

So far the only person who’d seen the video and survived was Asakawa. He’d been spared because he made a copy of the tape. But his wife and daughter had died even though they’d made copies. Just what did the video want? It seemed utterly arbitrary about who it killed and who it let live. If there was a logical thread, it had yet to be found.

As he went to leave Mai Takano’s apartment, Ando sensed the presence of a being he’d never encountered before. Something small and slippery that laughed like a girl.

Kaoru could feel it too, as he sat glued to the display. Something touched his ankles—he could feel something slimy against his Achilles tendons.

Impelled by fear, Ando opened the front door.

Something’s here.

He felt sure of it as he stumbled out of the room.

Meanwhile, at the university, the work of analyzing the virus proceeded apace.

Ando was contacted by a newspaper reporter. He consented to meet because the man said he was a colleague of Asakawa’s.

The reporter informed him of the existence of a floppy disk that contained an outline of the events of the case, written by Asakawa himself.

Ando had an idea of where the disk might be, and he managed to get his hands on it. There had been a word processor in Asakawa’s car at the time of the accident. Asakawa’s brother had it now. The disk was still in the word processor.

Ando opened the files on the disk and started reading. The document was entitled Ring, and it was well organized. Kaoru was already familiar with the events it recorded; its account matched up well with what he’d experienced through Takayama’s and Asakawa’s eyes and ears.

In effect, Kaoru was now able to confirm through the medium of writing the information he’d gained through Asakawa’s sensory organs. The contents of the videotape had been transformed into the document called Ring.

At this point, Ando received a message that had been encoded in a DNA sequence.

Mutation.

This hint sent Ando’s reasoning off in another direction. The videotape left in Takano’s room had been erased. The other two copies had been destroyed one way or another. The video itself no longer existed. However, the first copy had been partially erased at the end by the four kids who found it. In DNA terms, part of the genetic material had been damaged.

It occurred to Ando to think of the videotape, in the way it made use of a third party’s assistance to copy itself, as similar to a virus. Having suffered damage to its genetic material, he hypothesized, the video had undergone a mutation. It had been reborn as a new species. The old species, the videotape, had served its purpose. It didn’t matter to the new species if the old one became extinct.

There were two essential questions at this point.

If the video has evolved, what has it evolved into?

And:

Why is Asakawa still alive?

Then another clue presented itself. Mai Takano’s body was discovered at last.

She was discovered in an exhaust shaft on the roof of a rundown office building. It couldn’t be determined if she’d died of hunger or of exposure. The autopsy turned up no signs of a heart attack: her death, then, was different in nature from the other seven. She’d simply wasted away. If she hadn’t fallen into the exhaust shaft, she would still be alive.

Even more puzzling were the signs that she’d given birth immediately after falling into the shaft. This was proven by scars resulting from the placenta being torn out, as well as by fragments of umbilical cord found at the scene.

This all gave rise to a new question.

What did Mai Takano give birth to?

Ando, who had known her, was bothered. She simply hadn’t looked pregnant the last time he’d seen her.

They attacked the problem from a variety of angles. The toll of the dead who had had some connection to that video was now eleven—a figure that now included Asakawa, who had died in his hospital bed without ever regaining consciousness.

Ando and his colleague determined that watching the videotape had caused the virus to appear in the victims’ bloodstreams. They also discovered that the virus had some notable characteristics. There were two strains: one shaped like a ring, and one shaped like a thread, or a broken ring.

The thread type was more prevalent in the bodies of Asakawa and Takano, who had not died of heart attacks. In the other nine bodies, only the ring type was found. This, then, seemed to be the factor that determined whether or not the virus would kill a person. If the ring was broken the infected person would live, while if the ring was unbroken, death would follow in a week’s time.

Ando was desperate to find a logical explanation. It was then that he discovered another odd coincidence.

The thread-like strain moves like spermatozoa.

There were signs that Takano had given birth. What if she’d been ovulating when she watched the video? What if the newly-created virus had headed for her egg instead of her coronary artery?

It seemed she’d been impregnated, and had then given birth to something.

But what?

Whatever it was, he’d encountered it in her apartment.

Ando applied the same logic to Asakawa. As a man, Asakawa couldn’t bear a child. What did he produce instead?

That question would be answered for Ando very soon.

He received a visit from a woman who said she was Takano’s older sister. He’d met her already, in the building where Mai had died. This time they became intimate.

She was in the shower, and Ando was flipping through a publisher’s brochure, looking at the list of new books, when his eyes alit on a title of a book about to come out: Ring. To his surprise, Asakawa’s report had been turned into a book, and was about to circulate in large numbers.

Ring: that was what Asakawa had given birth to. The videotape had evolved into a book, and was about to propagate on a massive scale. By writing it, Asakawa had played a crucial role in that propagation.

Just then, Ando received a photograph of Sadako Yamamura. One look sent him into shock. She looked identical to the woman who’d just stepped out of his shower, the woman who said she was Mai Takano’s sister. What had Mai given birth to? Sadako.

Sadako, who was supposed to have rotted away at the bottom of a well in the mountains twenty-some years ago, had borrowed Mai’s womb to effect her resurrection. But before that fact could sink in, Ando fainted.

When he regained consciousness, Yamamura asked for his cooperation. She confirmed that the videotape had evolved into the book, and was now on the verge of mass reproduction, and she didn’t want him to interfere.

Ring would use its readers to change into all sorts of new forms. Ovulating women who came into contact with those forms would become pregnant and bear more Sadakos; the only other people to survive would be those who helped her to reproduce herself.

Ring would be a book, then a movie, a video game, an internet site—it would saturate the world through every branch of the media.

Ando’s imagination couldn’t fully grasp the disastrous consequences of this. In simplest terms, he guessed that the male-female compound that was Sadako Yamamura would go on being reborn with its singular genetic code, while the ring virus, constantly mutating, would eventually be left behind.

Variety is truly the spice of life: only genetic diversity allows a biological individual to derive any enjoyment from its existence. If all of that diversity contracted to a single genetic blueprint, life would lose its dynamism. Sadako may have achieved eternal life, or its equivalent, but every other life form would be chased into any corner it could hide in, and eventually be hounded into extinction.

Ando had to make a choice. He could either cooperate with Sadako, or be buried by her.

The reward for cooperating was simply too big.

The resurrection of my son.

The grief that dwelt in Ando’s breast turned out to stem from the death of his young son two years previously.

Between the skills of Ando and his colleagues at the hospital and the unique womb of Sadako Yamamura, it was possible to effect the rebirth of Ando’s son. At the moment the boy had disappeared into the ocean, several strands of his hair had come off. Ando still had them. His son’s genetic information was well preserved.

He really had no choice. Life as the world presently knew it was going to end with or without his help. In which case, Ando would much rather it end with him reunited with his son—he’d prayed so hard for it.

Kaoru wasn’t inclined to blame him. He could feel how badly Ando wanted to bring his son back to life. Kaoru wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t do the same thing if he were in the same situation.

Ando’s team removed one of Sadako’s fertilized eggs and exchanged its nucleus for a nucleus from one of Ando’s dead son’s cells. A week later, his son was reborn from Sadako’s belly.

Ando had sold Sadako the world in exchange for a life that had been lost two years ago.

Ring was published. Soon nearly twenty thousand of its female readers were pregnant. They all gave birth to Sadako. Collaborators helped Ring to move through form after form, infecting ever more people, allowing it to reproduce even more explosively. With the speed of a prairie fire, the world’s genetic makeup became consolidated into a single pattern.

The ring virus was able to affect non-intelligent life forms as well, robbing the entire biosphere of its genetic diversity. The tree of life, formerly a giant with myriad branches and luxurious foliage, became a tall straight trunk. Its seeds all carried the same genes, and those seeds rapidly decreased in number. It was as if life was moving backwards, crawling back down the tree of life toward its primeval state.

What life gained in exchange for its diversity was immortality: driven to the brink of chaos, it achieved absolute stability. For life to progress means for it to scale steep peaks with a delicate sense of balance. Once those peaks had been eliminated, once Shangri-La had been discovered on the valley floor and claimed as a permanent home, evolution couldn’t get a leg up.

The denizens of the Loop thenceforth lived repetitive, unchanging, boring lives. They stopped evolving. They had become cancer.

Kaoru typed the command that would unlock him from Ando. He was looking down from above now, as it were, on more and more territory, rather as if he were rising to heaven. He wanted to survey the Loop’s squirming life forms. Individually they were tiny, wiggling about in a pack. The pattern they made was too monotonous to be beautiful.

He’d seen this somewhere before, though. He’d looked at a Petri dish full of his father’s cancer cells under a microscope in the pathology department at the university hospital. He remembered how the cancer cells made ugly mottled clumps as they reproduced in their disorderly fashion. That was exactly how the Loop looked to him now, seen from on high.

Kaoru took off the helmet display and muttered to himself.

The Loop became cancerous.

He felt he finally understood what that meant, and how it had happened.

9

His sense of time was benumbed. He had no idea how many hours he’d spent sitting in front of the computer with the helmet display on his head and the data gloves on his hands. Time in the Loop moved differently from real time, of course, but then there was the fact that he’d been sitting in a basement where the sun couldn’t penetrate. There was nothing to remind him of the passage of time.

When he stood up he was unsteady on his feet. He felt like he’d gone days without eating or drinking. His fatigue was extreme, his thirst was monstrous, and his hunger knew no bounds.

He looked at his watch to find that morning was drawing near. He climbed the stairs out of the basement. There was mineral water strapped to the luggage rack of his bike. His first priority had to be to rehydrate himself.

Dawn in the desert. The air was chill. Kaoru found the bottle of mineral water, cleared his throat, and drank half of it down in one swig. What this gained him was the realization that he was actually alive. Peering into the Loop world for so long, he’d begun to imagine that the outlines of the real world were becoming fuzzy. The land on which he lived no longer felt firm under his feet. Reality and virtuality disengaged and re-engaged with alarming shakiness.

Kaoru leaned back against the seat of the motorcycle and drained the rest of the bottle. It brought his thirst under control. His body reacted honestly and straightforwardly. With no need to worry about anybody else, he unzipped his fly and urinated where he stood. Replenishing his body’s water and then eliminating some had revived him somewhat. But it provided no proof that he truly existed in the flesh.

Still clutching the empty plastic bottle, he went back to the stairs leading to the basement and sat on a step halfway down. He’d just seen with his own eyes how the Loop had turned to cancer. But something about it didn’t sit right with him. It felt like fiction. The images he’d seen were distinguishable from reality, but still there was something faintly preposterous about the whole thing.

A videotape that killed its viewers in a week’s time? Such a thing would be simple enough to concoct in an electronic environment. It would also be easy to rig it so that anybody who copied the tape would be spared. It was just a matter of setting the right parameters to produce a programmed death that would be disabled if the right action was taken within a specified period of time.

The problem was, all of this was beyond what the individuals living inside the Loop could accomplish relying solely on their own intrinsic abilities. In other words, the tape could neither be made nor neutralized without help from the real world.

Most of the deaths he’d experienced within the Loop had come as a result of watching the tape.

He felt he needed to confirm that, though. In spite of the heaviness he felt he forced himself to get up and sit in front of the computer again.

If the act of watching the video had functioned, within the Loop, as a trigger for those deaths, then it was worth taking a fine-toothed comb to the moments when future victims were actually engaged in watching it.

Kaoru began his search. One by one he called up scenes of Loop beings watching the video. He decided to observe them objectively, without locking onto an individual.

First to appear was a set of four young people, boys and girls, eyes glued in mingled terror and derision to a TV screen in the living room of what looked to be a mountain retreat.

One of the young people was stifling his fear, turning his adversarial laughter on his companions to get them to fall in line. It couldn’t be more obvious that his high spirits were forced.

As the video ended, one of the females was deathly pale. “Eww,” she said, before falling silent. The male who was trying to keep his spirits up was evidently worried that her single outburst would cast a pall of terror over all of them. He spoke up.

“C’mon, it’s got to be a fake.”

He kicked at the screen.

“Pretty scary threat at the end, though,” said the other girl. Her expression betrayed no trace of fear. With a face like a mask, she puffed away on her cigarette as she rewound the tape. Then, as if it were the obvious course, while the other three watched she erased the bit at the end where the formula for avoiding death was written.

“Let’s take it back and scare our friends,” she said. But the other three held back. They didn’t want to have anything to do with the creepy thing after tonight, no matter how much the girl dared them. Why should they take it back with them, inviting who knew what curse along for the ride? They said as much to her.

At that moment the phone rang. The other three gasped in surprise, while the expressionless girl picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

Her reaction suggested that there was no answer on the other end of the line.

“Hello? Hello!” She sounded irritated, but a faint trembling could be detected in her voice. She swallowed once, then slammed the receiver onto the hook. She stood up and shouted, “What the hell’s going on?”

To Kaoru, the space around the telephone, which had rung for no reason, seemed somehow warped.

The next to watch the video was Asakawa, followed by Takayama. Since Kaoru had already watched them watching, he skipped ahead to the next instance.

This was Asakawa’s wife and daughter.

The tape had been left just lying around, and his wife had noticed it. She put it into the VCR, not even intending to watch it all the way through. Then it began.

She sat the child on a chair beside her and started doing her ironing. Then she glanced at the screen. Suddenly she couldn’t tear her gaze away. It was the same with her daughter: she sat there unmoving, facing the TV.

As soon as it was over, the telephone in the living room rang. The video still running, Mrs Asakawa ran to the living room and picked up the receiver.

“Asakawa residence.”

No response.

“Hello?”

For a few moments she stood there clutching the receiver. Just as before, the space around the telephone seemed to Kaoru to bend out of shape. Objects appeared ever-so-slightly doubled, straight lines wavered. The warping was barely noticeable unless you knew what to look for. Something was wrong here.

Kaoru figured that the next to watch the video would have been Mrs Asakawa’s parents. But he was wrong.

The next scene was set in Ryuji Takayama’s apartment. Checking the date and time, Kaoru realized he’d dropped in just before Takayama’s death.

Takayama had been watching the video when he died.

Kaoru backed the scene up a bit. This time he could watch closely, with no distracting fear of death.

Takayama was seated at his desk, concentrating on a piece of writing. His head drooped, and it looked like he might be dozing off, when suddenly his shoulders shook and he jumped up. His neck muscles were taut and his hair stood on end. Seen from behind, he actually looked a bit comical.

Kaoru debated about which way he should orient the display. Should he keep it focused on Takayama’s back, or should he synchronize it with Takayama’s perceptions?

After wandering around behind Takayama for a little while, he decided to lock onto him. Kaoru’s perceptions melded with Takayama’s.

Takayama was gasping for breath. He knew intuitively that something was happening to his body. He was actually able to remain fairly calm in the face of his impending death, but he was trying to wrap his mind around a lot of things in a hurry. Questions raced through his head.

Did I not solve the riddle of the video after all?

Then why is Asakawa still alive?

Takayama glanced over at the VCR in the corner. The tape was still inside. He crawled over to the VCR. His heart was pounding. Moving caused him immense pain.

Kaoru knew exactly what was happening to Takayama’s body. A sarcoma had developed in his coronary artery, and it was blocking the flow of blood. What he was experiencing were symptoms of the heart attack that was shortly to kill him.

Takayama removed the tape from the VCR and examined it from every angle.

Kaoru didn’t know what he was thinking.

Takayama grasped the tape in a trembling hand, looked at the top, looked at the bottom, read the title written on the spine.

Thinking Kaoru knew not what, he quickly ran his gaze over the ceiling, out the window, over the wall, to the bookshelf. He seemed to be searching for something.

Finally, Takayama’s gaze came to rest again on the videotape he was holding.

He was clearly excited—not from the pain in his chest, though. The trembling in his hands was from an excitement that had made him forget himself.

Takayama inserted the tape back into the deck and pressed play.

He’s about to die. Why’s he watching the tape?

The now-familiar images began to appear before Kaoru’s eyes.

Takayama looked at his watch, which he’d placed on the desk. It was 9:48.

He crawled toward his phone receiver, which lay on the floor. Kaoru could sense his desperation. Had he figured out a way to survive?

He picked up the receiver and hurriedly dialed. It rang four times before a woman’s voice came through the line.

“Hello?”

Kaoru knew the voice. This would be Mai Takano. Takayama would die while on the phone with her. She’d hear his final scream.

With the phone pressed to his ear, Takayama was still gazing at the television screen. Dice tumbling around in a lead container, flashing numbers, one through six.

Takayama shrieked. His voice traveled across the telephone wires to Takano’s ear.

“Hello? Hello?”

Worried about Takayama, Mai kept waiting for an answer.

But Takayama hung up of his own accord. He placed the receiver on its cradle.

At that moment, he caught his own reflection in the mirror. Kaoru had the momentary illusion that he was seeing his own face in the display. Takayama’s retinas were starting to lose focus, so Kaoru could no longer see the television screen clearly. His heart was racing, and the pressure on his blood vessels seemed to be stimulating random patches on his skin.

Takayama’s vision, which was rapidly clouding over, remained fixed on the area around the VCR. A mist or smoke was rising there, forming into a slowly revolving cylinder. Space was twisting, like a dishrag being wrung out.

Takayama pushed the phone in the direction of the warp in space, dialing another number. Kaoru looked down, trying to see the numbers he was pressing.

But there was no need to look at the phone. The numbers were there on the TV screen. On the dice …

… 33254136245163423425413624516343432541362451634133254136245163423425 …

All Takayama was doing was dialing the numbers that showed.

He’s on the verge of death. Maybe he’s losing the capacity for rational thought, was Kaoru’s conclusion.

Just then Kaoru’s satellite phone rang. He’d placed it beside the computer. It rang for several seconds before Kaoru noticed it—before he realized the sound was a real one, not one from Takayama’s apartment.

Kaoru picked up the phone and slid the helmet display to one side so he could bring the phone to his ear.

He heard breathing, so faint it sounded like it would cease any moment. Labored, rhythmic breathing, in synch with what he heard coming from the display.

Kaoru couldn’t believe his ears. What he heard next was a man’s voice, its quality altered by passing through an automatic translation device.

“Are you there? Hey! Are you listening? I want you to do something for me. Bring me to where you are. I want to go to your world. I won’t let you get away with this any longer.”

Kaoru was confused. In the display he was looking at a close-up of Takayama’s left hand, holding the telephone. It was definitely Takayama making the call. And it was Kaoru himself, in the here and now, who was on the receiving end of that call.

Of course he was confused. He felt like he was calling himself.

You can’t call reality from the Loop!

Kaoru couldn’t find his voice. And before he could rouse himself from his fugue, the line went dead. He could still hear Takayama’s voice, though.

Bring me to where you are.

It was several minutes before the meaning of those words sank in.

10

Kaoru went over his chain of reasoning again and again. But finally, he knew there was only one way to test his theory.

The first thing he’d need to do would be to contact Amano with instructions: analyze the DNA of the ring virus and compare it to the genetic sequence of the MHC virus. It was a simple task, since the MHC virus had been sequenced. Kaoru had a copy of the results of that analysis. Once the ring virus was analyzed, comparing them would be easy.

He expected that somehow the ring virus’s genetic sequence had been converted from binary code to the ATGC base code. A computer should be able to figure it out in a snap.

He decided to take a nap while awaiting a response from Amano. He took his pack from the back of the motorcycle, got out his sleeping bag, and spread it on the basement floor next to the desk. He rehydrated himself, took some sustenance into his belly, and then curled up in his sleeping bag like a shrimp.

In no time at all he was fast asleep. Unaffected by the stress of the day, Kaoru’s youthful resilience pulled his consciousness down into slumber.

Two hours later, the computer came to life. The display flickered and the speakers emitted a signal.

Kaoru slipped out of his bedroll and sat down at the desk. Only two hours of sleep, but his body felt perfectly restored. He could face Amano’s response with a clear head.

The display lit up with a comparison of the ring virus to the MHC virus. Commonalities between the two sequences were marked. The similarity was considerable—too much to be ignored. With this much overlap, they had to be considered essentially the same virus, or perhaps more exactly viruses that were originally the same but had mutated into somewhat varying strains. Kaoru felt safe in concluding that the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus had originated from the ring virus.

Having arrived at that confirmation, Kaoru stepped back from the computer with its display full of data.

Part of him thought it was an idiotic theory, even though it was his own. It militated against all common sense. The chain of reasoning was sound and allowed for no other interpretation, but still something nagged at him.

Be rational about this, he berated himself. Now was a time for flexibility, not for rigid adherence to fixed ideas.

Kaoru tried to put himself in Takayama’s shoes and think about what had happened to him as a natural course of events. He’d been face to face with death. There’s not a person alive who doesn’t want to escape dying. What he was dealing with was a primal desire.

A bold analogy was starting to take shape in Kaoru’s mind.

Takayama came to understand it intuitively, just before he died, didn’t he?

That was the jumping-off point. The “it” that Takayama had come to understand included all manner of things. That was the key point.

Takayama, an individual within the Loop, understood everything.

He’d proceed on that assumption.

Takayama would have been wondering: why am I on the point of death while Asakawa is still alive? What did he do unknowingly this week that I didn’t. At which point Takayama would have realized that copying the videotape was the key to evading death. Asakawa had made him a copy of the tape.

But that wasn’t the only thing Takayama came to understand. Now he had a theory: watching the videotape set one to die in a week, like one might set a VCR, while copying the videotape cleared the schedule. He wanted to advance his theory to the next level: he concentrated on a new question. What made the whole thing possible?

“The world is an imaginary space.”

It was a conclusion influenced by his customary mode of thinking—that was pretty much how he thought of the world he lived in to begin with.

If the world was imaginary, a virtual reality, then it was perfectly possible to set someone to die a nonsensical death, and just as possible to clear the setting. So who was doing the setting? Whatever higher principle created the virtual world.

God.

Maybe that word had flashed through Takayama’s brain; maybe it hadn’t. But to create the world and set it in motion was the work of a god. From the perspective of the inhabitants of the Loop, their creator was God Himself.

So Takayama, just before he died, had attempted to hold congress with God. To that end, he’d needed to find an interface between reality as he knew it and God’s world. He’d searched desperately for that interface.

Which was why his gaze had wandered about the room, over its ceiling, its walls—he’d been looking for the tiny thread that connected his world to God’s.

No doubt the videotape was the only possibility he could imagine. If putting the tape in a VCR and playing it had been enough to set him to die, then maybe that was the interface, or at least maybe it could lead him to it. He should be able to see a slight warping of space in the portal. If that wasn’t the interface, then he was too late.

Takayama had decided to bet everything on the videotape.

He pressed play, started screening the images. His heart quavered—he wasn’t sure if he had enough time to escape death even if he had figured it out. He called Takano. But all the while his eyes were glued to the screen. The television was showing him dice rolling around in a lead container. Numbers between one and six kept presenting themselves to his view.

Takayama emitted a cry, but it wasn’t his death scream. He’d realized that the dice were repeating the same numbers.

… 33254136245163423425413624516343 432541362451634133254136245163423425 …

If he took out the numbers 133, 234, and 343, he realized, the dice were persistently repeating a string of thirteen digits: 2541362451634. Takayama, with his knowledge of genetic sequencing, had realized that those three numbers were stop codes.

He hung up on Takano and immediately started dialing the digits.

The call connected, the circuit was completed. It was possible to access reality from within the Loop.

As soon as he was sure he’d accessed the higher concept, Takayama blurted out his wish.

Bring me to your world.

It was a bold request, but one any scientist would have made. Not to escape death so much as to gain something greater. To move from within the world into the great outside from which it was created—to understand the workings of the universe.

That was Kaoru’s own dream from of old.

Takayama’s dream would come true if he was able to move from the Loop into Kaoru’s world. He’d learn everything about the principles on which the Loop ran. He’d learn what lay beyond what was to the Loop beings the edge of the universe. He’d learn what time and space were like before the creation of the universe. He’d learn, in short, the answers to all questions.

Bring me to your world.

At first glance it might seem like a rather childish desire, but Kaoru could well understand it. In fact, he shared it. If there was a God who had designed the world, he’d love to go to His world and ask Him personally about a few things.

Now, then. In the Loop world, Takayama had died immediately after the phone call. It had been observed on the monitor. One of the Loop’s operators must have heard Takayama’s request much as Kaoru had.

What had the hearer done, then? Had he or she granted Takayama’s wish? Takayama’s powers of intuition were amazing, to have not only figured out the riddle of the video but to have realized that his reality was only virtual. Maybe someone had taken an interest in those powers.

Kaoru began ransacking his medical knowledge for a way to allow Takayama to be reborn into the real world.

It would be impossible to recreate him based merely on an analysis of the molecular information that made up his body in the Loop. But since his genetic information was contained in the program’s memory, it might be possible to use that to give him birth in the real world.

It was possible to manufacture sets of up to two thousand megabases. The genome synthesizers that allowed reproduction of their chromatin structures had been developed at the beginning of the century. This had been followed shortly by a technique known as GFAM (genome fragment alignment method), which enabled these fragments to be connected. As a result, it was possible to reconstruct all of a human being’s chromosomes.

The first step would be to prepare a fertilized human egg. Then they’d have to remove its nucleus and replace it with chromosomes they’d fabricated based on Takayama’s genetic information. They’d replace the egg in its host mother. Nine months later, Ryuji Takayama would be born into the world. Of course it would be as an infant. But genetically, that child would be Takayama.

This could have been done. But then it would have involved a miscalculation. If someone had indeed recreated Takayama, then he or she had forgotten one key thing along the way.

Takayama carried the ring virus. When the genome synthesizer recreated his molecules, the virus would have been passed on, too. It was the only thing that could account for the resemblance between the ring virus and the MHC virus.

Looked at from another angle, that resemblance was itself evidence that Ryuji Takayama had been reborn into the real world. Yes, that was the most persuasive interpretation: in the process of rebirthing him, someone had loosed the ring virus in a subtly altered form.

So who summoned Takayama forth?

That he didn’t know. Nor did he know what whoever had done it had hoped to accomplish by it. What was to be gained by bringing a virtual being to life in the real world?

Kaoru had played video games as a child. Not that he’d been hooked—he’d tended to tire of them rather quickly, as a matter of fact. He remembered the appearance of the princes and princesses in the games, rendered in supposedly 3-D computer graphics, with their somewhat clumsy planes. They were unmistakably different from real people, but nonetheless there had been a few female characters he’d considered beautiful. This was like bringing one of them to life. And unleashing whatever computer virus she carried into the world as a real, biological virus.

It was absurd, when he thought about it that way. But the Loop was the most sophisticated computer simulation the world had ever seen: given that, he couldn’t rule it out. On the level of theory, at least, it was quite possible.

So where’s Takayama now, and what is he doing?

He felt he was closing in on the truth now. He remembered Kenneth Rothman’s last communiqué. I’ve figured out the source of the MHC virus. Takayama holds the key.

Kaoru was starting to believe it himself now.

11

As he climbed the stairs to the surface, Kaoru felt he’d spent years in front of that computer. The sun was directly overhead, its rays searing the earth. In terms of space and light, there was all the difference in the world between the basement and here.

He felt like his body had changed, perhaps because he’d lived so many more lives. But in reality he’d only spent forty-two hours at the computer. What he’d experienced was time concentrated.

The motorcycle’s gas tank was coated with fine sand blown by the wind that whipped down the ravine and through the spaces between the abandoned houses. Dust was everywhere—the fact that the layer on the tank was still relatively thin showed how little time he’d actually spent in the basement.

Kaoru straddled the bike and started the engine.

He had a clear image of where he needed to go now. He’d follow the gorge due west, then pass over a hill with a spring, and then cross two tall peaks.

Kaoru knew that at the moment it was important for him to rely on a greater power and do as he was directed. Clearly, someone or something was intervening.

When had it started, this intervention? Maybe he’d known it would turn out like this for ten years, ever since the family had gotten the idea for this trip. Maybe all he was doing now was carrying out a long-prepared plan.

Let’s go.

He grabbed the handlebars, made a U-turn, and went back the way he had come.

His plan was to head back to the main road and check into a motel where he could rest and replenish his gas and supplies. Then he’d start his traversing of the desert, on his road that wasn’t a road.

Two days after leaving Wayne’s Rock, Kaoru finally turned off the highway into the desert. He rode ten miles over flat country until a middling-sized mountain appeared, then he rode up its side.

The higher he went the stronger he felt the hush. The stream narrowed, and he could hear the sighing of the trees. There were as yet no traces of the MHC virus to be seen here. The vegetation was still healthy, the sight of it refreshing.

He could feel the plants’ exhalations gently on his skin. He pressed on, higher, deeper into the stillness.

He’d never expected to find this much greenery in the middle of the desert.

When the valley had come into view, he’d been unable to accurately guess at its scale. But now that he’d ridden right up to it, it was no mere stand of trees, but a true forest, all contained within a huge ravine.

The trees only grew on the inner slopes of the declivity; the rest of the landscape was an unrelieved brown wasteland. Hidden in a valley this deep, he doubted the forest would be visible even from the air.

Jagged boulders pierced the sky and trees filled the spaces between them. Even with an off-road bike, he could ride no farther. The rocky outcroppings came together to shelter a creek which shrank the farther up along its flow he went. He’d have to dismount here.

He lay the bike down gently in the brush amidst some trees. He took what he needed from the back of the bike and slung his pack over his shoulders. He exchanged his riding boots for sneakers and then looked around, trying to memorize the spot so he could find it again.

He’d have to rely on his legs to carry him the rest of the way.

From time to time he would stop and gaze up at the vast gorge that the little stream had carved into the land. That stream alone marked his road now. How long had it taken to make this canyon, thousands of yards deep? Contemplating the time and energy required made him dizzy.

Endless years and ceaseless repetition. The high-rise in which Kaoru made his home in Tokyo would easily fit into this valley. It had taken three years to build. But the valley—it’d taken hundreds of millions of years, and the water was still working on it, bit by bit.

The sun was sinking in the west now. The rays that found their way into the valley were climbing up its side, licking the sides of the valley as if it were some huge organism.

He paused in his leaping from rock to rock to plunge both hands into the stream for a drink. The water was cold. He could feel its chill spreading from his esophagus to his stomach. It was a boon to have the stream alongside: he wouldn’t suffer thirst. He scooped up more water, then sat down on a rock for a breather.

A hushed air hung over the secluded land. He stumbled across a memory. He’d once before breathed air that was otherworldly like this. It put him in mind not of the deep recesses of Mother Nature, but of a place with a much higher concentration of civilization. An intensive care unit.

His father went into the ICU every time he had to have more cancer removed. In that sealed-off space, where the only sound was the rhythm of the respirator, the patients’ flesh became so enveloped in stillness that it was hard to tell if they were alive or dead. Every time he visited his father there, Kaoru came away with the impression that it was only the machines that were really alive in that place—the people had sunk to a level below the inorganic.

He got chills as he remembered the tubes sprouting from his father’s face and head, the pain he must have been in—the greater the number of tubes the more they seemed to speak of the ebbing of his father’s life. There was something in the silence of this valley that reminded him of the ICU.

I wonder how Dad’s doing.

Now that his thoughts had arrived at memories of his father’s condition, he felt he couldn’t rest any longer. His father just had to hold out until Kaoru returned—otherwise, he would have come all the way here for nothing.

He worried about his mother, too. Was she still obsessed with Native American legends, praying for a miracle to save his father? Kaoru wished she could deal with things a little more realistically.

And what about Reiko?

He felt his chest tighten at the thought of her. He took the two photos of her from his breast pocket. One had been taken in the cafeteria at the hospital. In the photo, Kaoru was holding his head up high, while Reiko rested her head on his shoulder. Ryoji had taken the picture. What had gone through his mind as he’d captured this image? His mother’s affection for Kaoru was revealed in her pose. She had more of a womanly aura in this photo than a motherly one. Ryoji couldn’t have enjoyed seeing her like this. What he saw through the viewfinder had to have bothered him.

Every time Kaoru thought about Reiko he took out this photo and looked at it, but the sad memories of Ryoji it brought back were always stronger than any recollections of Reiko that it held.

He looked at the second photo. In it, Reiko was sitting alone on the floor of what was probably her living room at home. She sat casually, legs bent to one side, hands behind her, on a thick carpet. Her hairstyle was different. The photo was probably two or three years old, but as to whether it had been taken before or after the onset of Ryoji’s illness there was no clue.

Not long after their relationship had turned physical, Kaoru had asked Reiko for a photo from her younger days. It had been a bad choice of words. “Are you trying to say I’m old?” she’d scowled, poking him in the ribs. But the next day she’d brought him several photographs.

One had been taken at a party at her home. She was surrounded by friends, and she was holding a glass. Her face was flushed from drinking.

In another she was posing with one hand raised and the other on her hip. In another she was wearing an elegant orange kimono and standing nonchalantly beside a chrysanthemum doll.

In yet another, she was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. It was a perfect shot, catching her just as she turned around in response to someone calling her from behind.

Kaoru imagined that Ryoji had taken this one. He’d sneaked up behind her, called “Mom!” and then clicked the shutter. The reaction on her face was unfeigned—surprise mingled with laughter to create a most unusual expression. A valuable photo, capturing a side she usually didn’t show.

Kaoru was particularly fond of that picture, but he’d decided to leave it behind when he departed for the desert. He’d elected to take only two photos of her, the one of the two of them together and the one of her sitting on the floor. He kept them safe in his pocket.

In that second photo she was wearing a knit wool one-piece dress. From the waist up, it looked like a sweater; in fact, it was less a proper dress than a really long sweater. The U-shaped neck line was modest to a fault, providing not the slightest glimpse of the swelling of her bosom. Not that her breasts were that large to begin with. They were just big enough to fit in the palms of Kaoru’s hands. Their perfect volume and firmness fascinated him, though.

The dress material didn’t accent the lines of her waist, either. Instead, his gaze was drawn to her legs.

Because of the way she was sitting, the hem of the dress had hiked up to just above her knees. She was leaning back, knees raised slightly off the carpet. In the space between them there was a darkness that extended far back. Time after time, Kaoru had buried his face in that soft valley.

Day after day they’d waited for Ryoji to be taken away for his tests. Then in the brilliant light of day Kaoru would lay Reiko down on the bed, hike up her skirt, pull down her panties, and examine her sex organ. It was no more than one organ of the many that made up her body, but he found it inexplicably fascinating. His love for her had endowed it with inestimable value.

When he’d raise his head from between her legs he could see the almost too-bright light pouring in between the open curtains. The full rays of the sun made him feel that he was doing something terribly immoral. But this was a temptation he could not resist. He’d lower his face again, avoiding the sunlight, praying that this moment would last forever as he received her fluids with his tongue.

And now, as a result of moments like those, she had conceived his child.

Kaoru glanced at her slender waist in the photograph.

I wonder how big it is now.

He could guess: the embryo was probably about three quarters of an inch long now, looking something like a seahorse. At the moment, his affection for this new being that inherited his genes was not as strong as his affection for Reiko, who was carrying it.

But he had no more time to lounge on the rocks. All the faces passing through his mind were now urging him to hurry. Kaoru stood up and set off for the peak.

12

The sun was going down behind the ridge. Kaoru quickened his pace. He’d have to find a likely place to camp before it got completely dark.

He came to a flat spot surrounded on three sides by huge rocks. Looking around, he decided it wouldn’t be a bad place to spend the night.

He’d been here before. As an Indian, as the man whose point of view he’d assumed via the computer in the ruins of Wayne’s Rock. The tribe had passed through a place that looked exactly like this.

The Native American legend his mother had shown him had said to follow the warrior’s guidance. No warrior would be appearing to him in reality, but the place to which he would have guided Kaoru had he appeared was already stored in Kaoru’s memory. All he had to do was follow the strands of memory, comparing them one by one with reality, and he’d find his route.

There was no longer any doubt. The place would appear to him somewhere up ahead. Tonight, though, he must have rest. Kaoru unshouldered his pack and rested his legs.

Every step on the road thus far had further awakened Kaoru’s senses. With no rhyme or reason, sensation after sensation had flooded his consciousness. He felt terror, jealousy, exultation, with no grounds for feeling them—they just came over him, stimulating his senses. He suspected that if he persisted in tracing their source back into the past, he’d eventually arrive at the moment of his own birth.

He spread his mat out on a flat rock and then curled up in his sleeping bag. It wasn’t all that cold yet, but he knew that as the night wore on the temperature in the desert would plummet. In his bedroll he nibbled on some bread and sipped at some whiskey.

Suddenly he sat up and looked around. He had felt, or imagined he’d felt, something’s breath on the back of his neck.

He could feel the chill of the stone through the mat and sleeping bag. The breathing was regular, rhythmic, like the working of a respirator, or the breathing of a predator eying its prey, trying to calm itself, body and spirit.

From the same direction, Kaoru could feel something gazing at him. He could plainly sense the will behind it. The gaze bored into the base of his skull, quickening his pulse.

He couldn’t bear it any longer. He looked behind him. There he saw, maybe ten yards away in the shadow of a tree, a naked man on one knee training a bow and arrow on him. The man’s skin was dark, so dark that he could have blended in with the night, but somehow Kaoru was able to make him out.

The man’s long hair was tied back simply; he wore no feathers or other headdress. He looked to be of medium height and build, and his muscles hardly bulged, but he held the bow with the air of an expert.

Kaoru tried to move, and found that he couldn’t. It was as though he was in one of those half-waking states where the mind is aware but the body is immobile. All he could do was stare at the arrow.

The man’s right thumb was bent where he was pulling taut the bowstring. He was aiming at Kaoru’s head. The arrowhead was of gleaming obsidian. Kaoru knew at a glance that this was no rubber toy.

The man’s face was expressionless. Kaoru could detect there no hatred, but no charity either. No rapture. Only the stare of a hunter determined to faithfully perform his allotted part.

Kaoru stared dumbfounded at the slowly receding arrowhead. He felt no fear. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew this was not real.

But when he could see that the energy accumulating in the bow had reached a certain peak, suddenly the image of himself transformed into a beast burst into Kaoru’s head. Reflexively he tried to duck. But the arrow had already been released. Its silently revolving tip grew to dominate Kaoru’s field of vision. Kaoru leaned forward, as if throwing himself at the arrow, and then consciousness receded.

He was only out for a moment. When he awoke, he just lay there for a while, staring at the trunk of a tree that towered over him. He thought he’d fallen forward, but now, somehow, he was lying on his back. He brought his hand up to his right eye, the one the arrow should have pierced. It was unharmed. He stood up and looked around for the man with the bow. Gone. He’d disappeared without a trace.

Kaoru realized he must have been hallucinating. Maybe it was because of the peculiar atmosphere of the valley—maybe a memory imprinted on his brain long ago had been resurrected. The brown-skinned man had vanished, leaving the strong sensation of death in Kaoru’s mind. He felt as if he’d absorbed death directly, like some kind of radiation.

Phantom it may have been, but the image of the revolving arrow digging into his eye, leading him into darkness, was something he couldn’t chase away. It was a dry run for the death that was dogging his footsteps. More than the pain, more than anything, he found that it was the emptiness of death that filled him with bottomless horror.

Every time he experienced death he found a renewed appreciation for the fullness of life. Life and death brushed up against one another, intermixed. For the first time, Kaoru had a premonition of rebirth.

His breathing gradually came under control. As he regained his calm, he lay down again on the earth and looked up at the sky, head pillowed on his hands. Through a gap in one rim of the valley the full moon had appeared. Men had stood on the moon once, decades ago. As a result, the actual existence of the moon was something that was now within the realm of human knowledge. Most likely the sun, too, was really there, at the center of the solar system.

But the Loop’s sun and moon were real to its denizens, too, while Kaoru and others knew that they weren’t, not in a spatial sense. Beings in the Loop were merely programmed to perceive time and space.

This train of thought reminded Kaoru of something his father had repeated to him once, a remark of one of the astronauts who’d landed on the moon.

It was just like in the simulation, the man had said when pressed for a comment.

That had stuck in Kaoru’s memory. Before going to the moon, of course, the astronauts had been through any number of detailed simulations of the moon’s gravity and other physical conditions, many of which had taken place in the deserts of America. Only after they’d experienced the moon walk virtually a number of times did they experience it as reality. What this astronaut was saying was that the reality was exactly like the virtual reality. No matter how fine the calculations, though, there should have been some differences.

Kaoru remembered the Bible’s words about God creating the world in His own image. What exactly did it mean that the Loop had ended up looking just like the real world? In the Loop’s primeval state life had not arisen naturally. Then the researchers had introduced RNA life forms. And these had become the seeds of all life in the Loop—they’d developed into a tree of life just like the real world’s. Given that the Loop and the real world shared the same physics, it wasn’t, perhaps, all that surprising that life should have taken the same form. But, to take a hint from the astronaut, shouldn’t there have been at least a few differences?

Is this an epiphany?

He couldn’t shake the thought that the real world itself was only a virtual world. Logically, the idea couldn’t be disproved.

A god. A higher principle. There was nothing to stop Kaoru from accepting life as the creation of such a being. If this was simply a virtual world, then it was after all possible for the Holy Mother, as a virgin, to give birth to the son of God. Or for the son of God, having once died, to rise from the dead in a week’s time …

With humanity on the brink of extinction, now would be a good time for God to come. If things went on like this, the whole world would turn cancerous. God had to be watching somewhere, invisibly.

Kaoru stared unseeing at the starry sky, pondering the advent of God.

13

He’d used up half of his food supply, but he’d made his way out of the deep ravine and onto the ridge. He was about to head northward, toward the mountaintop.

The scenery was locked away in his memory. Once in a while he would hallucinate seeing the tribesman, and that would call forth recollections, letting him know which way he should go. Kaoru emptied his mind and went where he was led.

Sometimes this tribal guide would appear standing on a rock ahead of him. He’d stare at Kaoru until he’d fully caught Kaoru’s attention, then wave to him before disappearing up ahead. He never drew his bow anymore. His gesture was easy enough to understand: Follow me.

Sometimes Kaoru would see things drawn on the brown arcing rock faces deep in cul-de-sac ravines, things that filled him with foreboding. He imagined they’d been drawn ages ago by the Native Americans who had settled here, animals and human faces expressed with varying degrees of abstraction. Geometric patterns that, depending on how you looked at them, resembled the double-helix structure of DNA. Kaoru realized he was nearing his destination.

He pictured the elders living in a huge cave, preserving a more natural way of life. He’d come to imagine the place he was heading to as an unexplored region, veiled in mystery. There the elders lived as naturally as plants, dressed in hempen robes. Their mission was to impart to seekers the knowledge they’d stored up over the course of thousands of years …

But Kaoru’s expectations were betrayed. He walked for a day and a night without finding any ancient cave filled with relics.

It was getting to be time to wonder about his food supply, whether it would run out and with it his strength. Now was the time to turn back if he was going to. He still had a little food left, and if he could just make it back to where he’d left the motorcycle, he should be alright. The bike had nearly a full tank of gas, and the nearest town was about twenty miles, an easy ride. Maybe he ought to go back there and replenish his supplies.

He’d have to do what the situation demanded, he told himself, in an effort to calm his thoughts. He couldn’t let himself be trapped in a blind alley.

He’d been mentally referring to the beings that lurked here as “the Ancients”. The question was how to meet the Ancients and learn from them how the world worked. His father’s life, his mother’s life, Reiko’s life depended on it.

Somewhere along the line, Kaoru had started to see the Ancients as some kind of gods. But he told himself that he needed to consider the opposite possibility, too. What guarantee was there that they bore good will toward men?

As if to second that notion by allowing him a glimpse of malevolence, clouds raced across the sky. Since coming to the desert, he hadn’t paid much attention to the sky. Day after day of clear, bright weather had lulled him.

From where he stood on the ridge he had a three hundred and sixty degree view of the landscape—he felt he could see to the ends of the earth. Now in an instant his vision was cut off by roiling clouds, and the sky was a thick ashen color.

The clouds were moving in layers, hanging low in the infinite sky, until they seemed like they’d come crashing down on his head. The pressure was suffocating.

Expecting rain at any minute, Kaoru began searching for a particular spot on the ridge. The trees up here were short and their foliage sparse—he knew he’d find no shelter under their limbs. He was looking for something like a crevice between boulders. He’d seen several small openings while following the river upstream, but they were too far down the mountainside. Up here on the ridge near the peak, it wouldn’t be so easy to find a suitable cave, he was beginning to fear.

A drop of rain hit him on the cheek. He tensed his body, ready to dash for shelter, but there was none to be found, only rubble. A few more drops spattered on his head. Then the rain let loose with an earth-shaking roar of thunder. The scene was so changed that its previous appearance seemed to have been an illusion. At first the parched ground drank up the rain, but soon it could absorb no more, and rivulets of water began to appear.

Kaoru had no option but to huddle where he stood. There was no escaping nature’s wrath. For the first time in his life, he was afraid of the rain.

He had plastic bags in his rucksack, but only a few, and of what use would they be anyway? He had no tent, nothing to keep himself dry with. And even if he had brought a tent, it wouldn’t have done him any good. He was soaked to the skin in a flash.

His sneakers were waterlogged and heavy. Each step squeezed out a little flow of water. Waterfalls ran down his back and belly under his heavy jean jacket. He couldn’t see where he was walking anymore, and he began to be afraid he’d stumble into one of the torrents that had appeared from nowhere. All he could do was find slightly higher ground, firm footing, and crouch there.

His last bread was in his rucksack, wrapped in plastic, but he knew he hadn’t wrapped it very well. It was bound to get wet and dissolve. But he couldn’t eat it in this downpour. He was forced to stand there helpless while his food supply was destroyed. Then again, he thought, at least he’d have enough water. He opened his mouth wide to take in as much of it as possible.

But the rain was falling too mercilessly: it hurt to stand there with his face exposed to it like that. He had to squat on his heels again.

Looking down, however, exposed the back of his neck to pain. He couldn’t leave any skin uncovered, it seemed. He moved his pack so it covered his neck, then hugged his knees and waited for the rain to pass. He had the impression that rainstorms in the desert never lasted very long.

But this one did. The raindrops did get smaller and smaller until they seemed to turn to mist, but then, instead of stopping, they returned to their former size and force, pelting the ground. It was as if the storm was mocking him.

His fear grew. The rain had robbed his body of all warmth, and he was chilled through and through. On top of that, it was getting late. Darkness, cold, and hunger. He thought of this rain continuing all night, and it nearly paralyzed him.

The temperature of the air was falling, too. The dimness of evening turned into pitch blackness, and the rain sounded even louder. He couldn’t see, but he could feel someone close at hand, striking him on the back and the head. He was surrounded by people kicking and hitting him. He felt like he’d been cornered by a lynch mob.

But even worse misfortune awaited him. Suddenly muddy water was flowing around his feet, and when he jumped in surprise, he dropped his pack. He lost his footing, twisted and fell, and as he did so he lost his sense of direction. Based on recalled sounds, he groped around for his pack, but to no avail. He touched the ground with both hands, feeling out a circle around where he lay on his back, but found nothing. It could be just a little ways away, or it could have been carried off by the current. It was all the same to him: the pack was gone.

Kaoru stayed still in the midst of the darkness, unable to move freely. He’d have to rely on his sense of touch and his hearing now. If the water eddying around his feet rose to cover his ankles, he decided, he’d have to move, but to where? He’d have to hear and feel his way to where the water wasn’t as deep.

He was a worm, squirming in the mud. He’d seen worms that had crawled up out of cracks in the asphalt after days of heavy rain, only to be caught and dried up by the burning sun. Why did worms crawl out of the ground after the rain anyway? One theory was that they were trying to escape the carbonic acid gas dissolved in rainwater; Kaoru didn’t know if this was right or not. Poor creatures—they finally crawl out of the dirt and get out of the rainwater, only to be dried up by ultraviolet light. Was it the light that drew them, despite their weakness to it?

Kaoru would settle for even the tiniest bit of light at the moment. He’d been in utter darkness for hours now. How many hours, he didn’t know, as he’d lost all sense of time. He couldn’t even see the hands on his watch.

Without being sure of the lay of the land around him, he couldn’t walk anywhere. On the way up he’d seen numerous hundred-yard drops. If he wandered off now he might step right into a yawning crevice.

He thought he heard the sound of falling rock somewhere close by. He stiffened with fear. Several boulders rolled by, shooting pebbles when they hit them—he could feel the air move with their passage. The rain must have softened the ground enough to start a landslide. But then the rumbling abruptly stopped, right in front of him. There could be only one explanation: there must be a ravine directly in front of him. As the falling rocks pitched into empty space, they ceased making any sound. He was sure of it. He was on the edge of a gaping maw.

He backed up, sliding along the ground on his back. He had to put some distance between himself and this pit whose depth he couldn’t know. It was an instinctive thing. His feet slipped once, and he slid back down a couple of feet, and even that was enough to set the muscles of his buttocks trembling.

He was taking the rain full in the face now, and by and by he was becoming oblivious to the drops pounding his cheeks. No doubt tears were coursing down his face, too, but the Kaoru that wept seemed like somebody else.

Illusions crowded in on him with frightening force. He saw himself clinging to a rocky outcropping amidst towering waves, waist washed by the sea, and then again he saw himself being sucked into a bottomless swamp, sinking deeper into the ground the more he squirmed.

And then every time he managed to shake off the delusions, to recover his grip on reality, he was left with an overpowering consciousness of death. His body was nearly frozen, and his senses were about to give out.

I’m going to die from rain.

He’d never, not once in his life, worried about rain. It had simply never occurred to him that it could kill him. It was comical, really. Here the whole world was about to die of cancer, and meanwhile he was going to die of a little rain.

He realized it had been quite some time since he’d been rained on enough to get wet. He remembered a late afternoon shower about a month ago: he’d stood by the window on the top floor of the hospital and watched it. One moment the clouds beyond the thick pane of glass were changing color, and the next moment the streets below were wet. That pane was all that separated him from the outside, but it looked at that moment like another world.

Reiko had been with him. Shoulder to shoulder they’d stood in the air-conditioned hallway; Kaoru had been glad for the shower, as it hadn’t rained for a while. He’d looked on it as a blessing then. Ryoji was still alive, and new life had just begun in Reiko’s womb.

Rain was rain, but what had once seemed like heaven now felt like hell.

He tried to drive away negative thoughts with memories of Reiko’s face. He thought of his father and his mother; He tried to muster some courage. But he was too weakened. The moment he let his guard down, the shadow of death crept back over him.

All he had to do was go to sleep and it would all be over. The cold would take care of him, the darkness would carry him off.

Kaoru strove to retain his grip on consciousness.

He was fading fitfully in and out now. When he came to, he sometimes didn’t know where he was. If he stayed out for longer, death would take him.

As he shivered from the cold, he longed for the dawn. Once the sun came up, the temperature was bound to rise. Then, if nothing else, he’d be delivered from this fearsome darkness.

As it was, the unrelieved blackness was a breeding-ground for delusions. He thought he sensed somebody nearby. Not the familiar Indian, but somebody whose scent was far stronger as it wafted past his nose. Voices of indeterminate gender whispered back and forth. There had to be at least two of them, shadows in communication.

“Is somebody out there?” Kaoru yelled as loud as he could, loud enough to be heard over the rain, loud enough to chase away evil spirits.

But the shadows didn’t recede. Instead they increased—there were three of them now, four, five. They surrounded him, muttering. Kaoru couldn’t make out what they were saying, couldn’t even identify what language they were speaking. They sounded like they might be sympathizing with him, but then he thought he caught a mocking undercurrent. Maybe they were laughing at him after all.

At length, the rain began to lessen and the darkness started giving way. He could gradually make out his surroundings. Everything was gray as of yet—that distant peak that poked up like some sort of religious monument should be brownish-red, but instead it was just a black shape. A monochrome world was better than an invisible one though.

Watching the scenery around him change for the better should have given Kaoru courage. The dawn had come. The rain was stopping. But he was feverish now, his mind dazed, and he was still chilled and exhausted. Budding doctor though he was, Kaoru had trouble explaining his condition.

He hoped he’d simply caught a cold, but he could feel a tortuous rasping in his lungs. He’d never experienced these symptoms with a common cold. Pneumonia? He put his hand to his forehead, his chest, under his arm, trying to gauge his temperature. He seemed to be running a considerable fever. He couldn’t make himself move.

The rain had stopped and morning had come, but he was still curled up in the mud. He wiggled like a shrimp, trying to get to someplace out of the standing water.

What he wanted now was sunlight. He wanted to bask in it, to dry his body and his clothing. His waterlogged clothes were warm now, but from his fever, and he couldn’t stand the feel of them.

He took them off and wrung them out. Even that was a hard task in his present state of weakness. When the wind hit his bare skin, he shivered so much that he almost fell over. Still, he managed to get rid of enough water that he felt lighter.

He crawled into a space between the rocks to get out of the wind whipping up the ravine. There he rested for a while. He’d have to husband his strength by staying still until the temperature rose.

As he lay there among the rocks, fighting his fever, the world around him continued to transform. Colors appeared, and distant objects became clearer.

He watched it all, waiting for the clouds to part.

Hours passed. As the temperature climbed, Kaoru was able to sleep for short periods of time. Every time he opened his eyes he gazed vacantly at the movements of the clouds. Still the sun hadn’t broken through.

He awoke to a roar. Reminded of his sufferings of the previous night, he sat bolt upright in terror.

He saw something hovering in the sky. Right behind it, the sun was finally emerging. The clouds split apart and rays of sunlight shone on the floating object. Kaoru squinted against the brightness, staring at the heavens beyond the gleaming black thing.

This thing that had appeared was not what Kaoru had imagined. He’d expected to find ruins that bespoke the very beginnings of time, a group of people shrouded in mystery. Instead, what hovered there in the sky backlit by the sun was the product of the most cutting-edge modern science: a jet helicopter. And, just like the Indian’s bow had been, the antenna projecting in front of it was aimed straight at Kaoru.

The wind from its rotors buffeted him. Appearing like this, it was almost as if it had been waiting for him to arrive. For a time the helicopter stayed in one spot in the middle of the air, bombarding his ears with its noise. Then it turned, showing him its underbelly, and climbed.

Its rotors rent the clouds, enlarging the hole through which the sun shone. The light that came through now looked to Kaoru like a halo.

PART FOUR

The Space Underground

1

The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the whitish ceiling. Kaoru next turned his gaze on all four walls in succession, then on anything else that came within his field of vision.

The room was perfectly sealed off, with no windows. There was a rectangular grating in one corner of the ceiling, most likely a vent for the climate control system. That had to be what kept the room at such a steady, comfortable temperature.

There were two cracks in the walls, each tracing the shape of a rectangle. Doors, of course, but since they were exactly the same color as the walls he wouldn’t have noticed them had it not been for the cracks. One had a sturdy-looking doorknob. He guessed this door connected to a hallway. The other door only had a little handle, and looked like it couldn’t be locked from either side; probably it led to a bathroom or something.

The walls were covered not with wallpaper but with leather. At first he’d thought they were white, but as his eyes got used to what they were seeing he realized the walls were actually a light beige.

Over the course of these observations, Kaoru was able to confirm that his consciousness was in good working order. He was still alive, or so it seemed.

Still lying on his back, he stopped looking at things for a while, instead concentrating on each part of his body in turn. He commanded his chest to move, then his belly, his arms, his legs, and finally his fingers and toes. He was relieved to note that he could feel them all move.

It was easy enough to explain to himself the situation in which he’d been placed. He was in a little room with leather-covered walls, lying on a bed. It was that simple. Kaoru was the only person in the room.

Naturally, he was put in mind of hospital rooms, which made it even harder to figure out where he was.

He’d traveled to America alone and ridden a motorcycle to a point in the desert—or had he? Had he done all that in reality, or in a dream? He wasn’t sure he could say. At the moment it would have been easier for him to believe he was in his father’s hospital room, and that the whole thing had been a dream.

He’d been walking along the ridge in search of the cavern containing the long-lived ones, along the way glimpsing rock-paintings done by ancient Indians on the walls of little caves, illustrations that created an irresistible sense of mystery and perhaps foreshadowed the underground space that he believed was soon to manifest itself to him. But then had come the rainstorm, casting him into the depths of terror, pummeling him half to death.

His head still echoed with the sound he’d heard at dawn, just before the sun came out. That thunderous roar, that strangely out-of-place object hovering in space. An ultramodern jet helicopter painted gunmetal black. It seemed to him now that he’d lost consciousness just as it had flown up and away, showing him its underside.

He could string together the recollections, alright, but there was no way of verifying them. Reality and virtuality had become so confused that he didn’t trust his memories.

The only way to confirm things would be to wait for the testimony of a third party. But he’d been awake for an hour now, and he’d been left alone the whole time.

Maybe I’d better get up and leave the room on my own … Kaoru sat up slowly. He felt no pain, but the difficulty with which he managed to raise himself told him that his body was still exhausted. He sat there on the bed trying to bring his breathing under control—he felt a rasp in the back of his throat. Sitting up was one thing. Moving around was another thing altogether.

He looked down to find a pair of sandals waiting for him beside the bed. They didn’t belong to him. Somebody had put them there. Huge sandals. They’d dwarf his feet.

In the end it seemed that those sandals were urging him into action. He summoned all his willpower and lowered his feet over the side of the bed and into the sandals. They felt just as oversized as they looked, and they were heavy as well.

He tried walking across the room in them. He made for the room’s single point of interface with the outside: the door.

But his feet were tired, and the footgear was bulky and heavy. His feet dragged. The hem of his white gown parted and he saw his thighs. He suddenly realized that he was wearing no underwear beneath the gown. He was buck naked except for this flimsy white gown he’d been dressed in.

The door was right in front of him now. He had no idea where he’d go once he opened it; he just wanted to know where he was. That was his only motive. What kind of place was this? He wanted to see what was outside. And if there was somebody, anybody, there, he wanted to hear what they had to say.

Kaoru placed a hand on the doorknob. Up until that moment it hadn’t occurred to him that the door might be locked, but as he touched the knob, his intuition told him that it was. He turned the knob, pushed and pulled, but the door wouldn’t budge.

So now Kaoru had achieved a deeper understanding of the situation into which he’d been placed. He’d been confined.

Even standing up was tough. He felt he’d better give up on going out and go back to bed instead. He released his hold on the doorknob and turned around.

At that moment, though, he sensed somebody on the other side of the door. Kaoru froze in place and listened to the click as the door unlocked.

He took a couple of steps backward and waited for it to open. He’d been denied any information about the person or thing about to appear. The person could walk through that door and introduce himself as a Martian and Kaoru wouldn’t have been surprised.

The door opened quietly. He’d been expecting to see someone standing there. Instead, he saw someone sitting there: an old man in a wheelchair, staring straight ahead.

“I see you’re awake,” the man said in English. Kaoru nodded reflexively.

“You’re Kaoru Futami. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. My name is Cristoph Eliot.”

The old man held out his hand for Kaoru to shake. Kaoru glanced at the hand: it was abnormally large.

As were the feet that stuck out in front of the wheels of the wheelchair. Even seated as the man was, Kaoru got a good idea of his size. Overall, he was on the small side for a foreigner, but his hands and feet were disproportionately big.

Kaoru then wondered at himself and the way he was remarking on the irregularity of this man Eliot’s body. Shouldn’t he be in shock right about now? Why does this old man know my name? All of his identification, all his papers, had been lost with the rucksack.

He shook the man’s hand, observing him closely. He had a head like an egg: not a single hair grew on it. His skin was porcelain-white and lustrous. Judging by the hue of his skin, it was probably unfair to think of him as an old man. At the same time, he had a dark spot on his neck and left cheek, the kind of mark peculiar to old age. It contrasted sharply with his pale skin.

From Eliot’s grip, Kaoru realized the man bore him no ill will, so he decided to ask the question that had been on his mind.

“What is this place?”

Eliot’s grayish eyes narrowed and a smile played over his lips.

“The place you were trying to get to.”

But the place Kaoru had been trying to get to was supposed to be a huge cavern with a village of very long-lived people in it.

He looked around the room with new eyes. The little sealed room, the beige leather walls—no, it couldn’t be. This was too different from what he’d imagined.

Eliot seemed to pick up on Kaoru’s perplexed expression. He raised one great finger and asked a question of his own.

“What do you think is above us?”

The ceiling, and beyond that—what? How was Kaoru to know?

Seeing he couldn’t answer, Eliot answered for him.

“A thick layer of water.” Not a “tank”. A “layer of water”.

Kaoru couldn’t figure out what he meant. Was he using some sort of symbolic expression for rain? After his experiences of the last few days, Kaoru found that idea plausible.

Next Eliot pointed down with the same finger.

“And what do you think is below where you’re standing?”

What could be beneath this little room? Earth, of course. But Kaoru wasn’t about to give the obvious answer. He remained silent.

Eliot provided the answer to this question himself, too.

“A vast space.”

Kaoru realized what he was being told: that he was suspended between water and space. But it still didn’t make sense to him.

It would, however, explain some things. If what Eliot was saying was true, then the force of gravity in this area should be abnormally low. Gravity increases in spots with great mass underneath, and decreases in spots with low mass underneath. A vast empty space beneath his feet would account for the gravitational anomaly. It was persuasive.

Kaoru still couldn’t believe it, though. Had he really reached his destination? If he had, if this was the place indicated on the fictional gravitational-anomaly map, then he shouldn’t be surprised that Eliot knew his name.

The old guy’s trying to tell me that gravity is lower here. He knew I was trying to reach this place.

Confusion overwhelmed Kaoru, and he had to put his hand on the wall to steady himself. He was gasping for breath, but he finally managed to force out the question.

“Did you know I was coming?”

Eliot reached out a huge hand to keep Kaoru from toppling over, and said, in a voice full of charity, “Yes. You were meant to come here.”

Kaoru felt hot. His fever must have come back.

“The only thing that wasn’t predicted was that record-breaking storm.”

Kaoru couldn’t even tell any longer if he was burning up or freezing. He felt feverish, but chills were running over the surface of his body. He couldn’t stay on his feet. Eliot’s words were indistinct in his ears.

He brushed Eliot’s hand away and tried to walk back to the bed under his own power. Halfway there he collapsed.

2

For the next three days Kaoru’s task was to recover his strength. This expenditure of time, Eliot finally gave him to understand, wouldn’t have been necessary had it not been for the rainstorm. Once his strength had been restored, Kaoru would be given the answers to all his questions. Until then, he was forced to recuperate in that little room, in ignorance of his real situation.

Eliot poked his head in once in a while, but mostly it was the nurse, Hana, who looked after Kaoru’s health and other needs.

Kaoru thought Hana was a cute name: in Japanese, hana means flower. He asked her if it was her real name, but her only response was laughter. “You can call me that, at any rate.” And it was easy to call her by it, once he got used to it.

Hana … It reminded him of delicate wild flowers blooming in a meadow—an image that fit the nurse to a “t”.

Once Eliot had left them alone, Kaoru would barrage her with questions. What kind of facility is this place? Who is Eliot? Is there a purpose to all this?

He delivered himself of every question that occurred to him, with an effect that must have been overwhelming, but Hana simply smiled and held her peace, shaking her head to show that no answers would be forthcoming from her.

In face and body, Hana looked like a child. She couldn’t have been more than four foot ten, and she had plump cheeks and big round eyes. If she’d worn her lustrous black hair down, sweeping back from her forehead to cover her whole back, she might have looked more grown up. As it was, she wore it tied tightly back, exposing her smooth, arcing forehead in a way that emphasized her youthfulness, obscuring her true age. The swelling of her breasts, too, was that of a half-grown girl, but he doubted she would get any bigger. Her small breasts, however, went well with her delicate Oriental features.

Kaoru was taken in by her childlike appearance, at first. He assumed that she wasn’t answering any of his questions because she herself hadn’t been let in on the truth. The innocence in her face seemed to indicate ignorance, so that even though she supplied none of the information he asked for, he felt no suspicion, no anger, tow ard her.

But Hana’s skills as a nurse turned out to be such as to belie her appearance. Kaoru could recognize a good nurse when he saw one, having virtually lived in hospitals for almost as long as he could remember. It was as though she knew how to scratch him exactly where he itched. She was perfectly efficient, with not a movement wasted.

She had him hooked up to I.V.s, taking antibiotics, and trying to get sufficient sleep.

She was fairly taciturn as she went about her work. He thought he detected in her gestures an unnecessary briskness. He wondered, although it was unfair to her, if she was trying to minimize contact with his body. She had manual dexterity in line with her competence as a nurse, but sometimes her hands seemed to hesitate when it came time to touch him. And occasionally he caught her stealing glances at him, observing him as if he were something unnatural, alien. He noticed it more as time went on.

It was two days after he first met Hana. He heard the sounds that meant she was about to enter the room, and he pretended to be asleep, leaving his eyes open just a slit. He watched her gaze at him with curiosity as she quickly changed the I.V. bottle. It was almost a morbid curiosity he saw in her eyes—she was afraid of him and intrigued by him at the same time. This in turn piqued Kaoru’s interest. What was she reacting to in him when she got that expression on her face?

She finished changing the bottle, and then bent over him, hips thrust back, observing him nervously. Surely she was convinced he was sleeping. But then why didn’t she let down her guard?

Kaoru snapped open his eyes and grabbed Hana’s arm. He hadn’t intended to startle her, but that was the effect. She tried to let out a little scream, but couldn’t find her voice. It died in the back of her throat, and all that escaped was a gasp.

“Why do you look at me like you’re seeing a ghost?” Kaoru spoke slowly and distinctly. He wanted to calm her down, first of all. Her hand, the one Kaoru wasn’t holding, was pressed to her cheek. She wasn’t putting up any resistance worth the name: she didn’t try to shake loose, didn’t turn her head away from him. She swallowed her scream and looked down at him vacantly. She looked like she was about to burst into tears, a look that was a fine complement to her childlike features.

“I want to know. Why do you look at me like that?”

She shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry.” The words seemed to come from the bottom of her heart, but they didn’t answer his question. He could interpret them one of two ways. Either she was saying she was sorry for looking at him like he was a ghost, or she was apologizing for not being able to answer him. Or maybe it was both.

He let her go.

Her job was just to nurse him back to health. She’d been forbidden to open her mouth about anything else. Any explanation about the way she looked at him would necessarily involve explaining the whole situation he was in, and she couldn’t do that. As Kaoru came to understand this, he decided to quit pressing her.

She remained standing next to his bed even after he released her.

“Isn’t it difficult for you to talk?” Her sense of duty was showing through. Her first impulse was to check on her patient’s condition.

“It’s difficult for me not to talk. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Well, then, why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Let’s see … How about everything, starting with your birth?”

“And what good would it do you if I told you?”

“At the very least, I probably wouldn’t look at you as if you were a ghost anymore.”

In other words, she knew nothing about him. If she knew more, maybe she’d be able to look on him as a fellow human.

“I want to know just one thing about you first,” Kaoru said.

Hana composed herself, without answering.

“If it’s not too forward of me, I’d like to know how old you are.”

Hana laughed. No doubt she’d been asked this any number of times.

“I’m thirty-one years old. I’m married and have two children. Both of them boys.”

Kaoru’s jaw dropped open in amazement. She looked no more than a girl, and yet she was telling him she was thirty-one. And a mother of two! An unexpected response, to say the least.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Everybody says that.”

“I was sure you were younger than me.” At twenty, though, he was eleven years her junior.

“How old are you?”

He told her. She furrowed her brow and in a low voice said, “Really?”

“I look older, don’t I? But I’m really twenty.”

Kaoru put a hand to his cheek. He hadn’t shaved since arriving in the desert, so he figured he might look even older than usual.

He couldn’t quite get over the shock that this woman was in fact older than him. It was bound to make him act differently with her.

Learning each other’s true ages seemed to change something between them. After that, whenever Hana looked in on him, Kaoru watched for the chance to tell her a little more about himself.

Hana was a good listener. She only came by the room a few times a day, and they only had a limited time to talk, maybe ten minutes at a time. But she made good use of it, never getting off track, always eliciting more about Kaoru’s past life.

And Kaoru found he enjoyed talking to her, telling her things. It allowed him to make sure of himself as he was now. Of course, doubts did come to mind, but he shunted them aside and he spoke haltingly of himself.

He told her of his childhood, what he’d thought about, the kind of dreams he’d had. Bits and pieces of life with his father and mother. Their plans to go off to America together, to the desert …

There were things that were hard to talk about. Most of all, his father’s cancer: how it had dashed their travel plans, how their lives had revolved around hospitals ever since. How after several years his cancer had been identified as coming from the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, and how there was essentially no hope of him recovering. How Kaoru’s mother refused to give up, but had immersed herself in Native American legends until she found hints of a miracle cure, belief in which had allowed her to go on undaunted. How Kaoru, forced to balance his father’s illness and his mother’s headlong rush into spiritualism, had abandoned his early desire to study astrophysics for medical school.

As he spoke, Kaoru began to feel a nostalgia for it all. Over a period of four days he spoke to her for a total of two, maybe three hours. He certainly couldn’t tell her everything about his life in that amount of time; he had to cut out a lot of things. But he remembered a lot of things too. Sometimes he’d have to fight back tears, and then sometimes he’d burst out laughing as he told her about some crazy thing his father had done.

A life that could be told in a mere two or three hours—could it be real? As he talked, his more distant memories began to cloud over.

“Haven’t you ever been in love?”

Her question was perfectly timed. At that very moment Kaoru was wondering whether or not he should tell her about Reiko. He’d been leaning toward avoiding the subject, and if Hana hadn’t spoken, he very well might not have mentioned her.

Telling her about his affair with Reiko would naturally involve telling her about Ryoji. The experience still filled him with sadness, and more than that with pain. Regrets always came to mind first, shame for his ill-considered actions. He realized that the room where he and Reiko had taken their pleasure and the room he was in now were rather similar. Of course, Ryoji’s room had boasted a west-facing full-length window overlooking the green of the park and admitting the rays of the setting sun, while this room had no window at all. But that aside, in terms of size and the color of the walls, the rooms were very much alike.

No matter how hard he tried, he’d never be able to communicate to Hana the carnal joy that Reiko had given him.

Kaoru confessed his feelings honestly. Now and then Hana looked at him disbelievingly, shaking her head and saying, “Oh, no,” in a commiserating tone. Then when Kaoru revealed that Reiko was carrying his child, Hana’s expression froze.

“And this child—it’s going to be born?”

A strange way to phrase the question, he thought, but he didn’t stop to worry about it.

“Of course, I want her to have it. That’s why I came here.”

Hana closed her eyes. Her lips were trembling and she seemed to be praying, although he couldn’t hear her words.

In this windowless room, the only way to gauge the passage of time was by his watch. If it was to be believed, this was the evening of the fourth day. After he finished telling her about his and Reiko’s child, Hana said, “That should do for today.” She seemed not to be permitted to do whatever she wanted with her time; she was always cutting their talks short when she found the right moment.

“I want to hear the rest tomorrow, though.” She spoke with kindness. This woman whom he’d once thought of as a child had now become a merciful mother-figure.

She placed a hand on his arm and contemplated him for a while, and then walked to the door. Once there, she stopped, glanced back at the bed, and then went out into the hallway.

The expression on her face as she looked back at him burned itself into Kaoru’s mind. He’d seen it somewhere before.

He thought about facial expressions, deciding that they usually fell into a finite set of categories. People generally made the same sort of face placed in the same sort of situation: hearing a piece of good news, for example, or jumping from a high place. He tried to figure out what category Hana’s expression belonged to.

Something came to mind immediately, something that had always stayed with him.

The situation had been almost exactly the same. A woman, dressed in white like Hana, walking out of a sickroom, turning around for a last look at the patient. A nurse.

Once, his father had been moved to a larger room, as a temporary measure. He’d just had surgery to remove the cancer from his rectum, and seemed to be making good progress. It had been a four-person room, and every bed held a cancer patient.

One of the nurses who frequented the room had been particularly popular with the patients. She was no great beauty, but she was attractive enough, and more than that she was the type of woman who just radiated goodness. She was always long-suffering toward her patients, listening to their demands with never a look of complaint. Kaoru’s father had liked her, too. He’d joke with her and touch her bottom, all for the pleasure of being admonished by her like a child.

A time came when she left the hospital, albeit temporarily. She was in her second year of marriage, and in fact was seven months pregnant. She’d put in for a year’s maternity leave.

On her last day at the hospital, she came by Kaoru’s father’s room to say goodbye. Kaoru was visiting his father at the time. She told the patients that she expected them all to be happy and smiling when she came back in a year, to which one of the patients joked, By the time you get back, honey, I’ll have checked out of this place.

Kaoru seemed to remember the other two patients, but not his father, saying similar things. It was impossible to tell how sincere the patients were being. In any case the nurse just nodded in agreement as she made the rounds of each bed to say her goodbyes.

Then, as she left the room, she turned back to glance at the patients in their beds, exactly as Hana had done just now. The look in the nurse’s eyes had not evaded Kaoru’s notice then: it had been one of certainty that there were those among the patients she would not see, could not see, when she returned in a year. And not because they’d have checked out. Her look was a wistful one of final—for this life, at least—farewell.

The patient in the bed next to Kaoru’s father had just learned that his lung cancer had spread to his brain. The next patient over had just lost his manhood to prostate cancer. Kaoru’s father was the only one with some vitality left. All the rest were proceeding steadily toward their dates with death.

Awareness of that had informed the nurse’s gaze. And now Kaoru had seen that same gaze directed at himself.

Why did Hana look at me like that?

It made him uneasy. He’d ask her directly if he could.

But as it turned out, Kaoru was never to see Hana again.

The next morning, at the usual time, there was a knock at the door. Kaoru opened it expecting to see Hana, but found Eliot instead, his huge feet sticking out in front of his wheelchair, his huge hands resting on the wheels.

Seeing that Kaoru was recovering smoothly, Eliot gave a satisfied nod. “How are you feeling?”

Kaoru’s endurance was at its limits: he had so many questions, and all of them had been put on hold for so long. Hana’s cuteness had helped him to bear it for a while, but facing Eliot he knew he couldn’t keep them back much longer.

How am I feeling? You’ve got to be kidding. Why am I always the one who’s got to answer questions? My physical strength is back, but at this rate I’m going to turn into a nervous wreck. How am I feeling, indeed!

He bit back his anger, but not all that effectively. His voice shook as he said, “Knock it off already.”

Eliot evidently noticed the tension in Kaoru’s voice. He held up his hands as if to tell Kaoru to hold on a minute, then paused. At last he spoke. “I get it. I think I understand your feelings. It’s about time we get underway with our plans.”

Plans? What plans? And what have they got to do with me?

With a hard look on his face, Kaoru began to press Eliot for answers. “First I want you to tell me where I am and what you’re up to.”

Eliot pressed his palms together.

“First I want to ask you something.”

Kaoru waited silently for him to continue.

Eliot’s voice was grave when next he spoke.

“Do you believe in God?”

3

Eliot showed him into a room with no windows. Why was this whole place sealed up like this? Kaoru disliked windowless rooms. This room was bigger than the last, though. There was a leather living-room set in the middle of it.

Eliot invited Kaoru to have a seat on the couch. Kaoru did as he was directed. Then Eliot got out of his wheelchair. He stood up, rear end thrust backward, and without using a cane hobbled over to seat himself opposite Kaoru.

Kaoru couldn’t help but stare. Since Eliot used a wheelchair, Kaoru had naturally assumed he couldn’t walk. But he could: somewhat awkwardly, but fairly steadily.

Noticing Kaoru’s surprise, Eliot flashed a triumphant grin. “You must learn to look at things without preconceptions. Trust nothing.”

But Kaoru was already quite accustomed to suspecting everything. One thing he’d learned crossing the desert was how to keep his balance as he walked the hazy line between reality and virtuality. It was the one thing he’d most wanted not to lose during that rainstorm on the ridge.

“When are you going to answer my questions?” Kaoru said sulkily, ignoring Eliot’s words. Eliot raised his hands in a gesture that seemed to say, Any time you want.

There were so many things Kaoru wanted to ask. He decided to lay aside his basic questions for the moment, and instead to start by exploring something Eliot had said earlier and which had been nagging at Kaoru ever since.

“I was fated to come here, from long ago. That’s what you told me, correct?” Kaoru wanted to know why he’d said that. Doubtless he’d been speaking figuratively, but the way he’d said it troubled Kaoru deeply.

“It’s a little early yet to explain that. If we go out of order, you’re liable to end up screaming.”

“In that case, you’re going to explain things to me so that I understand, so that I don’t end up screaming—right?” Kaoru was on edge again. Eliot’s roundabout way of speaking rubbed him the wrong way. Kaoru got the feeling that this man held his life’s rudder, and was laughing at the mother and father who’d brought him into the world.

“This was the only way to do it. I decided I would never be able to force you here. You had to come of your own free will. And looking at you now I can see that I was right about that.” Eliot spoke as if to himself, then smiled. He spoke as someone who’d intervened in Kaoru’s life. At that moment, Kaoru wanted to wring the old man’s neck.

Eliot was unfazed by Kaoru’s violent glare. For a time they were both silent.

It was Eliot who resumed speaking. “How much do you know about the Loop?” His hands were clasped in front of him, and there was something boyish in his upwards glance at Kaoru.

“It’s an extremely well-designed computer simulation.”

Eliot frowned, not content with that answer.

“Well-designed? That doesn’t even begin to cover it. When I made the Loop, I made a world perfect in every respect.”

“You made it?”

“I should say ‘we,’ I guess, but really, I was the one who had the initial idea for its structure.” Now that he was discussing the Loop, there was a perceptible note of pride in Eliot’s voice. The words came like water from a burst dam now; at times something like ecstasy was visible on his face.

“I was still a student at MIT. That’s right, I was about the age you are now—this was nearly seventy years ago. The world was in love with astronauts—we’d just landed on the moon—and everybody was convinced that before long science would bring us space stations and space tourism. But I wasn’t interested in outer space. My gaze was turned on another world, one I was trying to build myself.”

Having said that much without pause, Eliot ducked his head and pursed his lips.

“Incidentally, do you know what makes the world go round?”

“The real world, or the Loop?”

It was easy to see what made the Loop go round: electricity. But the real world, that was a different story.

Eliot laughed at Kaoru’s question.

“In this case, they’re a lot alike. They move according to the same principle. The thing that makes the world go round—both worlds—is funding.”

Eliot waited a few moments for the import of his words to sink in, then continued. “If the gargantuan project that was the Loop hadn’t been funded, then that world would never have come into being. Neither this world nor that one will move without money.”

Kaoru was listening closely now, eager to see what Eliot would say next, and how it would all connect to himself.

If only there had been funding, we might all be aboard space stations now. Eliot was right. Science, Kaoru knew, did not progress along a straight line in a vacuum sealed off from social conditions. Instead, it changed direction from time to time in response to the situation. Budgets were controlled by the opinions of societies and governments—priorities were determined according to what people wanted most at a given time. Seventy years ago, outer space was the canvas on which the future was expected to be drawn. Everybody imagined that humanity would make colonies of the moon and Mars, that shuttles would make regularly scheduled trips between the planets. It was the stuff of novels and movies.

But by Kaoru’s day, not only had man not been to Mars, he hadn’t even returned to the moon. In the end, man’s presence on Earth’s satellite had been limited to that one brief, shining moment. Since then plans for space exploration had moved along at a snail’s pace, if at all. And for one simple reason. No funding.

In hindsight, it seemed odd that nobody had been able to predict that grinding halt.

Eliot, however, was saying that he had, in fact, predicted it. He was boasting of his foresight in turning his prodigious talents in another direction entirely.

He’d chosen as his academic fields computers, which at that time were unbelievably primitive compared to the ones Kaoru was familiar with, and molecular biology, which had just been revolutionized by the discovery of the double helix. Eliot had had the uncanny intuition to combine these two emerging fields. His first research project had asked the simple question of whether or not it was possible to create artificial life within a computer.

He’d pursued this question through highly original means, and at length, his work began to bear fruit. Just as Eliot had foreseen, society’s interest began to shift from space exploration to the creation of a user-friendly world of information. Computers were the stars of the age, and Eliot suddenly found that he had venues in which to present his work, and listeners to present it to.

With new wind in his sails, Eliot proceeded to develop the first self-replicating program, and then the first software that could evolve on its own. All without losing sight of his initial question. Is it possible to create artificial life in a computer?

He first realized his goal sooner than even he had expected, in the final years of the twentieth century. He’d never expected it to happen before the end of the century, he said; he’d shocked even himself. Of course, the beings he called life at that point were quite simple in structure, moving around onscreen in a way that resembled nothing so much as parasitic worms.

Then he caused male and female to appear, and at the beginning of the new century, new life had appeared within the computer of its own accord. The new cells divided again and again, and eventually they crawled around in the display just like their parents. Eliot called it a sight worthy of the new century.

Things accelerated after that. The basic process was much the same for all kinds of life forms. Producing fish or amphibians was all a matter of accumulating adaptations.

Having accomplished that much, Eliot allowed for an evolution in his ultimate goal. The question now became: Is it possible to create in a virtual space a biosphere on the scale of the Earth’s?

This was the germ of the Loop project, an idea that at this stage was already pretty clearly defined.

At Eliot’s invitation, scientists the world over began working toward a single goal. Computer scientists, medical doctors, molecular biologists, evolutionary theorists, astrophysicists, geologists, meteorologists—people from every branch of the sciences were involved. But interest wasn’t confined to the hard sciences—economists, historians, political scientists, and social scientists of all stripes were paying attention, too.

Because it turned out to take more than just science to create a virtual Earth. It took an understanding of the humanities and social sciences as well. For this reason it was expected that the results of the Loop experiment would contribute to all fields. In addition to the basic evolutionary and biological mysteries, it was hoped that creating intelligent life forms in a virtual world would help provide clues to social problems such as wars and population increase, even fluctuations in the stock markets, areas in which it had been impossible to find definitive governing principles. Leading scientists in every field recognized the importance of the Loop project.

So the Loop started to function formally, in reality, with a budget equivalent to that of a full-fledged country.

Due to the reservations of certain government actors, the project couldn’t be conducted in the open at first. Nobody could predict what might come of it—some new strategy for world domination, perhaps—and so it was felt that it should be carried out with the greatest circumspection. In the end, with no great ceremony, the project was launched as a joint effort by the U.S. and Japan.

The next name Eliot mentioned was one dear to Kaoru.

“Hideyuki Futami … Yes, he was a brilliant researcher. Young—fresh out of grad school—but he made the biggest contribution of anybody on the Japan side, I think.” Eliot’s phrasing tickled Kaoru—as was Eliot’s intention, no doubt. Hearing one’s father praised like this would make anyone feel good. Certainly that was the effect it had on Kaoru.

“Have you met my father?” Kaoru asked enthusiastically.

“Not face to face. But I heard about him, from my assistants.”

Hideyuki had never talked much about the Loop. Kaoru was curious as to just what role Hideyuki had played in the project. He resolved to ask next time he saw him.

Eliot went on, interrupting Kaoru’s thoughts of his father.

“I think you know what happened to the Loop after that.”

“It turned cancerous.”

“In the end, yes. But up to that point it was simply incredible. We’d never expected it to go so far.”

He gave Kaoru a portentous look, as if urging him to ask the question.

“There was something you hadn’t predicted?”

“Does it not surprise you? After all, you’ve seen a part of the Loop with your own eyes.”

“So many things surprised me that I’m not sure what I should be surprised at.”

Kaoru wasn’t replicating Eliot’s excitement, and this seemed to take the wind out of Eliot’s sails: he sat there with his mouth half open, spittle dribbling from a corner of his lips. When a drop of drool began to descend on a clear string, Eliot finally noticed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“We’d expected that with physical conditions the same as on Earth, we’d get roughly the same sorts of life forms. We didn’t dream that they’d be exactly identical. In those days everybody thought that the course of evolution was guided by chance. It couldn’t happen the same way twice.”

That was indeed one of the things that had surprised Kaoru. The course of evolution in the Loop had been exactly the same as on Earth, down to the last detail, and it certainly mystified him.

“So what did you conclude from that?” he asked.

“We didn’t see life naturally emerging in the Loop at the very beginning. So we introduced it. We introduced RNA, thought to be the earliest form of life. Sowing seeds—that was the metaphor we used, but it was no metaphor. That RNA was in all reality a seed, destined to grow into a certain, specific tree of life.”

Kaoru had taken part in a discussion like this before, he remembered. With Ryoji. Reiko was dozing nearby while Ryoji and Kaoru debated evolution. And the point Ryoji had been trying to make then was more or less the same one Eliot seemed to be making now.

“What are you trying to say?” Kaoru tried to keep his tone cool and rational. If he broke in too unnaturally, the old man might start drooling again, and Kaoru had no desire to see that.

“The Loop matched up perfectly with reality. Life didn’t emerge naturally in the Loop—that’s why we sowed the seeds. Don’t you realize what that means?”

It hit Kaoru. He remembered what Eliot had asked him at the beginning of their long conversation. Do you believe in God? That gave Kaoru the answer.

“That reality is only a virtual world, too, right?”

“Indeed. Life didn’t emerge of its own accord on Earth, either. So why are we here? Because somebody sowed the seeds of life here. Who? The being we call God. God caused there to be life on Earth, and He made us in His image. The Bible was right.”

Kaoru wasn’t particularly shocked by this. He’d had the same thought many times on his journey to this point, but he hadn’t been able to prove or disprove it. This was mere reasoning by analogy. It had no bearing on reality. It could not be verified. In the end, it would be, as it always had been, a question of belief or unbelief.

“But that doesn’t change anything, does it?”

Eliot sank into his couch as if pushed there by Kaoru’s logic. “Even if reality was created by a god, I’m not saying it was made in the same way as what we created in the computer.”

Before Eliot could finish the sentence, Kaoru was saying, “I guess God’s world must be controlled by funding issues, too.”

Eliot’s eyes narrowed and flashed coldly. “You’re making fun of me.” His sternness didn’t last long, however. He immediately resumed his former calm expression.

Kaoru glanced at the clock on the wall. This conversation had gone on for three hours already. He was getting hungry, and with no end in sight he was getting tired as well.

Eliot seemed to guess Kaoru’s thoughts. “You must be fatigued. Why don’t we take a break, watch an old movie or something. I’ll see to lunch.” His face was expressionless, betraying neither anger nor excitement. He produced a remote control, and a screen descended in front of one wall. He pressed PLAY.

Then he stood up slowly, returned to his wheelchair, and went to leave the room. Kaoru followed him with his gaze. When the door shut behind Eliot Kaoru heard it lock. The sound told Kaoru everything he needed to know about his current situation. He was still incarcerated. He’d have to find out why.

On the screen an old movie was playing, one he’d seen before. It was a sci-fi flick his parents had taken him to see when he was ten. He knew the theme song by heart—he’d liked the movie so much that he’d gotten his mother to buy the soundtrack, and he’d listened to it over and over.

A large black man dressed in white appeared and placed a sandwich and some tea with milk in front of Kaoru.

As he ate, Kaoru closed his eyes and listened to the music divorced from the images. It brought back more memories when he turned it into his own private movie projected onto the backs of his eyelids. Images of his family from the peaceful days before his father’s cancer had been detected.

Kaoru didn’t notice he was weeping until the tears creeping down his cheeks reached his lips. He wondered again about coincidence. Had Eliot chosen this movie at random, or had he put it on in full knowledge of the many memories it held for Kaoru?

If it was the latter, then things went a lot deeper than simple confinement. Maybe Eliot’s been watching me all along.

He’d often felt, as a child, like somebody was watching him from behind. He’d always dismissed it as his imagination, but now the feeling came back, and it felt real this time. Kaoru lost his appetite.

4

Eliot returned about the time Kaoru finally finished his lunch.

“My, you certainly had an appetite,” Eliot said, looking at the empty plate. “Good, very good.”

“Can we cut the crap? I can’t even tell you how this is making me feel.” As a result of their talk this morning, Kaoru had accumulated even more questions than before. He couldn’t wait to put an end to this farce. Why had he come here, anyway? To find out how to combat the MHC virus. He couldn’t afford to kill time like this.

“Well,” said Eliot, as he lowered himself onto the sofa, “our theme for the afternoon is you and your mission.” Once again he seemed to have seen right through Kaoru. Now he couldn’t leave even if he wanted to.

“My mission?”

“Yes. Why have you come here? To find a way to combat the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, no?”

Kaoru and Eliot stared at each other for a while.

Kaoru felt a deep nervous annoyance. Eliot seemed to know all kinds of information about him, while he’d been provided with no knowledge about Eliot. It wasn’t fair. He had a reasonable understanding now of the man’s place in the history of science. But what Kaoru wanted to know was more private things. Maybe if he had a clearer idea of Eliot as a person, he wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable.

“How about a pop quiz?” said Eliot, breaking in on Kaoru’s thoughts. He extended his right index finger, pointing at the ceiling. He seemed to be thinking of himself as a teacher now.

“In what year was it discovered that when a neutrino interacts with another object its oscillation goes out of phase?”

Kaoru was familiar with neutrinos, a kind of subatomic particle. If he were asked their main characteristics, he’d be able to answer with three: they move at the speed of light, they have no electrical charge, and they’re composed of energy. Looked at in that way, they’re quite similar to light. The decisive difference is that even though they have energy they can pass through anything. Neutrinos given off by the sun pass right through the earth, coming out the other side and heading straight off into the darkness of space.

But what did that have to with anything?

Kaoru’s answer came automatically. “2001.” Kaoru hadn’t even been born yet, but he’d read the information in a history of science textbook, and he remembered it clearly.

“That’s correct. In fact it was only at the end of the last century that the neutrino, which had always been considered massless, was discovered to have mass after all.”

“Yes, and?” Kaoru’s irritation was rising, and he tried to interrupt. Eliot stopped him.

“Just wait. Hear me out. Everything’s organically interconnected, and this affected our plans. You’re probably not going to understand what I mean when I say this, but if the neutrino’s phase shift had not been discovered, you would most likely not exist.”

“Give me a break. Enough with the jokes already. What could the nature of the neutrino possibly have to do with my existing or not?” Neutrinos are said to comprise ninety percent of all matter. They’re everywhere. But what did that have to do with Kaoru? He wouldn’t be able to take much more of this.

“Alright, alright. I’ll just ask you to keep that idea in a corner of your mind, and to stay with me for another three minutes while we talk about neutrinos.”

Then Eliot proceeded to explain what could be done using the neutrino’s phase shift.

It turned out that by shooting neutrinos at an object, measuring their phase shift, and then recomposing them, it was possible to create a detailed three-dimensional digital picture of an object’s structure. Neutrinos could be projected through inorganic and organic objects alike. But it was the fields of medicine and pathology that expected to see the greatest applications of this discovery, because suddenly it became possible to have a digital record of an organism’s entire molecular makeup. This was different from a mere DNA analysis. Sequencing an organism’s DNA simply meant analyzing one cell out of the nearly infinite number of cells in a single organism. Using neutrino oscillation made it possible to record everything about a subject, from brain activity to the state of the heart, even memory.

“Not long after the inception of the Loop project, another team of researchers began to construct a piece of equipment known as the Neutron Scanning Capture System, NSCS for short. This would allow us to instantaneously capture an organism’s molecular structure. Needless to say, their project too had a huge budget. I myself had no direct connection with the NSCS project, although of course I offered whatever advice I could.”

Eliot paused there.

“How about some tea? You’ll need some time to digest this information.”

Kaoru obediently raised his teacup to his mouth. The tea was cold. Kaoru had heard a fair amount concerning neutrinos in his lifetime, but this was the first he’d heard of the NSCS.

“I’m sorry if this has been confusing to you. It’s time now to bring the discussion around to the MHC virus, which threatens us all.”

“Finally, we’re getting to the point.”

The news came as a relief to Kaoru. He was starting to be afraid that this, too, would lead nowhere.

“What do you know about the Human Metastatic Cancer Virus?” Eliot asked.

“I know that its genome has been sequenced. I’ve seen the results myself.”

“And yet there’s still no treatment for it, no progress on a vaccine to prevent it.”

“Why is that?”

“It can take a long time to figure out where a virus came from. In the case of the MHC virus, an extremely long time.”

By now, Kaoru felt he could guess where the virus had come from.

“The Loop, right?”

Eliot opened his eyes wide and stared at Kaoru. “How did you figure it out?”

Kaoru enjoyed the look of sincere amazement on Eliot’s face. He felt like delaying his answer to prolong this pleasure, but he hadn’t the patience. “The MHC virus isn’t very large. It’s only got nine genes, each of which ranges from several thousand to several hundred thousand bases in length. But the total number of bases in each gene comes out to equal 2n x 3. That can’t be a coincidence.”

Eliot groaned. “Nice catch.”

“Not to brag, but I have something of a sixth sense when it comes to numbers. It didn’t take much to figure it out.”

“And from that you were able to guess where the virus had come from?”

“Well, why did they equal 2n x 3? That was the question. The times-three part was fairly easy to understand, since three bases together make one codon specifying a single amino acid. But what about the other part of the formula, the 2? No doubt I never would have gotten the idea had I not known about the Loop project. The 2 had to come from the binary code used by computers. The virus must have leaked out of the Loop somehow. That was its birthplace.”

“Exactly.” Eliot gave a weak smile and clapped his hands. Whether or not the applause was sincere, it sounded like mockery to Kaoru.

Kaoru lowered his voice in an attempt to sound calm. “So we know where it came from. Does that help us find a cure?” A cure for the virus—that was the main thing.

Eliot ignored the question. “When did you figure this out?”

“Huh?”

“When did you figure out the origin of the virus?”

“About a month ago.”

“I see. For me it was about six months ago.” He didn’t seem to be trying to brag. He was counting on his fingers like a child, a look of unguarded remorse on his face.

“I want to know what you think about it,” Kaoru said, pressing him.

Eliot’s response was dilatory, as he started making excuses.

“It’s too bad that it had to be cancer—such a common disease. Had it been something more distinctive, maybe we could have done something at an early stage. But it was able to blend in with normal cancer as it laid its groundwork. It was like the wanted man realizing the best place to hide is in the big city. Precisely because cancer is such a common illness, the virus was able to use it as camouflage. Think about it. Who would raise a fuss just because a researcher on the Loop project died of cancer? Whereas, if one of us had died from an unknown illness, we would have been quite active in looking for the virus that caused it. But with cancer … we mourned the loss of another colleague, but didn’t suspect anything. It was able to sneak in and do away with us one by one.”

Kaoru could sympathize. It had been a mere seven years since this cancer was definitely proven to be viral in origin, and therefore different from normal cancer. And it had only been a year since scientists had first successfully isolated the virus. And all that time, the virus had been laying the groundwork for an explosive spread.

Kaoru imagined that Eliot had lost people close to him to the virus. His gaze, one of hostility and regret, was focused on the past.

This was Kaoru’s chance to find out more about Eliot as a person, but instead Kaoru brought the conversation back on track.

“Have you been able to figure out precisely how the virus escaped from the Loop?”

“Eh? Oh, yes. Of course.”

“Will you tell me?”

“We froze the Loop twenty years ago. Time has stopped inside the Loop. All of its inhabitants are frozen in place. Do you know why we put an end to the project?”

“You’re going to tell me you ran out of funding.”

He didn’t mean it as a joke, but Eliot, after a moment’s shock, laughed heartily.

“That’s absolutely right. We used up our budget. We’d gotten scholarly feedback from all directions, about as much as we were going to get, and the results had been quite good, at least valuable enough to justify the expenditure. But a project like that can’t go on forever. Do you have any idea how many massively parallel supercomputers we buried in the New Mexico desert? Six hundred and forty thousand. And we put another six hundred and forty thousand in the ground underneath Tokyo. We needed our own power plants just to keep them running. They ate up a staggering amount of electricity, and it took massive amounts of money to keep them running. It couldn’t go on forever. And then the Loop started turning cancerous.”

Kaoru felt he knew all he needed to about how that had come about. Back at Wayne’s Rock he’d witnessed for himself, with his own eyes and ears, the key scenes in that chain of events. He informed Eliot of this, and Eliot nodded twice.

“So you’ve seen it. Or, I should say, you’ve experienced it. But you don’t know why it began to turn cancerous. Let me say right up front that I don’t know, either. The making of that odd videotape, the spread of that new virus—these are things that the individuals within the Loop couldn’t help but find impossible to explain. You’re thinking that even if they couldn’t explain it, I should be able to, as the one who made the Loop. But I have to be honest with you: I can’t explain it. Not all phenomena in the world can be explained. We’ve always got problems that need solving; the world is always coming apart at the seams. There’s no world anywhere without its internal contradictions. Maybe the real world’s internal contradictions infected the Loop; alternatively, it’s not inconceivable that it was the work of a computer virus. Our security was supposed to be perfect, but as long as the Loop was connected to the outside world, there was at least the possibility of it being breached. If it was a piece of mischief, it was an extremely well-wrought one. But what interested me most was one of the individuals within the Loop: Ryuji Takayama.”

Eliot stopped there and turned on Kaoru a gaze that seemed to be searching for agreement. Kaoru obliged.

“Yeah, he’s a pretty interesting guy, alright.”

“He’s unique.”

“He must hold the key to the MHC virus.”

Now Eliot’s eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to peer into Kaoru’s brain. As if it wouldn’t do to take his eyes off Kaoru for a second now.

Slowly, with suspicion, Eliot said, “Did you not see Takayama on the monitor?”

“I spent most of my time seeing things from his perspective, actually.” Kaoru answered carefully, each word given special weight, in imitation of Eliot; at the same time he was checking his own memory to make sure he wasn’t making any mistakes. No, that was how he remembered it: he’d made full use of Takayama’s senses as he reexperienced the event.

Eliot made an awkward sort of cry and blinked rapidly several times. “Oh-ho. That explains it.” Uneasy, Kaoru watched Eliot’s eyes as they darted around.

“Explains what?”

“Eh? Oh, nothing. It’s just that the conversation begins to move in an interesting direction. Anyway. So that means that you heard Takayama’s scream just before he died as if it were your own voice.”

“That’s right.”

He could recall it all clearly, everything he’d seen and heard through Takayama’s eyes and ears. On the brink of death, Takayama had found an interface with the real world, and he’d called it. Kaoru could hear Takayama’s voice echoing within his body.

“What did Takayama say to you?”

Kaoru repeated the phrase, in as close as he could come to Takayama’s intonation.

“‘Bring me to your world.’”

“What do you think it means?”

“I think he deduced the existence of the Loop’s maker, a god from his perspective, and he wanted that god to bring him back to life in that god’s world—in other words, in the real world where you and I live. At least, that’s what I took it to mean.”

And Kaoru could sympathize with that request. How many times had he confronted his father with a desire to understand how the world worked? But it turned out that this world’s working was a little too complicated to be fully comprehended. Every time he thought he’d chased down the answers, they receded a little farther into the distance, like an endless game of cat and mouse. He felt like he was chasing his own shadow, something he’d never ever be able to catch. If it turned out that the world had a maker, then going to that maker’s own world would answer all his desires. It would surely tell him how his own world worked.

Eliot spoke calmly. “I understood Takayama’s feelings completely. His request came not out of fear of death. What moved him was an insatiable thirst for knowledge. His curiosity about the world exploded in that instant, and it brought about what was to him a miracle.”

“A miracle?”

“That’s what it was to him. On the brink of death, his greatest desire was to cross over into this world. If the NSCS plans hadn’t been in my head, I doubt the idea would ever have occurred to me. In fact, I’m sure it wouldn’t have. But as I say, things are connected, organically. I believed I could see twenty, thirty years into the future, and based on what I saw, I made up my mind to grant Takayama’s wish.”

Kaoru cried out in surprise.

Grant Takayama’s wish?

It was just as he’d suspected. Somebody had been rash enough to bring an entity over from the virtual world into the real one. Kaoru was speechless.

Eliot, though, was calm as he began to explain how he’d gone about bringing Ryuji Takayama into the real world.

It was impossible to bring him over as an adult, possessed of his current state of consciousness and all the memories it held. The only thing Eliot could do was extract genetic information from one of Takayama’s cells, and based on it, use a genome synthesizer and the genome fragment alignment method to create DNA that would be valid in the real world. Once he’d analyzed Takayama’s DNA sequence, it was essentially a matter of chemically synthesizing it.

The next step was to prepare a fertilized human egg, extract its nucleus, and insert the manmade Takayama nucleus in its place. Then all he had to do was return the egg to the mother’s body and wait for Takayama to be born. The process wasn’t all that different from the cloning procedures that had been developed in the last century. Nor was it all that difficult.

In short, the only way to bring Takayama into the real world was to allow him to be born here as a baby, a new human carrying all the genetic information of the virtual Ryuji Takayama.

“This was a grand experiment, to say the least. We were all quite excited at the prospect of bringing something from the virtual world into the real one. But we had to act in the utmost secrecy. I’m sure you can see why. If the media had gotten wind of it, they would have had a field day, saying we were playing God, ignoring the sanctity of life, that sort of thing. We’d seen the furor that had surrounded the first successful human cloning at the turn of the century, and we wanted no part of that. I doubt you can imagine what things were like then … Anyway, the plan was kept secret even from most of the scientists involved with the Loop.”

“Not even my father knew about it?”

Eliot nodded once. “That’s right. He didn’t know. It was more convenient that way.”

“So he was left out in the cold, is that it?”

“It wasn’t like that, exactly … But, well, I guess you could say that …”

Eliot seemed at a loss for words. But Kaoru thought he could guess what came next. “So anyway, you mean …?”

“Yes, it’s just what you’re thinking. We collected Takayama’s genetic data from a point just before he died. A point at which he was already infected with the ring virus. When we brought Takayama into the real world, we brought the ring virus right along with him.”

“In other words, the ring virus that took over the Loop world was the basis for the MHC virus that’s taking over our world?”

“That’s what we think. Careful comparisons of the genetic sequences of both viruses reveal too many similarities to be explained away as mere coincidence. The ring virus seized on our plan to resurrect Takayama in this world as a chance to escape. We think the virus’s RNA must have invaded an intestinal bacterium, as luck would have it, and thus made it into the outside. And then it mutated with frightening speed, as viruses are wont to do. The result was the MHC virus.”

The sequence was essentially what Kaoru had guessed. What to do about it, though, remained a problem.

He leaned close to Eliot’s face and said, “Let’s clear something up right now. Have you or have you not figured out a way to conquer the MHC virus?”

“You said it yourself: Takayama holds the key.”

“So Takayama is alive. Where is he now?”

Eliot rested his chin on his hand and gazed into Kaoru’s eyes for a while. Then he snapped his fingers. “The eyes play tricks on one, don’t they? What we think we know can affect our judgment.”

Shaking his head, Kaoru leaned back on his couch. Eliot always evaded the important questions. He began to be suspicious of the old man again—what was he up to?

Eliot, meanwhile, was punching buttons on the remote control, ignoring Kaoru’s nonplussed gaze. From one wall appeared a large computer monitor.

“You saw it all. You even put on the helmet display. But you failed to notice it. I suppose that’s liable to happen. Your preconceptions got in the way, I suspect.”

Kaoru thought Eliot was talking to himself; he was speaking as one might speak to a bird that’s landed in one’s yard. So Kaoru swallowed his annoyance and waited for Eliot to play his next card.

Eliot had called up on the screen the last moments of Takayama’s life. He’d probably prepared this ahead of time—he had the scene up and ready to play with only a few commands.

“Let’s go through it like you did, locked into Takayama’s perceptions.”

And they began to go through the same sequence of events that Kaoru had lived through already amid the ruins of Wayne’s Rock. It was a week after Takayama watched the video, and he began to see signs of his impending death. Spurred by his final wish, he put the tape into the VCR and pressed play. Those mysterious, fragmented images danced across the TV screen. Dice rolling around inside a lead case. In the middle of a phone call, Takayama noticed the ever-changing dots on the dice and made a sound like a scream.

Just then it happened. A reflection appeared in a mirror at the edge of the monitor. A man with a telephone receiver held to his ear and a look of utter shock on his face. It was Takayama. While on the phone, Takayama’s glance had momentarily settled on his reflection in the mirror.

Eliot paused the playback there and zoomed in on Takayama’s reflection.

“You were locked into Takayama’s perceptions, but your own preconceptions clouded your vision. Your mind’s reaction was that you couldn’t be seeing what you were seeing, and so it simply wouldn’t let you see it. It happens. Take another look. Don’t you recognize that face?”

The face in the mirror was slightly blurred. Eliot sharpened the image.

Kaoru sat face to face with Takayama’s reflection. His jaw dropped. His nerves were buzzing, as if they didn’t want to recognize the face.

Takayama’s features were distorted by his expression of astonishment. On top of that, the imminence of death seemed to have abruptly aged him. But even so, there was no mistaking the outlines of his face, the muscular line of his jaw. Kaoru did indeed know that face. He’d known it all his life.

“This man holds the key to the MHC virus.” Eliot poked Kaoru in the chest with a huge finger. “Kaoru, you’re Ryuji Takayama.”

Kaoru tried to block the words from reaching his brain, but their truth seeped into his body anyway. He felt the world collapse around him. His body, the flesh that he’d always thought of as his, had betrayed him.

“It can’t be.” Kaoru turned his face toward the ceiling, eyes shut tight.

“We need your help. You must cooperate with us.”

Kaoru saw nothing. Eliot’s words entered his ears, but he couldn’t grasp their meaning. All he knew was that the world was falling apart.

5

Kaoru sat on a boulder hugging his knees. From the flat edge of the ridge he could see a deep valley carved over the course of billions of years. Here and there he saw whitish mottled places on the rust-colored earth. Strangely shaped rocks stood out against the horizon, looking like creations not of nature, but of man. But man had not touched the landscape that stretched before him.

He hardly remembered the scenery from his hike along the ridge—the storm and what came after felt like events in a dream. When he’d huddled alone in the dark, had he been here, in the midst of this vastness? He gazed on it now as if for the first time, following with his eyes every wrinkle and furrow in the land. They reminded him, quite naturally, of the furrows on the surface of a brain. Kaoru’s own brain was engraved with many memories, but its history was still comparatively short, only twenty years. Its origins, however, were utterly out of the ordinary. It had been born not of biological reproduction, but digital recomposition.

In the distance he could see a yellowish river flowing in a near loop. A strange sight. A manifestation of the synchronicity between the real world and the virtual?

He turned around, but there was no one there. Only the building housing the elevator that connected the underground laboratories to the surface, and next to that the heliport. A helicopter, painted gun-metal black, rested motionless on the heliport. This was the jet copter that had carried Kaoru’s helpless body here after the storm.

Midway between the elevator building and the heliport was a dark hole, the entrance to a huge limestone cave stretching deep into the earth. In the cavern was a vast bowl-shaped depression filled with clear water.

Eliot had been telling the truth. Pointing to the ceiling and the floor, he’d spoken of a great layer of water above them and a great space beneath them. Both turned out to be actual.

They’d dug down into the earth to a depth of three thousand feet, and there they’d found this spherical hollow space, six hundred feet in diameter, floating there like a bubble. The layer of clear water was like a shield, keeping external radiation from getting into the hollow space. The natural landscape had been put to good use in installing the Neutrino Scanning Capture System in its underground shrine.

Kaoru still hadn’t seen the apparatus, that machine that would decide his fate, be it the electric chair or … what?

He’d spent nearly a week in those labs underground. Now, finally, he was getting his first look at the place from the outside. His wish to go to the surface had finally been granted. Evidently Eliot had been kind enough to admit that he wasn’t about to run away or hide.

The weather was calm. Kaoru was soaking up the afternoon rays after a week without sunlight. As long as he was in the sun, he was warm enough in just a T-shirt. He shifted his arms, still folded in front of him, rubbed his upper arms, and tried to pull his thoughts together, but it was no use. He couldn’t even decide what there might be for him to decide. What was he to think of his life up to this point? There were no precedents to guide him. He was deeply troubled.

It was easy enough to doubt Eliot. That might even be the simplest solution: just deny everything he said. After all, who would believe he’d been created from genetic information taken from a virtual reality program anyway? That was like denying his very existence. Maybe Eliot was simply making up a story because he wanted to experiment with the NSCS. Kaoru should deny him that: he ought to leave this mountain of his own free will, after cursing Eliot with curses the likes of which the world had never known. And then … then what? Kaoru didn’t know. Certainly nothing pleasant remained for him. He was going to lose the ones he loved. All he’d have left would be regrets.

He kept going back to the starting point. Monozygotic twins share the same genes and look virtually identical. If Kaoru and Takayama shared the same genes it would certainly explain their faces looking alike. Then there was the curious sensation Kaoru had experienced the first time he’d heard Takayama’s voice directly, the same queer feeling he felt when he heard his own voice on a recording. So face and voice matched. But that alone was not sufficient proof. Those could be easily manipulated by computer.

Kaoru had pointed this out to Eliot. As if he’d anticipated Kaoru’s doubts, Eliot merely held out a satellite phone.

“It’s your father. I think you should talk to him.”

Kaoru took the receiver and heard his father’s voice from where he lay in his hospital bed. And once he’d heard what his father had to say, Eliot’s story began to seem credible at last.

The most convenient way to raise Takayama’s clone, it was decided, would be to choose one of the participants in the Loop project and have him raise the clone as his own child.

At the time, Hideyuki and Machiko Futami had been married for four years. They had no children. In fact, a gynecologist had recently confirmed Machiko’s infertility.

But still they wanted a child. Eliot and his colleagues got wind of this, and through several intermediaries they approached Hideyuki about the possibility of adoption. Both Hideyuki and Machiko were receptive to the idea of bringing a newborn infant into their home and raising it as their own child.

Events progressed swiftly, and soon Eliot, through a devious route, delivered to Hideyuki and Machiko the newborn Kaoru. They were told nothing about the child’s birth or lineage, under the pretense of avoiding future trouble. There was no telling if they would have been willing to accept the child had they known he came from within the Loop.

And so they brought Kaoru up lovingly as their own child, never telling him he was adopted.

As they spoke, linked by the satellite phone, Kaoru could picture Hideyuki lying in bed, weakly grasping the receiver.

“Kaoru?”

It was a joy to hear his father’s voice, though it was weaker than he remembered it.

Kaoru and Hideyuki reported to each other on their recent doings. On hearing that his son was well, Hideyuki seemed happy. “I seem to be doing better myself lately,” he said, although Kaoru had no way of knowing if it was true or not. Judging from his voice, it had to be a lie. He felt that his father’s time was fast approaching.

Then, calmly, off-handedly, Kaoru asked his father about his origins. Hideyuki was sincerely surprised at first that Kaoru had discovered he was adopted, but then he seemed to decide that the boy was bound to find out sooner or later, and proceeded to tell him honestly how things had been twenty years before.

As he listened to his father’s explanation, Kaoru had his eyes closed and said something like a prayer in his heart. Who had approached Hideyuki—where had he gotten Kaoru from?

Kaoru’s prayer was in vain. His father’s explanation matched Eliot’s in every detail.

“Weren’t you at all hesitant, Dad, to raise a child who wasn’t carrying on your genes?” Kaoru asked quietly. Even if his mother was infertile, it wouldn’t have been difficult at all to create a child who inherited their genes.

“Whether or not you had our genes wasn’t what mattered. Parent-child bonds come from being together, from how they act toward each other. Think about our relationship over the past twenty years. You’re my son, Kaoru.”

These words etched themselves into Kaoru’s cells.

Kaoru said goodbye and broke the connection, feeling that he’d never speak to his father again.

He watched Takayama’s life over and over on the computer. As he went through episodes in the man’s childhood when he displayed his rare talent for science in general and math and physics in particular, Kaoru couldn’t help but feel that they were the same person. Even his gestures when absorbed in a book or deep in thought were identical to Kaoru’s.

It was a strange experience to watch Takayama onscreen. Here was an individual with the same genetic makeup as Kaoru himself, growing up in a different environment—a different universe, no less. A man with a different personality from Kaoru, a different consciousness, but exactly the same features. An identical twin.

Kaoru got to his feet and strolled toward the end of the ridge. A downward glance showed him the edge of a sheer cliff, at the bottom of which could be seen a stream in its snakelike course. Its surface was green, either from a trick of the light or from the composition of the dirt dissolved in its water. Even now, the river continued to carve out its canyon, bit by tiny bit.

He realized he’d have to accept the facts. He was in this world because somebody had constructed him based on Ryuji Takayama’s genetic information. It fit, and he’d better deal with it. He could deny it all he wanted, but he couldn’t escape his fate.

Kaoru was destined to return to the Loop.

The wind had picked up. He took a step back from the edge of the cliff. It wouldn’t do to be blown off the cliff and dashed on the floor of the canyon. That would mean the loss of valuable information—the end of two worlds.

Eliot’s plan was a devilish one. He had indeed seen twenty years into the future, just as he’d averred.

Why exactly had Eliot felt the compulsion, twenty years ago, to grant Takayama’s wish and bring his clone into the real world? Perhaps he’d seen it as an experiment in cloning, but more than that, it had to be because Eliot already had a clear vision of the NSCS. He’d already gotten the idea for a complete digitalization of a human being’s molecular structure using the as-yet-unconstructed apparatus. Indeed, he’d already settled on a trial subject.

Nobody could be expected to volunteer for neutrino scanning, but without a volunteer, the machine couldn’t be tested. The days when test subjects could be drafted against their will were long gone. Without a young, healthy, willing volunteer, this elaborate apparatus would simply go to waste.

Eliot put it best himself. “If we plucked somebody out of the Loop and kept him around long enough, then we’d have a legitimate reason for using the NSCS on him: to send him back. If he wanted to go home, we’d be in a position to send him there. Cloning is the only way to bring someone from the Loop into the real world, but things are different when it comes to sending someone from the real world into the Loop. Using the NSCS, we can reconstitute you inside the Loop as you are this very minute—your consciousness, your thoughts, your memories.”

If he wanted to go home.

That was the condition, but that was also the rub. Why would he want that? He’d never see his father, his mother, or Reiko again. And his child … Kaoru had already planted his chromosomes inside Reiko’s womb—he had a child on the way, via old-fashioned biological reproduction, and if he went into the Loop he’d never see the child’s face.

If that was the only factor, he’d never play along with Eliot’s scientific game. Not a chance. His genes may have come from the virtual world, but at the moment he was very much alive in this one. Home? This was his home now. No matter what he’d been before, since his birth here he’d lived his own life, chosen his own course. He liked it here.

But luck was conspiring against him. Kaoru was in a no-win situation.

During the process of reconstituting Takayama, the ring virus had escaped, eventually mutating into the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. That was a fact. The ring virus had been embedded in Takayama’s genes, and sometime during the operation of the genome synthesizer, something had gone wrong: a fragment had become embedded in an intestinal bacterium. Which was not to say that the ring virus had been cleanly extracted from Takayama’s genes, returning his DNA to its pristine, uninfected state. No, it was likely that the ring virus was still there, a part of him.

As soon as Eliot told him this, Kaoru started to wonder. If this virus is embedded in my genes, why haven’t I come down with MHC myself?

Not only had he never come down with the cancer, but every test he’d ever undergone for the virus came out negative.

Eliot had an explanation for that. “Somewhere in the RNA-DNA transcription process, a mutation must have occurred, inserting a stop code. It didn’t show up in tests. You see, the MHC virus causes a mutation in gene P53 of the infected cell. The virus itself has a telomerase sequence. It inserts the sequence TTAGGG into the DNA of the infected cell. This makes the cell immortal, but cancerous.

“As soon as we realized that the MHC virus came from Takayama, we obtained a sample of your cells and started analyzing them. I hope you don’t mind. You may remember an unexplained blood test a while back … In any case. We were surprised to find that the telomere sequence in your cells was not TTAGGG. It seems that in your case, although the MHC virus produces a telomerase and attaches the TTAGGG sequence to DNA ends, it’s unstable and soon breaks down. Your cells’ lifespan doesn’t increase, but your cells don’t turn cancerous. You may be a new type of human being, one with true immunity to the MHC virus.”

Eliot’s explanation made a certain amount of sense to Kaoru. His immunity probably came from a slight discrepancy between Loop genes and real-world ones. All things considered, maybe that was only to be expected.

As Eliot’s words flashed through his brain, Kaoru thought he could see the course of his past life stretched out in the canyon below him, trailing a tail of light. The course that light would travel in the future seemed to have been foreordained.

Kaoru wondered when the suggestion that he come here had first been implanted in his mind. He was ten when the gravitational anomaly map had made its way onto his computer screen, despite the fact that the information it contained was nowhere in the database he’d been using. Of course Eliot had sent it. No doubt he’d seen to it somehow that Kaoru come across the information on longevity zones, too. Eliot needed to keep Kaoru perpetually intrigued by this spot in the desert, but he couldn’t be open about it. He had to continually feed Kaoru hints to keep his curiosity aroused. Eliot had allowed Kaoru to think that everything was his own discovery, one coincidence on top of another, while at the same time he’d carefully emphasized the mysterious possibility of salvation that this point in the desert seemed to offer them all.

Kaoru was sure that Eliot had been behind his mother’s stumbling across the right Indian legends, and the article about the man who’d miraculously recovered from cancer. Such stories had been on the increase over the last six months or so—no doubt Eliot had sent out a lot more clues than the few that Kaoru and his mother had picked up on. But even those had been enough: Kaoru was here now.

He’d come here on his own, of his own free will, out of a sense of mission. That had been Eliot’s ultimate requirement. The procedure wouldn’t work if he’d captured Kaoru and brought him here by force. The NSCS would reproduce his exact mental state at the moment of scanning. If he’d been forced here, his mind would have been filled with fear and hostility, and those emotions would have gone with him. He’d need to go willingly, with a goal clearly in mind and a calm acceptance of his fate.

“It’s not my style to use force,” Eliot had said, but Kaoru knew what that really meant. The project would fail if the participant was unwilling.

Willingness and a sense of mission: Kaoru had showed up with exactly what Eliot required of him. And the carrot Eliot held out to him was quite enough to satisfy that sense of mission.

“The key to conquering the MHC virus is within you. Unless we can analyze your genome in three dimensions, your mitochondria, your metabolic cycle, your secretion factors, we’re not going to be able to solve this. Simply analyzing your DNA sequence isn’t enough. We need to digitize your entire body. We think that a special gene insertion method might prove to be a powerful treatment, but in order to understand the full effects of insertion, we need to run detailed simulations, and we need data on you for that. Do you understand what this means? The things we learn from you will have immediate application. Your father, your mother, your lover will be the first ones to benefit. It’s only proper that you be rewarded for laying your life on the line.”

Eliot’s expression was earnest as he offered this promise.

The longevity zone Kaoru had imagined he’d find out here in the desert had proved to be a mirage. Its only vestige was this decrepit old scientist, Kaoru reflected bitterly. But what Kaoru had hoped to find in his longevity zone—a cure for MHC, something to save the lives of his loved ones, something to prevent the entire spectrum of life on earth from falling victim to this cancer—that was about to be granted him, in a most unexpected way. As long as he was willing to trade his body for it …

His body supposedly contained something that completely blocked the effects of the virus, and the best way to instantaneously and exactly lay bare that mechanism was to neutrino scan him. The things they learned would have immediate application. The terror of the cancer virus would disappear: life on earth would learn to coexist with the virus.

Kaoru understood the logic behind it. There was no time to pursue this knowledge by traditional methods. Long before they arrived at a cure, time would have run out—at least for his father. His mother would probably lose her mind, while Reiko might kill herself and the baby inside her.

He may have come from the virtual world, but he felt that this life had value, and was worth living. He’d been alive these twenty years—the hunger he’d satisfied with Reiko was proof of that. If it hadn’t been for her, he might not have ever felt so alive.

I exist, right here, right now.

Beaming with confidence, he stood at the end of the ridge like one of those peculiar rocks visible on the horizon. He gathered all his courage and expressed it in a shout, as loud a yawp as he could make.

The sound of his voice echoed in the canyon, flew across the land toward the horizon, disappearing in the distance. He imagined that was how he himself would disappear, leaving only echoes behind.

His feelings toward Eliot were complicated, needless to say. They went beyond straightforward hatred. After all, it was thanks to Eliot that he had a physical body. All the pleasure and pain he’d experienced these last twenty years he owed to Eliot’s ingenuity. If someone had asked Kaoru whether he’d wanted this life, he would have answered with a resounding yes. But then, if he’d never received this bodily existence, the cancer virus would never have been loosed upon the world.

Kaoru knew he bore no responsibility for that. But as a fact it was undeniable, and it weighed on his mind.

However, this was no time to be caught up in resentment, hatred, or the pricks of conscience. It was time for him to steel himself and pay the price. It was time to look to the future. Always to the future.

Kaoru turned around and strode purposefully away from the cliff.

6

It took another ten days to make everything ready. Kaoru spent the time going through the record of Takayama’s life in the Loop, experiencing it until he knew it all, up to the moment of his death. He made it all his own, from the man’s relationships with parents and friends to his scholarly learning, his habits of thought, the way he spoke.

By the time Kaoru got so that he could understand the language they spoke in the Loop without a mechanical translator, he’d essentially finished committing the man’s life to memory. Perhaps because they shared the same genes, Kaoru found it felt rather natural to become the man in this way. In fact, the more he found out the less he considered Takayama a separate person. At certain moments Takayama’s life seemed to overlap with his own.

On the morning of the big day, Eliot accompanied Kaoru down in the elevator. As they descended three thousand feet below the surface, all of Kaoru’s misgivings melted away. He was about to cross over to that distant shore, but strangely he felt no fear. The special atmosphere of the place actually lent his mood a touch of solemnity, of grandeur.

The elevator doors opened. He could see a section of the NSCS control center. Surrounded by thick security walls, the computers’ lights were flashing. But they weren’t inside the NSCS yet. Kaoru would go in there alone.

Eliot kept pace with Kaoru. He refused to use a motorized wheelchair, telling Kaoru that he preferred to propel one himself, to keep his muscles in shape. The old-fashioned wheelchair looked out of place here, surrounded by the latest technology.

Panting faintly, Eliot said, “I need to ask you something before we begin, so that we have no misunderstandings. You don’t think I let loose the MHC virus on purpose, do you?”

The thought had crossed Kaoru’s mind, but all his doubts on that score had been settled.

“Why would you do that?”

Kaoru went behind Eliot’s wheelchair and tried to push for him, but the older man waved him away as he would a fly. “Don’t interfere,” he said, but kindly, renewing his grip on the wheels. “Why would I do it, you ask? Isn’t that obvious? To ensure funding for the Loop.”

True enough, if Eliot could make the case that restarting the Loop was a necessary step toward defeating the MHC virus, then he’d get a massive amount of funding. A cure for the virus was the top priority worldwide—if one were developed, it would bring huge profits all around. The return on investment would be phenomenal, to say nothing of what it would contribute to society. And with that funding, Eliot would be able to achieve his dream of reactivating the Loop, a dream that had been on ice for twenty years.

“You wouldn’t do something like that.”

“And why wouldn’t I?”

“Because there’d be no way you could foresee how the virus would behave. That, and I have a hard time believing your hatred of the virus is feigned.”

Eliot swallowed and made a queer sound in the back of his throat. He, too, had lost several intimates to the disease: it was obvious what fueled his animosity toward it.

“I’m glad you understand. The virus’s getting loose was an accident, pure and simple. Had I known the virus was this wily, this nefarious, I would have been much, much more cautious …” His words of frustration carried the weight of truth.

“I know. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be down here.”

Eliot stopped his wheelchair and gazed vacantly up at Kaoru. His wide eyes were wet with tears.

“So you don’t … hold a grudge?”

“For what?”

“For taking it upon myself to bring you to this world, and then saying, ‘Time’s up, back you go.’”

“But I wouldn’t be here, as a human being, if it weren’t for you. The last twenty years haven’t been bad at all. In fact, you’ve given me a lot of great memories. I don’t have any grudge against you.”

Kaoru was trying to view things philosophically. He felt that if he failed to affirm the present world completely, then all that would be left to him would be fear of the world to come. Unhappiness had dogged him. He’d seen his father, his mother, and his lover infected with the MHC virus; he’d witnessed Ryoji’s suicide. But he could still state unequivocally that this life had been a good one. It was the only thing that allowed him to remain composed as he walked down that hallway.

“Stop and talk with me for a moment.” As ever, spittle hung at the corner of Eliot’s mouth.

“Alright.”

So the two of them stopped to shoot the breeze there in the middle of the long hallway leading to the neutrino scanner. Kaoru leaned back against the wall, and Eliot propped his head against the back of his wheelchair. They each laughed at the other’s casualness.

“I’m sure I’ve already told you this, but we wouldn’t have arranged for your birth here had there not already been plans for the NSCS. Everything’s organically interconnected. If just one element had been missing, things would have turned out entirely different.”

“So it’s a mere accumulation of coincidence?”

“Certainly it’s coincidence that’s led us to restart the Loop—to be forced to restart it. But the Loop and the real world correspond to each other on some level.”

Kaoru had begun to notice that himself. It was almost as if the virtual world, cancer-ridden and frozen in time, was reaching out to move the real world, to use it.

Eliot changed to a new metaphor as he continued his explanation. “There comes a point when a child—even one not particularly precocious in science—notices that the structure of the atom resembles the structure of the solar system. The child sees the atom and its component particles as constituting their own universe, and wonders if life exists on those miniature ‘planets’ just as it does on ours. That’s the circle of life. That’s why I named it the Loop.”

“I think I said something like that to my father when I was in elementary school.” And to Kaoru it seemed that it wasn’t just the microscopic realm that might work like that. Maybe the solar system was but an atom, and the Milky Way an aggregation of atoms, a molecule. The surrounding universe was a cell, and all of existence a huge organism. A being that held within it a smaller being, which held within it a smaller being—like a series of nested boxes. Certain ancient religions took such a view, just as they saw life cycling through a series of existences, past, present, and future.

“What do you think happens if the circle is broken? The microscopic and the macroscopic are connected, interlocking—if part of the cycle is arrested, it’s going to affect the rest of it.”

“If the circle gets broken … well, it just has to be reconnected.”

“That’s right. But not simply by going back to the beginning and doing it over. We have to overcome the calamity that has befallen the Loop, and then reconnect it.”

“So what happens to the Loop’s historical trajectory? Its cancer?”

“The same thing that happens to any species that runs into an evolutionary dead-end: it goes extinct. Records will remain in the Loop’s memory banks, but the events will be surgically removed from the real world’s history, just like we’d cut out cancer cells. The history of the Loop will be shunted onto a side road. It will start again from a new page.”

It reminded Kaoru of a river carving out a land scape. Water follows the shape of the land as it flows ever downward, but sometimes it finds itself trapped, and then it swells into a pool. Even then, the water is always searching for an escape, probing weak places in the ground until it succeeds in making itself a new path. It’s easy to tell where a river ran into dead ends on its way to the sea: the tale is told by a river’s oddly acute angles, its occasional islands.

The Loop was like a river in that respect. Right now it was stalled, its way blocked. But left as it was to stagnate, it was bound to find a way to overspill its containment and exert a negative influence on the real world. The real world corresponded to it, after all. While it was necessary to find real-world ways of dealing with the cancer virus, it was just as necessary to change the trajectory of the Loop, its history of cancer. Until that was done, there would be no fundamental solution.

It was Kaoru’s job to overcome the blockage in the Loop, to make a new way for it to flow.

Eliot spoke again. “Sometimes the world needs divine intervention. So God is born of a virgin. And reborn. All the arrangements have been made.”

Kaoru realized what he was being told: he was to become a god. It didn’t feel real to him. He felt too vividly the sense of being pushed along this path.

He started down the hall again, and as he walked, he thought. That Indian’s life I was shown at Wayne’s Rock: what was the meaning of that?

Eliot had prepared that experience for him, of course. Kaoru had yet to ask why. Kaoru’s own interpretation was that it had been a dress rehearsal for death. But another possible meaning had just occurred to him.

The Indian had seen his wife and child die before his very eyes. The cruelty, the loss, and his own inability to do anything about it had been much harder to bear than thoughts of his own death. Right up until the veil of darkness closed around him, his thoughts had been ones of pity, rage, fear at having been unable to save them. Those negative images had swirled around in the blackness of Kaoru’s helmet display, and after taking it off he was determined not to ever have to feel that way again, in the virtual world or the real one. The Indian’s story was not one of a man who had sacrificed his life for those of his wife and daughter. It was incomparably worse than that. It was the story of a man who’d been forced to look on helplessly while they perished.

Why was it necessary for me to see that—to experience it?

In view of subsequent events, the experience’s effect on him seemed to accord with Eliot’s plan. Kaoru’s desire to never go through that again motivated his decision to sacrifice himself to save his loved ones. But now what planted itself in Kaoru was the idea that he’d been manipulated, trapped, into doing just what Eliot wanted him to.

He strode down the corridor with profoundly mixed emotions. Eliot chased him in his wheelchair.

“Don’t you wish to make a phone call?”

Kaoru stopped. “A phone call?”

“Yes. Is there no one you wish to speak to?”

He’d already spoken to his father, not long before. He would have liked to hear his mother’s voice, but he didn’t know what he’d say to her. How was he supposed to explain what he was about to do? She’d lose it for sure.

Reiko. There was nobody else he could talk to.

Eliot showed Kaoru into a small room off the hallway and handed him a telephone receiver.

Kaoru dialed, praying she’d be in. Eliot gestured wordlessly to a monitor, as if to ask, Would you like video? Kaoru refused the offer. There was no need to make it a video-phone call. He had the feeling that hearing her voice alone, with no extraneous information, would better allow him to hold on to the memory.

A connection. “Hello?”

First contact with Reiko’s soft voice had the unexpected effect of reducing Kaoru to tears. Waves of emotion buffeted him. Memories overcame him, aural and visual. It was an explosion, triggered by her voice. He couldn’t control himself.

“Hello? Hello?”

Kaoru realized he never should have called her.

7

The hallway ended at a black door. This was where Kaoru said goodbye to Eliot.

Eliot held out a gargantuan hand for Kaoru to shake. Kaoru returned his grasp, although not very strongly. The last words he’d exchanged with Reiko still occupied his brain—his heart had been shattered into a thousand pieces—his gaze was elsewhere.

“I seem to have lived too long.”

Kaoru snapped back to reality. He looked down at Eliot and saw a man who had, indeed, grown too old for his own good. A man who had a precise grasp of how much longer he had to live.

I’ll be following you eventually, he seemed to want to say, but in fact they were headed to different places altogether. Eliot would never go where Kaoru was about to.

“Don’t forget your promise,” Kaoru said. He’d extracted another pledge from Eliot, in addition to his promise to use the data from Kaoru’s body to help his parents and Reiko first of all.

“I won’t. Trust me.”

Kaoru listened carefully for Eliot’s response, then turned and opened the door. Only he could go beyond that point. He slipped in, and the door shut behind him automatically.

An odd smell. Ions, perhaps. From this point, he’d receive instructions via loudspeaker. The metallic voice coming through the speakers was the only sound that came in from the outside. Kaoru was utterly cut off from the external world.

Following instructions, Kaoru took off the gown he was wearing, and then his sandals and his underwear. He went into the next room naked. According to what Eliot had told him, he was to pass through several clean rooms.

He had a pretty clear idea what was going to happen. He was going to be suspended in the center of the huge sphere that was the neutrino scanning capture system, where he would be bombarded with neutrinos from all directions. But there was a procedure he had to follow first.

In the next room he saw a stretcher. A voice instructed him to lie down on it. He lay down face up, and the stretcher began silently moving down a narrow, dark hallway. It took Kaoru through an air shower, and then a shower of purified water. Together these cleansed the surface of his body of all contaminants.

As he passed each station on the line, he could see a digital meter with a reading flashing in red, numbers approaching closer to one hundred with each stage. 99.99 … 99.999 … 99.9999 … The gauges showed the degree to which the rooms, and thus their occupant, were free of impurities.

The stretcher conveyed Kaoru into a clear oblong container. Purified water, slightly warmer than body temperature, began to engulf him. The container was shaped not so much like a bathtub as like a slightly oversized coffin.

Kaoru was fixed firmly in place, floating in water. Next he was transported into the neutrino scanning capture system.

The water had a calming effect on him. Gradually he became unable to tell where his body left off and the water began, as his ego began to dissolve into tiny bubbles and joined the water.

Reiko’s last words came back to him again, in what might have been his ego’s last attempt at resistance.

I felt the baby move this morning.

She’d sounded so happy to be able to report on the baby’s growth. The thought of the fetus in the embrace of her amniotic fluid allowed Kaoru to see his own situation as a bystander might. Come to think of it, he was in the same state as that baby, right down to its will to be born.

This place was a universe unto itself, ruled by utter darkness. Gravity had disappeared: his body felt weightless. He knew he was inside a sphere six hundred feet in diameter. His eyes should have been able to see its inner surface. But in the darkness the space surrounding him felt infinite.

As a child, he’d often gone out onto the balcony of his family’s high-rise apartment to stare up into the night sky. Seeing the stars and the moon always strengthened his desire to fathom the universe.

What a different situation he was in now. Back then he’d stood on a height overlooking the ocean; now he was in a three-thousand-feet deep hole in the desert. Back then the air had been filled with the scent of the sea; this space was filled with the artificial smell of ions.

He thought he saw a blue light flash for an instant in the emptiness above him. Had the neutrino bombardment begun? The flash reminded him of a star twinkling.

Any moment now he would be bombarded with neutrinos from points on every part of the inner surface of the sphere. Each would penetrate his body and reach the point on the sphere wall opposite its point of origin. Molecular information about him would accumulate gradually, until Eliot would begin to get a three-dimensional digital image of his body’s minutest structures. The more neutrino radiation he received, the sharper that image would become. He’d been told that the first rounds would simply pass through his body—he wouldn’t feel much if anything. But that level of irradiation wouldn’t provide enough information for their purposes. They would need to expose him to so much neutrino penetration as to actually break down his cells. Kaoru tried not to think about what would happen to him then.

There were more blue lights now, and they flashed more quickly, blinking energetically in the darkness. They was beautiful. They tore through space like shooting stars, glittering, leaving white trails behind.

Kaoru stared peacefully into the night sky. He felt like a child again …

He wondered if this was what astronauts felt like. They said that seeing the Earth from space brought one closer to the territory of the divine. If so, then it was a little different from Kaoru’s situation after all. What he was aiming at was godhood itself.

Something was pressing rhythmically on his eardrums—strange, as he should be cut off from all sound in here. Someone or something was speaking loudly into his ear. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be human. Maybe a digital signal from the virtual world?

Suddenly, an image was inserted into his mind. It was as if a Chagall painting had been forcefully placed inside his head. He wasn’t seeing it with his eyes—it was like a cord from a video deck had been connected directly to his brain. Brightly colored, impressionistic images flashed through his mind, disappearing as abruptly as they had appeared.

The bluish-white lights connected into tangled threadwork now, an infinite number of bands intersecting in the middle distance. The lines of light now filled the darkness. He could hear the sounds of their collisions, sounds he shouldn’t have been able to hear … Digital signals whirled around him, caressing his earlobes.

His body was cast into the gravity-less universe. He felt as if he were floating up out of the tank of water and into the vortex of light. His mind wandered from his body, becoming clearer all the time.

Kaoru was entering the final stage now. Every second brought him closer to the end of this journey which had begun as a trip toward a point in the desert and had become a pilgrimage to death and rebirth.

The images were slipped into his brain, images composed of rough particles. Mosaic-like images, with indistinct edges. Try as he might he could no longer summon smooth, natural images as before. There wasn’t enough information to analyze properly.

The neutrino bombardment intensified. His molecular structure began to take digital shape. As its resolution increased, the mosaic filter was removed from the images in his brain. Now they were reproduced before his mind’s eye as perfectly natural images.

Vision was back to normal now. He thought he glimpsed, at the far end of a corridor of light, a Hades indistinguishable from the here-and-now.

His journey ended. His body disappeared from the real world and was reborn into the Loop.

The procedure had concluded. The tank in which Kaoru had been floating now contained no human form. Instead it held the liquefied remains of his destroyed cells. As his ego had melted into the water, so too had his body broken down into its smallest components, dissolving into the purified water. The water was no longer pure. Thanks to the bluish-white light it didn’t look bloody, but it was a noticeably thicker liquid than before.

His body was defunct. But Kaoru’s consciousness still existed. Neutrinos had captured the state of his brain on the brink of death, the positions of his synapses and neurons, chemical reactions in mid-reaction, and had recreated them all digitally.

He was not to be reconstructed directly from this final blueprint. Rather, he would be reborn according to the information captured by the NSCS. The growth process would be carefully controlled, and after approximately a week of Loop time, the infant would grow to the physical state the subject had been in when he’d entered the NSCS. He should regain his original consciousness, as well.

Kaoru had a pretty good idea where he was now. Inside a womb. A real one, not a metaphorical one. He was inside a virgin womb, bathed in amniotic fluid.

He could hear his mother’s heartbeat as if over a great distance. The sound echoed in the dark, sealed sphere, getting louder and louder.

Kaoru did not know whose womb he was in, but he knew he was about to be born.

He stretched out his body, filled with a desire to get out into the world.

The light was too bright: it hurt his eyes. But this wasn’t the bluish flickering anymore. The light was steady and white, artificial. It seemed to come from overhead fluorescent light fixtures, the kind you find in hospitals.

In the light, he could see his umbilical cord, the grotesque thread that alone connected him to the mother. He reached out a hand and tried to sever it himself, and let forth a loud cry. A cry just like any normal baby’s.

“Wah! Wah!”

It was the beginning of a new journey.

PART FIVE

Advent

1

The day was so clear it was hard to believe it was the rainy season. Walking along on the embankment that separated the beach from the road, he set his sights on the horizon: the other side of the bay was obscured in haze. A sea wall extended out from the beach; several anglers stood on it, lazily casting their lines into the sea. It was still early in the summer, so there were no bathers yet, but a couple of families had spread sheets on the sand and were picnicking.

Gazing at this peaceful seaside scene he could forget that this was only a virtual reality. Six months had elapsed since his rebirth into the Loop. He’d adapted to this world completely, body and mind.

The previous October, Ryuji Takayama had died, once. His death had been confirmed, and an autopsy had been performed by a friend of his from medical school, Mitsuo Ando. Notwithstanding that, in January of this year Takayama had awoken from his three-month sleep, due to the combined efforts of Ando, his pathologist colleague Miyashita, and others. He had crawled out of the womb of a maiden named Sadako Yamamura, had torn the umbilical cord with his own hands, and in just a week’s time he’d grown into the body Kaoru had possessed when he’d entered the neutrino scanner. Ando and Miyashita, unaware that the Loop had been created by a higher power, could not be expected to understand the true mechanism behind Takayama’s resurrection. The three months Takayama had been dead corresponded to the twenty years of Kaoru’s lifetime. And now the consciousness that had once been Kaoru had taken on Takayama’s flesh in order to live in the Loop.

His living conditions were rather inconvenient—a dead man couldn’t very well walk around in public—but he was in a perfect environment for research. Takayama had spent most of half a year in a laboratory lent him by Miyashita, researching the virus. This meant unraveling one by one the clues hidden within his own cells. It had taken half a year to finish the greater part of the research and to perfect a vaccine for the ring virus.

This was his first time out in a long while. He could feel the gentle wind cleansing his heart as it played over his skin. In his days as Kaoru he’d enjoyed the nighttime breeze on the balcony of their apartment; evidently his tastes hadn’t changed.

He could see the small form of a boy beyond the picnickers, standing where the waves petered out. The boy would creep hesitantly up to the water, and then dash back so as not to get his feet wet. Then he crouched and started digging a hole and making a sandpile. His body was bare from the waist up, and below the waist he wore a swimsuit, making his aversion to the water all the more conspicuous. His movements were quite careful. The boy wore a tight bikini-type swim-suit, and no swim cap.

The watcher thought about the first time he’d seen Reiko, at the pool. He remembered the queer impression her son Ryoji had made with his plaid shorts, not meant for swimming, and his swim cap from which not one strand of hair poked out. The touch of Reiko’s skin, the last words they’d exchanged—these images and sounds remained clear in his memory. What was she doing now?

He was walking along the narrow embankment with a plastic bag full of canned drinks, carefully balancing so as not to fall onto the sand or the road. Unlike the ridge he’d walked in the desert, the embankment was only a couple of feet wide. As he walked he felt as though he were traversing the thin, fragile boundary between this world and the next.

The boy ran away from the waves toward the embankment—he was heading toward a man seated on the embankment about a hundred yards ahead. The seated man was the boy’s father, the man he himself had come to talk to.

The man had eyes only for his son, and so was utterly unprepared for the visitor. Thinking it best not to startle him, Ryuji Takayama called out his name.

“Hey, Ando!”

Hearing his name called, the man looked up and all around. Then he caught sight of Takayama walking toward him, and his expression became one of dumb amazement.

“Hey, long time no see.”

Takayama hadn’t had any contact with Ando these six months. After assisting in Takayama’s rebirth, Ando had left the university. He’d disappeared.

Takayama sat down next to Ando and leaned closer so that their shoulders touched. But Ando quite openly avoided meeting his eyes, instead returning his gaze to his son, still running across the beach toward him.

Nonplussed, Takayama took a beverage out of the bag he carried and quickly drank it down. Then he took another can out and offered it to Ando. “Thirsty?”

Ando accepted the can silently and popped the pull ring, still not looking at Takayama.

“How did you know I was here?” Ando asked calmly.

Takayama simply said, “Miyashita told me.” Knowing that today was the anniversary of Ando’s son’s death, Miyashita had guessed that this was where he’d be, and he’d told Takayama.

A curious thing it was, though, that anniversary. Two years ago today, at this very spot, Ando’s son had drowned, and yet now here the boy was. Forgetting his own situation for a moment, Takayama could not help but smile.

“What do you want?” Ando asked, in a voice thick with tension. He didn’t seem very happy to see Takayama. Takayama had made a considerable effort to get here—he’d had to sneak out of the lab, then take a train and a bus. He felt he deserved a bit warmer a welcome. There seemed to be a misunderstanding of some kind.

Eliot had told him that everything was arranged for his rebirth. In any world, the idea of a dead man coming back to life would be pretty hard to accept. The stage would have to be set.

And set it Eliot had. He’d singled out Ando as someone who could be of use and sent him hints in code, all so he could arrange in as plausible a way as possible for Takayama’s rebirth. Bringing Ando’s dead son back to life was bait to get him to assist in bringing Takayama back.

In the case of Ando’s son, an inhabitant of the Loop, there was no need to go through a neutrino scan. It was an intra-Loop transfer, a simple matter of reconstituting the boy’s genetic information.

The Loop had been reset, six months ago, to the point where its cancerization had been triggered, and then restarted. Takayama’s advent had been timed with the utmost care so as to enable him to conquer the calamity whose seeds had been sown. If he were to do nothing, the Loop would proceed along the same path, turning cancerous. He needed to construct for it a new history, make a new channel for its dammed-up waters. If he succeeded, the world he’d lived in before, too, would retain its genetic diversity.

“Listen, I’m grateful to you, I really am. You worked out just as I expected.”

Takayama was indeed grateful to Ando. Just before coming to the Loop, he’d committed Takayama’s life to memory. He knew of his school days with Ando, and he knew of Ando’s brilliance. Without the help of such a friend, he doubted he ever would have been able to make his entrance in such a reasonable way as via virgin birth.

But Ando, it seemed, simply felt used. Or worse—maybe he suspected Takayama of being in league with Sadako Yamamura, of coming back in order to destroy the world.

If that was what Ando thought, then Takayama had no way to defend himself. The one thing he couldn’t do was reveal his true identity. Sometimes it depressed Takayama to think of the lonely life that awaited him. The only thing that kept him going was the desire that he kept hidden in his breast.

Down by the water’s edge again, the boy stood up and waved at Ando. Ando returned his signal, and the boy came closer, kicking sand as he came.

“Daddy, I’m thirsty!” Ando offered his son the beverage that Takayama had given him. The boy took it and drank it down.

Takayama watched the boy’s pale throat. He could almost see the cool liquid coursing down the little throat. Living, moving flesh and blood, brought back to life by only slightly different methods. A product of the same womb—a brother, almost.

“Want another one?” Takayama said, fishing around in his bag.

“Nope,” the boy said to Takayama, then turned to his father, raising the half-finished can as high as his head. “Can I have the rest?”

“Sure, drink up.” The boy went back to the water’s edge, swilling the can. Takayama figured the boy wanted to play with the can after it was empty, maybe fill it with sand. Ando yelled after him. “Takanori!”

The boy stopped and turned around. “What, Daddy?”

“Don’t go in the water yet, okay?”

The boy grinned in acknowledgement, and turned his back to him again.

The child was still afraid of the sea—he remembered drowning. He’d have to overcome that fear before he could get on with his long life.

“Cute kid,” Takayama said. He was thinking of his own child, still growing, no doubt, inside of Reiko.

Ando ignored his comment, instead saying, “Tell me something. What’s going to happen to the world now?” He glared at Takayama as if to say, You ought to know.

And he did know. Or at least, he had a better idea of it than Ando did. But he could never tell him.

“What do you think’s going to happen to it?”

Ando answered by sketching out a future that closely resembled the final cancerization of the Loop. The ring virus would spread throughout the world. The videotape would transform itself into various forms of media, and would itself spread worldwide. Women who came into contact with it while ovulating would give birth to children with the same genetic makeup as Sadako Yamamura; everyone else would be eliminated. The same would happen with men: a very few on whom the new media depended would survive, while the rest would be destroyed. You didn’t have to be a doctor to predict the results of this. All life would be assimilated to a single genetic pattern: Sadako.

“And you’re okay with all that?”

Ando’s gaze was brimming with animosity. He definitely misunderstood Takayama.

Without changing his expression, Takayama reached into his pocket and pulled out an ampoule. He handed it to Ando. “I want you to have this.”

“What’s this?”

“A vaccine.”

“A vaccine?” Ando accepted the tiny glass vial and examined it carefully.

After six months of research, Takayama had succeeded in developing a vaccine for the ring virus, based on hints found within his own cells. He’d only just perfected it. Animal trials showed it to be effective.

“Take that and it’ll take care of the virus. Your worrying days are over.”

“Did you come all the way here just to give me this?”

“What, can’t a guy go to the beach once in a while?” Takayama gave an embarrassed laugh. Ando’s expression seemed to soften a little.

As he put the vial in his breast pocket, Ando repeated his earlier question, but more calmly this time. “Can’t you tell me what’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know.” Takayama’s reply was blunt.

“Don’t give me that. Together you and Sadako are going to redesign the world and everything that lives in it—aren’t you?”

At that, Takayama had to laugh. There was no point in staying here any longer. He got to his feet, muttering, “Well, I guess I’ll be off now.”

“Are you leaving?” Ando looked up at him from where he sat on the embankment.

“It’s about time I took off. What are you going to do now?”

“What can I do? I’ll find a deserted island someplace out of the media’s reach, and raise my son there.”

“That sounds like you. Me, though, I’ve got to see things through to the end. Once it’s gone as far as it can go, who knows, maybe a will beyond human wisdom will exercise its power on us. Wouldn’t want to miss that.” Takayama was speaking vaguely on purpose, trying to say something without saying it. Relax. The world’s not going to turn out like you think it will. It already did end like that, once, but this time it won’t. I came back to see that it doesn’t.

He started walking away along the embankment.

“Bye, Ryuji. Say hi to Miyashita for me.”

Takayama stopped at the sound of Ando’s voice.

“Before I go, I want you to remember something. No matter what disaster strikes, we’ve got to meet it head on and overcome it. Only by accumulating that kind of experience can we change the world, you see. So … yeah, it’ll be alright.”

Takayama waved and walked away. He was sure Ando hadn’t understood. But that was okay. Someday he would.

He glanced behind him from time to time as he heard Ando’s voice and his son’s.

“Daddy, you promised, right?”

“Yes, I did.” Ando again told the boy what would happen once he overcame his fear of the water. “I’ll take you to meet Mommy.”

Ando and his wife had separated over the boy’s death.

“Mommy’s going to be so surprised.”

Listening to these scraps of conversation, Takayama imagined the Ando family’s happy reunion.

He was jealous. That was something he’d never have.

2

He reviewed the longitude in his head, although he had no trouble remembering it exactly. The time, too. There was no way he could forget the appointment he’d made with Eliot.

From the seaside town where he’d met Ando, Takayama headed due south, arriving at the appointed place slightly ahead of schedule. It was on a hillside with a nice view across the water to a cape. The gentle pine-covered slope continued right down to the water’s edge.

Takayama sat down on the grass and waited.

June 27, 1991, 2:00 pm exactly, Loop time. That was what Eliot had told him. There was still a half hour to go.

Six months had passed for Takayama since the Loop had been restarted, but time moved somewhat slower in Eliot’s world. The Loop would be moving even faster if they’d been able to mobilize the same number of supercomputers as before, but they hadn’t. As a result, the Loop would only move five or six years for every year the computers ran. Six months to Takayama would correspond to about a month where Eliot was.

He’d made contact with his father and with Reiko just before going into the scanner. A month had elapsed for them since then. He’d made his crossing to this world without being able to explain things to them. They probably thought Kaoru was lost somewhere in the desert, when in fact, he’d disappeared completely.

At the very least, there were things he still wanted to tell them. And how else could he fully explain his actions but with his own mouth, his own body?

It was easy to call Takayama up on the computer monitors over there, a simple matter of specifying time and place. So he’d made Eliot promise to show his parents and Reiko that he was safe and sound.

Takayama looked at his watch. Almost time.

Then, as if to proclaim the arrival of the appointed moment, the clouds parted in front of him and sunlight shone on the surface of the ocean. It was as if a window had opened in the sky, an interface. Takayama wouldn’t be able to see anybody through it—no faces, no expressions—but they would be able to see him.

Two o’clock on the button. He should be in view for them now. Takayama raised his head slightly and smiled at the people who would be watching him.

He called them each by name, speaking to them, telling him about what he was up to.

There were so many things he wanted to ask them, but he knew he couldn’t. Had they been able to use the digital information they’d gained from his body to combat the MHC virus? He wanted to think they had: he wanted to think that his father’s life was saved. His child with Reiko would be farther along now than when he’d spoken to Reiko on the phone. Had Reiko found the hope to go on living in her world? Takayama hoped that seeing him like this, she’d make up her mind once and for all to live.

He had every intention of dealing with the ring virus and the mutated-video media that carried it in this world. If coming in contact with those media programmed one to die in a week’s time, it should be simple enough to devise a deprogramming system. He had absolute confidence. He’d come all the way to this world from the other one determined to overcome. When it came down to it, he was godlike. He knew how this world worked. What cared he for viruses or mutant media?

As he spoke these thoughts to the sky, he tried to imagine that other world recovering as the course of Loop history normalized.

He remembered the hideous desert trees, disfigured by cancer. He remembered the dead rats he’d seen in Wayne’s Rock, swollen bellies upturned.

He remembered the single pink blossom on the hillside, the one tree that had escaped the cancer. Takayama concentrated on that tree, allowing it to expand in his imagination.

He wished with all his heart for the moment when those trees would cast off their tumors and reassume their fresh greenness. He imagined those withered limbs heavy with beautiful blossoms. If the Loop recovered its biodiversity, those scenes would be reality.

A breeze widened the gap in the clouds. The observers’ faces flickered in and out of view.

Takayama nodded. “It’s going to be alright,” he said.

That hope was likely to be heard.

If you enjoyed The Complete Ring Trilogy, read on for an extract of Koji Suzuki's Dark Water...

A selection of deliciously spooky short stories from the Japanese master of suspense, the acclaimed author of Ring. The film Dark Water is based on the first story in the collection.

Suzuki demonstrates the power of his psychological insight into the mechanics of fear in this highly atmospheric collection of stories unified by the theme of water.

Following her divorce, Yoshimi Matsubara lives with her five-year-old daughter Ikuko in a depressing and damp apartment block on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay. But when a child’s red bag keeps turning up in unexpected places, Yoshino’s sanity seems to be threatened, and she soon begins to fear that her daughter’s life is at risk.

Kensuke Suehiro jumps at the chance to visit a restricted island in Tokyo Bay, about which he once heard a rather strange story. But when he arrives, he finds far more than he bargained for.

Fisherman Hiroyuki is embittered and unhappy in his marriage. But getting rid of his wife turns out to be anything but easy, especially when his own boat seems to be against him.

Family man Sugiyama finds himself trapped in an underwater cave. Can he find a way to communicate with his beloved son one last time?

Just four examples from this beautifully crafted collection of stories filled with suspense, tension and drama. A perfect introduction to one of Japan’s top literary stars.

Buy the ebook here

PROLOGUE

Whenever her son and his family came down from Tokyo to spend time with her, Kayo would take her little granddaughter Yuko out on early morning walks. They always made their way to Cape Kannon, the easternmost tip of the Miura Peninsula. It was just the right distance for a stroll, the walk around the cape and back to the house measuring less than two miles.

On the spacious observation platform provided for a panoramic view from the cape, Yuko would point far out to sea at whatever had aroused her curiosity, excitedly tug on her grandmother’s hand, and buffet her with a flurry of questions. Kayo answered each of them patiently. Yuko had arrived the day before—she was on summer vacation—and was to stay for another week. The prospect of spending time with her granddaughter was, for Kayo, simply exhilarating.

The view of the furthermost recesses of Tokyo Bay beyond the Tokyo-Yokohama industrial area remained hazy. You rarely got a clear view all the way across, for Tokyo Bay was larger than people thought. In contrast, the mountains of the Boso Peninsula seemed to rise up immediately across the Uraga Waterway, and a high and distinct ridge snaked from Mt Nokogiri to Mt Kano.

Yuko let go of the railing and stretched her arms out as if trying to grasp something. Cape Futtsu, whose long, slender sandbar lay on the opposite side of the bay, appeared to be almost within reach.

The imaginary line that connected Cape Futtsu and Cape Kannon was the threshold of Tokyo Bay, and a stream of cargo vessels proceeded in and out in two neat columns through a corridor of water. Yuko waved to the lines of freighters, which looked like rows of toy boats from where she and her grandmother stood.

The tide flowed rapidly in the shipping lane, and striped patterns sometimes appeared on the water. High tide flooded the bay with water from the open sea, and the low tide emptied the bay. Perhaps for this reason, all the debris in Tokyo Bay was said to wash up at Cape Kannon and Cape Futtsu. If Tokyo Bay was a huge heart, the capes jutting out on each side functioned like valves filtering out waste from the seawater that circulated by the gentle pulse of the tide.

But it was not just the circulation of the sea. The rivers Edo, Ara, Sumida, and Tama all supplied fresh blood to Tokyo Bay like so many thick arteries. The variety of trash washing ashore ranged from old tires, shoes and chil-dren’s toys to the remains of wrecked fishing boats and wooden doorplates bearing addresses from as far away as Hachioji. Some of the things made you wonder how they ever ended up in the sea: bowling pins, wheelchairs, drumsticks, and lingerie…

Yuko’s attention turned to the pieces of driftage bobbing amid the waves.

Driftage can spark the beachcomer’s imagination. The sight of a motorcycle’s side cover can conjure up the image of a biker skidding off a pier into the sea, while a plastic bag stuffed with used syringes has a whiff of crime. Each item of debris has its own tale to tell. Any particularly intriguing thing you may come across on the beach is best left untouched—because it begins to tell its tale to you, as soon as you pick it up. Fine if the story is heartwarming, but if it curdles your blood, things will never be the same.

Especially if you love the sea, you ought to be mindful. You pick up what looks like a rubber glove and find out it’s really a severed hand. That sort of thing could keep you off the beaches forever. The feeling of picking up a hand is probably not too easy to shake off.

Kayo would say such things matter-of-factly to frighten her granddaughter. Every time Yuko begged for a scary story, Kayo responded by weaving a tale around a piece of driftage.

The young girl would probably ask for scary stories on every morning walk in the coming week, but Kayo had plenty of stories to tell and then some. Ever since she’d picked up that thing by the sea, one morning twenty years ago, when she’d just started taking her walks, her imagination had only been growing more active. Now, she could freely draw forth from articles of driftage the bizarre tales that littered the water’s edge.

‘No treasures?’ Yuko wanted to know if nicer things ever washed up, perhaps from some faraway land, instead of just the scary stuff.

All kinds of vessels, from tiny boats to giant ships, busily plied the narrow sea-lanes down there in the bay. Why shouldn’t a chest of gems plop from a ship’s cabin into the water now and then? So reasoned Yuko.

‘I wouldn’t say I’ve never found any,’ Kayo replied ambiguously.

‘May I have it?’ Though Yuko didn’t know exactly what this treasure was, her desire for it was spontaneous.

‘I could give it to you,’ said Kayo, hinting that the offer was conditional.

‘If what?’

‘If you’ll keep me company for the whole week, on my walks.’

‘Of course I will!’

‘Then you shall have your treasure on the morning of the day you go back to Tokyo.’

‘Promise?’

To seal the bargain, they performed a pledge that was popular among children. Perhaps Yuko wouldn’t like the treasure—or even agree it was a treasure. To make sure the girl wouldn’t feel cheated, Kayo needed to keep weaving more tales, so that the setting from which the words had sprung would be vivid in Yuko’s mind.

For Kayo, one thing was certain. In the long life that Yuko had ahead of her, the moment was bound to arrive when the treasure would reveal its worth.

FLOATING WATER

Thinking again about drinking the tap water, Yoshimi Matsubara held the glass up to the fluorescent light in the kitchen. Rotating it just above eye level, she saw tiny bubbles floating in it. Tangled up with them, or so it seemed, were countless particles of dirt that could have come in the water or been a deposit at the bottom of the glass. She thought better of taking a second gulp and with a grimace poured the water down the sink.

It just didn’t taste the same. It was already three months since they’d moved from their rented house in Musashino to this seven-story apartment building that stood on a landfill, but she still couldn’t get used to the tap water. She’d take a gulp out of habit, but the strange odor, which wasn’t even like chloramine, attacked her nostrils and almost always kept her from finishing the glass.

‘Mommy? Can we do fireworks?’ It was her daughter Ikuko, now almost six years old, calling from the sofa in the living room. She hugged a bundle of miniature fireworks that a friend at nursery school had been kind enough to share with her.

Barely registering her daughter’s pleas, still clutching the empty glass, Yoshimi was picturing the path their water had to take from the Tone River. As she tried to trace the route in her mind, wondering how it differed from the flow of water back in Musashino, an image of tar-black sludge came to her. She did not know exactly when the apartment’s site had been filled, nor in what way the water pipes wound from island to island. But she did know, from a map charting the history of Tokyo Bay, that the land they lived on didn’t exist in the late ‘20s. The thought that the uncertain ground beneath her feet had as its foundation the dregs of several generations enfeebled her grip on the glass.

‘Mommy!’

It was dusk on a Sunday in late August. Urged on by the deepening dark, Ikuko pleaded with her mother. The water still hadn’t been turned off when Yoshimi turned to face the living room.

‘There’s nowhere to set them off…’

The park by the canal in front of their building was closed for construction work, and since there was absolutely nowhere else in the neighborhood that was suitable, Yoshimi was about to tell her daughter no. Then she realized they’d never been up to the roof of their apartment building.

Mother and daughter proceeded to the fourth-floor elevator hall with a box of matches, a candle, and a plastic bag containing the fireworks. They pressed the up button and waited for the elevator, which arrived with a painful groan.

When they got in, Ikuko said, imitating an elevator attendant: ‘Welcome, madam. Which floor do you require?’

‘Take me up to the seventh, please,’ Yoshimi played along.

‘Very well, madam.’

With a slight bow of the head, Ikuko turned to press the button for the seventh floor, only to find that she couldn’t reach it. Yoshimi giggled at her daughter’s plight; on tiptoe and with her arm outstretched as far as it would go, the best she could manage with her straining index finger was the fourth floor. By this time, the elevator doors were starting to close automatically.

‘Too bad,’ Yoshimi said, and hit the button for the seventh floor.

‘Huh!’ Ikuko sulked.

The grainy feel of the elevator button lingered with Yoshimi, and she unconsciously wiped her forefinger against her linen skirt. Every time she used the elevator, the black, blistered surfaces of the floor buttons made her feel gloomy. Someone had used a cigarette to scorch the buttons for the first through the seventh floors. Although the NO SMOKING sign right next to them remained unscathed, none of the originally white buttons had escaped. Whenever Yoshimi wondered what could motivate such behavior, she felt chilly. It probably had something to do with repressed anger against society—and who could be sure the frustration wouldn’t be vented on people someday? What terrified her most was that this man (she’d somehow decided it was a man) used the elevator of the very apartment building they lived in. As a single mother, worried about the worst, she couldn’t shake off her anxiety. Still, she’d had enough of men and didn’t ever want to live with one again.

During the two years she’d lived with her husband, she’d never once felt protected. When they separated four and a half years ago, and when a year later the divorce became official, she felt relieved, frankly. She just couldn’t adapt herself to living with a man. Perhaps it was a Matsubara family tradition. Both her grandmother and her mother had followed the same path, and for the third generation now, theirs was a two-person family of just mother and daughter. Ikuko, who held Yoshimi’s hand now, would in the years ahead likely get married and become a mother, but Yoshimi somehow knew the marriage wouldn’t last.

As the elevator stopped and the doors slid open, Tokyo Bay spread out in front of them. They stepped out into the corridor and saw four apartments to the left and four to the right of the elevator, but none of them showed any sign of occupancy. The fourteen-year-old apartment building suffered from the after-effects of the burst economic bubble.

A few years earlier, when, out of the blue, a project to construct a high-rise complex in this area had come up, this apartment building and other mixed-occupancy buildings in the neighborhood had been subjected to a bout of land speculation. But the neighbors resisted being chased out, and while the coordinators fumbled, the bubble burst and the construction project disappeared into thin air. About half of the forty-eight apartment units in the building had been purchased, but could not easily be resold; twenty were eventually put up for rent at considerably less than market value. Yoshimi, who caught wind of this from a friend in the real estate business, had always dreamed of having a view of the sea, so she grabbed the opportunity, leaving the rented house in Musashino she’d lived in for so long, and transplanting herself onto the completely different environment of reclaimed land. She simply couldn’t abide staying in a house that still reeked of her husband, and also, now that her mother was dead, childcare-friendly Minato Ward seemed more convenient for a single mother and her daughter. The publishing company Yoshimi worked for was in nearby Shimbashi, and the best thing about it all was that she’d be able to devote time saved on the commute to her daughter.

Upon moving in, however, she found that a lot of the owners had purchased their units as an investment. They had never moved in, and by now most of the units had been transformed into offices. Inevitably, the building almost emptied out at night. Some five or six single people lived there as tenants, while the only family in the entire building lived on the fourth floor—in Yoshimi’s unit, number 405. The super had told Yoshimi that a family with a daughter the same age as Ikuko used to live on the second floor, but had moved away the year before due to some tragedy. From then on, the apartment building had seen no children until Yoshimi and Ikuko moved in three months ago.

Yoshimi surveyed the deserted seventh floor for a stairway leading to the rooftop. There it was, immediately to the right of the elevator; the roof would be only a floor above. Holding her daughter’s hand, Yoshimi climbed up the steep concrete stairs. Next to the elevator engine room, there stood a heavy-looking iron door. It didn’t appear to be locked, and when Yoshimi tried turning the knob and giving it a push, it opened with surprising ease.

It wasn’t spacious enough to be called a rooftop. It was a cramped place measuring no larger than forty square feet, fenced in with a waist-high handrail, with concrete pillars rising up from the four corners. Yoshimi would have to keep her eyes on her daughter if she approached the edge—the weight of your own head seemed enough to pull you over if you dared peer down.

In the gentle breezeless dusk, on this pier into the air, Yoshimi and Ikuko lit their fireworks. The red jets stood out in the deepening darkness. Below them to the right, the dark waters of the canal flickered with light reflected from the streetlamps, and opposite was the nearly completed Rainbow Bridge to link Shibaura with Daiba. The top of the suspension bridge, outlined with red signal lights, sparkled like real fireworks.

Yoshimi took in the view from on high, and Ikuko held aloft her little sparklers and cried with delight. It was when the score of sparklers had all turned into charred cinders, and the two prepared to go back down, that they discovered it, both at the very same moment. They had had their backs against the wall of the penthouse, which housed the stairwell and atop which sat the building’s water tank; but in the small drain that ran at the bottom of this wall was what looked like a handbag. It didn’t look like it’d been dropped, but rather, placed there on purpose. After all, who’d come to a place like this and lose her bag?

It was Ikuko who picked it up. No sooner had she let out a faint cry of surprise than she’d dashed over to it and grabbed it. ‘It’s Kitty,’ she noted.

It was hard to see in the dark, but against the glow of the street lamps from down below, the Kitty motif was indeed visible on the cheap vinyl bag. The bright red vinyl surface squished and changed shape in her hands.

‘Give it to me,’ scolded Yoshimi. She reached for Ikuko, who was trying to unzip the bag to see what was inside, and succeeded in taking the bag away from her.

Yoshimi’s mother, when she was still healthy, used to take Ikuko on walks in the hills around Musashino, often to come home with some discarded item. It was only natural for a woman of Yoshimi’s mother’s generation to feel that modern folks threw things out too soon. That was that. What Yoshimi couldn’t stand was the thought of her own daughter scavenging through garbage, and she had frequently gotten into arguments with her mother about it. In bringing up Ikuko, Yoshimi never tired of hammering into her a simple rule about picking things up. Whatever it was, you didn’t take it if it didn’t belong to you. Every time Yoshimi said this with a solemn look, her mother would react with a grimace: ‘Now don’t be such a stiff…’

Having taken the bag away from her daughter, Yoshimi didn’t know what to do with it. Through the surface came a lumpy feel of its contents. Yoshimi, something of a hygiene freak, decided without even opening the bag that the best course of action was to go talk to the superintendent about this. She was going to his ground-floor office right away.

The superintendent, Kamiya, was a long-time widower who’d been the building’s live-in super for ten years, ever since he’d retired from a hauling company. Although the job didn’t pay well, the accommodations were free, and it was an ideal arrangement for an old man living on his own.

No sooner had Yoshimi handed him the bag than Mr Kamiya unzipped it and emptied the contents on top of the office counter. A bright-red plastic cup bearing the same Kitty motif as the bag. A plastic wind-up frog whose legs were designed to flap. A little bear with a beach ring. It was clearly a three-in-one bath-time toy kit.

Ikuko cried out and started to reach for the toys, but yanked her hand back when her mother glared at her.

‘How very odd,’ the superintendent mused. What puzzled him was not that someone had left a bag on the rooftop, but that a toy set that obviously belonged to some child was found on the premises of this building.

‘You could display a notice and try to find the owner,’ Yoshimi suggested. Perhaps the owner would see the bag and claim it.

‘But the only child in the building is little Ikuko—right, Ikuko?’ the old man sought the girl’s assent. She was gazing intently at the Kitty bag and red cup from where she stood beside her mother. It was only too obvious from her expression what outcome Ikuko desired. She wanted it: the bag, the toys. Annoyed by her wistful look, Yoshimi grabbed her by the shoulder and forced her to step back from the counter.

‘You did mention that a family used to live on the second floor…’ ventured Yoshimi.

Kamiya looked up in surprise and said: ‘Ah, yes.’

‘Didn’t you say they had a little girl of five or six?’

‘Indeed. Yes. But it’s been two years.’

‘Two years? I thought you said they moved out last year.’

The super hunched his back and began to scratch his ankle audibly. ‘Well, yes. They didn’t move out until last summer.’

Yoshimi remembered being told by the super, when she moved in three months ago, that the family who’d been living on the second floor had moved out of the building the previous year because they’d experienced some misfortune. Yoshimi was guessing that it was they who’d somehow left the bag up on the roof.

Yet, neither the bag nor its plastic contents looked like they’d been exposed to the elements for a whole year up on the roof. The Kitty bag—which was without a speck of dust or grime, as brand-new as if it had just been purchased from the store—refuted the idea that it could’ve been abandoned for so long.

‘All right then. I’ll try displaying it on the counter for a while to see if we can find the owner.’

In this way, the super sought to end the conversation. After all, it was only some cheap bag, and he couldn’t care less if they found the owner or not.

Yoshimi, however, did not move from where she stood in front of the counter. Instead, she fingered her curly chestnut hair, debating whether to come right out with what she had on her mind.

‘If the owner doesn’t turn up, Ikuko, then you could have the bag, couldn’t you?’ Mr Kamiya offered and smiled at Ikuko.

‘No, that wouldn’t be right. If the owner doesn’t turn up, please dispose of the bag.’ Yoshimi turned down the offer with a resolute shake of her head. She then left the super’s office, pushing Ikuko from behind as if to get her away from some contagious object.

Yet something troubled Yoshimi as they rode up in the elevator. She had avoided the subject of the so-called tragedy that was supposed to have befallen the family. After all, she did not want to appear the kind of person who entertained herself by talking about other people’s misfortunes. But the question needled her and she longed to know the exact nature of that family’s misfortune.

The next day was a Monday. Yoshimi spent longer than usual combing her hair that morning. From the living room she could hear the theme song of a children’s television program. This melody served as a time signal, indicating on this particular morning that she still had plenty of minutes to spare before setting off for work. She would take Ikuko to the nursery school by nine o’clock, then catch a bus from the school for a twenty-minute ride to her office in Shimbashi. The time and energy required to get to work here was truly nothing compared to what her commuting hassle used to be. It really made the move here worthwhile. Had they stayed in Musashino, she wouldn’t have been able to put Ikuko into nursery school, and certainly couldn’t have worked. She could always find another job, but it was unlikely that she’d ever find anything as good as her present position in the proofreading department of a publishing company. The job not only allowed her to devote herself to the world of the printed word, which was one of her passions, but there was no overtime and little need to associate with other people. On top of this, the pay was quite adequate. Ikuko came into the room with a pink ribbon and asked her mother to tie back her hair with it. The knot she had just tied had come loose and Ikuko’s hair draped down, almost covering her shoulders.

As she touched her daughter’s hair, she found herself surprised at how unmistakably the child had inherited her genes. It was strange that such an obvious fact should not have occurred to her until now. Their two faces looked identical in the three-sided mirror before them: the same chestnut-colored curly hair, the same white skin, and the same freckles under both eyes. One face belonged to a woman in her mid-thirties and the other was that of a little girl turning six.

‘Noodles…’ She remembered a boy once looking at her in high school and announcing that her hair looked as if someone had dumped a bowl of noodles on top of her head. She hated everything about herself in those days, her natural curls, her face, her freckles, and her skinny body. How many boys told her how passionately they felt about her in high school? It never occurred to her to count. She had no idea what they saw in her, and had to conclude that her criteria as to what constituted beauty were totally at odds with those of others. Everyone remarked on the beauty of her cute little face, freckles and all, and her natural brown hair, a rarity among Japanese. She simply didn’t understand. When the boys caught on to her indifference, they began to make fun of her auburn hair behind her back. There were a lot of girls who knew how to handle things better, saying what they liked without the slightest risk of backbiting. Hiromi, a classmate in junior high school, was a typical example of that type.

With her hair now tied up, Ikuko said a quick ‘thank you’ to her own reflection in the mirror rather than to her mother, and dashed back into the living room to watch television. Yoshimi could detect no trace of her former husband’s physique or manner in Ikuko’s figure. That at least was a blessing. She had never once found anything enjoyable about the physical union of man and woman. Her only word for it was ‘agonizing’. Yet there is never any shortage of talk about sex in the world. She simply couldn’t understand it. Perhaps some insurmountable barrier separated her from other people. They differed on everything from what constituted beauty and ugliness to definitions of pain and pleasure. The world as she perceived it was largely at odds with the world as others saw it.

When her husband learned of his wife’s unwillingness to accommodate his needs, he would often resort to solitary measures, casually tossing the tissue paper under the sofa. She once got some of the fluid on her fingertips when she’d inadvertently picked up a ball of tissue the following morning. The image of his idiotic expression of bliss came to her mind, leaving no room for the desire to understand. At such times, her entire body would shudder with extreme loathing and scorn.

The familiar voice of a female television announcer from the living room reminded Yoshimi that it was time to set out.

Ikuko thrust the door open and ran towards the elevator to press the down button before her mother. Once out of the elevator, they could only leave the building by the main front entrance, passing by the super’s office. The red bag was on the counter. Yoshimi and Ikuko caught sight of it simultaneously. The Kitty bag that they’d found on the rooftop the evening before lay on the counter with its zipper closed, and with a notice on top. It read:

Wanted: any information as to owner.

Kamiya, superintendent

Though the super seemed to have acted on her suggestion, Yoshimi somehow thought it very unlikely that the owner would turn up.

Far from bringing a respite from the intense summer heat, the onset of September saw temperatures soar to record levels. During three days of abnormally intense heat, the bright red bag sporting the Kitty character was still visible on the black counter in the super’s office. When Yoshimi saw the bag as she passed by every morning and evening, she found herself the victim of an inexplicable obsession. The bright-red bag seemed to symbolize flames. Then, as if to prove her notion true, the moment the bag was removed from the counter, the sweltering heat of late summer suddenly showed signs of receding. Had the owner turned up to claim the bag? Had the super simply disposed of it of his own accord? It no longer mattered either way. The bag no longer had anything to do with her. Another source of anxiety had arisen to take its place, however. She was suffering from work-related depression. After an interval of six years, she had once again to proofread the new novel of a writer of violent fiction she remembered only too well. Her boss had handed her the proofs as soon as she had arrived for work that morning.

The job involved finding errors in the manuscript. To do this, Yoshimi had to read meticulously through the work over and over again. Six years ago, she had been completely unprepared for a manuscript by the same author that ended up traumatizing her. So great was the shock that she’d been pushed to the brink of a nervous breakdown. The brutal scenes depicted in the work etched themselves into her consciousness and even tormented her in the form of nightmares. She was on the verge of seeking psychiatric counseling in an attempt to rid herself of the adverse affects of working on the novel. She suffered waves of debilitating nausea on several occasions, lost her appetite, and shed eight pounds. She was also frequently unable to distinguish between illusion and reality.

She complained to the editor in charge of the project, demanding to know why the company handled work from such an author. With a haughty attitude, the editor, a young man still in his mid-twenties, explained that they were in no position to complain. The author’s work sold well and that’s all there was to it.

The remark only reminded Yoshimi once again just how high the barrier was that separated her from other people. She found it incredible that people were prepared to pay good money to read such a disgusting novel. The crowd that swarmed on the other side of the barrier had minds that functioned based on completely different principles than hers. As if that weren’t enough, she was shocked the following year to come across the same book, though one issued in paperback by a different publisher, on her husband’s shelves at home. The moment she set eyes on it, she was overcome with a sensation akin to terror, followed by the image of her husband enjoying gory fantasies aroused by the book. It deepened her resolve to divorce him.

Yoshimi caught sight of the red Kitty bag again the next Saturday morning. This time, she unexpectedly found it in the garbage facility provided for the apartment tenants. She had gone to put out some non-burnable waste and had lifted off the lid of the large polyethylene garbage bin. The red bag had been wedged between two black plastic bags. Although she did momentarily stop and stare at the bag, it was far from difficult to conclude how it had got there. The super had thrown it away in the belief that there was no likelihood of the owner ever turning up. As if nothing had happened, Yoshimi dumped her own sack crammed full of sorted waste on top of the red bag and covered the garbage bin with the lid.

That should have been the end. The bag was to be carted off in a garbage truck with the rest of the incombustible waste destined to form new groundwork for a landfill.

On the first Sunday in September, Yoshimi and Ikuko had gone to buy a few things at the neighborhood convenience store. They found that fireworks had been significantly discounted now that the summer season was nearly over. In fact, the price was so low that Yoshimi could not reasonably refuse Ikuko’s pleas on grounds that fireworks were too expensive. The disappearance of the remaining fireworks from the store shelves would signal that the lingering embers of summer had finally gone out. Fond as she was of summer, even Yoshimi could not resist the allure of these last goods on the shelf, for there was something poignant about their impending disappearance. So Yoshimi found it perfectly natural when Ikuko said that she wanted to play with fireworks again that evening.

The two of them made their way up to the rooftop at exactly the same time in the evening as they had the week before. The instant she touched the knob to open the door of the penthouse, she was beset with an awful sense of foreboding. She felt an image in red flicker somewhere in her consciousness. As she pushed the door open, she found herself instinctively looking towards the right. Her line of vision locked onto its target in an instant, as if she had known all along that it would be there. An object of livid red highlighted the dark gray of the waterproofed surface of the rooftop. Despite the same poor visibility as the week before, the blazing red sped to the eye through the gloom.

‘Oh…’ Yoshimi stood with her mouth open and her entire frame rigid. She shrank back without a word, groping wildly with her hands behind her for her daughter. Ikuko, however, ducked in a flash, evading her mother’s arms, and rushed over to the Kitty bag, which was placed exactly where it had been the week before.

‘Stop!’ Her voice trembled as she called her daughter back.

There was no explaining the dread she felt. Just as her daughter was about to pick the bag up, Yoshimi caught up with her, and swept the bag from her reach. The Kitty character on the side squished out of shape as the bag rolled over several times on the concrete. No question, it was the same one. The bag with the Kitty motif that they had discovered on the rooftop one week ago, the bag that had sat for three full days on the counter in the super’s office before being thrown out unclaimed in the polyethylene garbage bin along with other garbage, that bag was here in front of them now. Undeterred, Ikuko reached out once again to where the bag had rolled. Yoshimi hit her hard.

‘I said NO and I mean it!’

Her heart pounded violently in fear. She did not want her daughter to touch it. It was her instinctive loathing of strange objects. Ikuko stared wistfully at the bag and then looked up at her mother’s face. Turning back to the bag, her face puckered and she burst into tears.

So much for fireworks. Yoshimi stroked her daughter’s shoulders with a circular motion to comfort her as they went back into the penthouse and closed the door behind them. Nothing on earth would have induced her to lay a finger on that bag. She didn’t want to bring it back to the super, and she never wanted to come up to the rooftop again.

More than anything else, she wanted to know how such a thing could possibly happen. The bag had been in the polyethylene garbage bin, so how on earth could it have made its way back up to the roof? Her temples ached. ‘Made its way back’ had been an unconscious choice of expression—as if the bag had a life of its own.

As soon as they returned to the apartment, Yoshimi tried to put the chain on the door, but found that she had no control over her hands. Her legs also trembled. As she tried to remove her sandals, one flew awry and knocked down a pair of Ikuko’s boots. Ikuko’s expression was reproachful as she set the sandals and boots straight; her face clearly betrayed a hankering for that Kitty bag.

Yoshimi emerged from the bath first and began drying herself with a bath towel. She could hear her daughter’s muffled voice coming from inside the bathroom. Her daughter would not leave the tub until she had put away the toys she played with in the water. She had also been brought up to always remove the plug after a bath.

With a bath towel wrapped around her chest, Yoshimi took a carton of milk from the refrigerator in the dining area and poured herself a glass. She made it a rule to drink a glass of milk before going to bed. It kept her bowels regular. Ikuko still showed no signs of getting out of the bath when Yoshimi had finished drinking her glass of milk. She bent down near the door and was about to tell Ikuko to get out of the bath when she heard her daughter talking to herself. She could only catch snatches.

‘That’s ‘cos I’m playing all by myself…but…bear…no fair…It isn’t yours…mi…’

The ‘Mi…’ caught Yoshimi’s attention as probably being the name of Ikuko’s friend. But, as far as Yoshimi knew, none of Ikuko’s friends at the nursery school or in the neighborhood where they used to live in Musashino had names beginning with ‘Mi’. Who on earth was Ikuko having her imaginary conversation with, then? Ikuko did have a classmate called Mikihiko, but she always called him by his surname instead.

Yoshimi opened the bathroom door. The ‘unit’ bathroom was one of those comprising a bath and westernstyle toilet. A plastic washbasin floated on the water in the cream-colored bathtub. In the center of this basin was a small drenched towel that rose up in the form of a column. It somehow resembled a wayside jizo statue, but one with its head tilted to one side. Having soaked the towel and wrung it into this shape, Ikuko now seemed to be talking to the towel as if it were a playmate. A trickle of water dripped from the tap into the bath, linking the opening of the tap and the surface of the bathwater with a slender column. As the little washbasin floating in the bath came into contact with this column of water, it tilted a little and started spinning.

‘Ikuko, what are you doing in there? Come out at once.’

Immersed in the bathwater, Ikuko had her back to the door when she answered her mother.

‘My friend loves taking a bath all by herself. She never, ever gets out.’

Yoshimi asked herself again who on earth her ‘friend’ might be.

‘Never mind. Just get out,’ she told her daughter.

Ikuko put the washbasin in the sink and stood up with a swoosh. Yoshimi wrapped Ikuko in a bath towel and held her. Despite having been immersed in the tub for so long, Ikuko’s shoulders were strangely cold to the touch.

Ikuko fell asleep on her futon, with the picture book she had been reading open in front of her. Yoshimi debated whether to stay up for a while and read, but finally decided to turn the light off and go to sleep. She fell asleep as soon as she pulled the light summer sheet over her chest.

She had been asleep for about two hours when her consciousness began to edge its way back up from slumber to wakefulness; her casually extended hand could no longer detect that familiar warm presence at her side. Yoshimi’s body rolled frantically to and fro. Sliding her hand along her side, she could feel nothing. She was wide awake in an instant. Half sitting up, she groped the surface of the futon where Ikuko had been sleeping, and began calling her daughter’s name. The tiny nightlight at the foot of the futon was enough to reveal the emptiness of the small room: Ikuko wasn’t there.

‘Ikuko! Ikuko!’ Yoshimi tried shouting louder.

This kind of thing had never happened before. Ikuko was a deep sleeper. Once she had snuggled down to sleep, she always slept soundly through to the next morning without ever waking up during the night. She would rarely get up to go to the toilet.

After checking the living room and dining area, Yoshimi was about to check the toilet, but the bathroom light was out so Ikuko obviously wasn’t there. Just then, she heard the sound of tiny footsteps in the passage outside.

Yoshimi dashed to the door, where she noticed that the door chain was not fastened. Did she forget to fasten the chain when they returned from the rooftop, or did Ikuko unchain the door?

Unconcerned about being clad in nothing more than her negligee, she rushed out into the corridor outside. She could hear the sound of the elevator moving. The elevator hall was halfway down the corridor. She stood there and watched the floor numbers light up in succession. The fifth-floor lamp went out and the sixth-floor lamp came on. Then the sixth-floor lamp went out, the seventh-floor lamp blinked on, and it stopped. The elevator had gone to the top floor, where no one lived. Someone had just gotten off on the seventh floor. In that instant she suspected that that someone was Ikuko. That suspicion was being confirmed in her mind. Ikuko could not bear the thought of the red Kitty bag being left out there on the apartment rooftop, Yoshimi concluded. She must have been desperate for that bag. At the same time, though, Ikuko knew better than to believe that her mother would allow her to pick up something that someone else had thrown away. That’s why she had waited until her mother was asleep before heading for the apartment rooftop. Although Yoshimi doubted that Ikuko had the courage to overcome her fear of the dark, she pressed the elevator button to call the cage back down from the seventh floor. The elevator stirred, made its way down to the fourth floor, and flung its doors open. Yoshimi pulled the sides of her negligee close together over her chest as she entered the elevator. She pushed the button for the seventh floor, only to feel the elevator plunge softly downward, contrary to her expectations. Yoshimi took several steps away from the door, until her back was against the wall of the elevator. She brought her clenched elbows together to cover her chest more closely.

‘Oh dear, someone’s getting on.’

That someone, thought Yoshimi, must have called the elevator from one of the floors below before she pushed the button at her end. Whoever it was had to be on the ground floor, actually. No doubt it was one of those men living alone on the fifth or sixth floor coming home drunk. It was already past one o’clock in the morning. Her horror of being harassed by a drunk made her resent the cramped elevator itself, which offered her no means of escape. As the elevator began its descent, the scorched buttons began to light in succession.

The elevator came to a sudden halt. She looked up at the row of numbers indicating the floor. It had stopped at two.

…Why the second floor?

She braced herself. She’d never get used to riding elevators late at night; it was a nerve-wracking experience. The doors opened, but no one was waiting for the elevator. Yoshimi gasped, made her way slowly forward, then peered outside, scanning both sides twice. The dark deserted passage seemed to stretch on to infinity. Obviously, there was no one there. Who on earth then, had summoned the elevator? The doors started to slide shut automatically. Yoshimi stepped back reflexively. Yet, the second before the door had shut completely, she was quite certain that she sensed a presence steal swiftly into the elevator. Maybe it was just her imagination, but the temperature in the confined space of the elevator seemed to have dropped suddenly. She was not alone in the elevator; there was something else with her. She felt someone’s breath on her abdomen, the kind that turns white on a cold winter’s day.

The elevator made its ascent, then stopped at the seventh floor.

When she reached the landing of the staircase leading to the rooftop from the seventh floor, Yoshimi turned on the lights of the penthouse. Two fluorescent tubes on the ceiling flickered to life. Encouraged by the light, Yoshimi bounded up the staircase to the rooftop.

She pushed the door wide open and left it there so that the fluorescent lighting would spill out to the roof.

‘Ikuko!’ she called.

No matter how much she strained her eyes, she couldn’t locate the small figure she sought. She looked down from the western edge of the rooftop, but the light of the streetlamps along the road did not show the dark stain that would signal tragedy. She heaved a sigh of relief. Ikuko hadn’t fallen to her death. The northern, southern, and eastern sides of the building all had balconies protruding on the seventh floor. Even if Ikuko had fallen, the fall wouldn’t be fatal.

Where did she go?

Yoshimi’s stomach threatened to rise to her gorge. Who knew? Ikuko could be somewhere in the apartment. Was it too much to hope? Such thoughts passed through her mind as she looked back at the penthouse. The white fluorescent light spilled out onto the rooftop. Immediately above the penthouse sat the creamy-skinned overhead water tank, held aloft by a turret of iron poles. Bathed in light from beneath, the coffin-shaped body protruded straight up in the center of the clear night sky, holding water within its walls. This was where the household water was collected and stored before being fed to each of the apartments below.

Two cord-like objects could be seen swaying in the shadows of iron poles that supported the overhead tank. Straining her eyes further, Yoshimi was just able to make out a tiny shadow playing under the tank. It puzzled her that she could only see the shadow, but not the object casting it. The image she began to conjure up in her mind was that of a little girl crouching directly beneath the overhead water tower.

‘Ikuko, is that you?’

There was no reply. To search the top of the penthouse, she’d have to scale the perpendicular aluminum ladder set in the concrete wall of the penthouse. It was a vertical climb of more than six feet that would fully engage both her hands and feet. Though such a climb, crawling spiderlike up the side of a wall, would normally be difficult for someone of Yoshimi’s delicate build, she hauled herself up, fueled by the desperate desire to get a look at what was up there. No more than halfway up, she looked down to gauge how far she had climbed. She spied a dark object lodged in the darkness of the drain that ran the length of the penthouse wall. It was just where it had been the night before, where she had swept it from Ikuko’s grasp and caused it to roll away. Yoshimi’s mind began to race in confusion. Something didn’t fit. She was missing some essential point.

It couldn’t have been Ikuko!

Her right foot almost missed a step as this realization came to her. It could not have been Ikuko who’d come up to the seventh floor in the elevator; her daughter was too short to be able to reach the button for the seventh floor. A shiver ran down Yoshimi’s spine. As she looked up she saw the shadow gaining greater substance. There could be no doubt that someone or something was up there. She heard the joints in her legs crack from the strain.

If it wasn’t her daughter, who was it?

She only needed to heave herself up a little further to have her entire face level with the upper edge. Yet her courage failed her. All kinds of images flashed one after another in her mind’s eye. Her body stiffened, making it difficult to climb up or down.

At that instant, she heard the voice that she most longed to hear, calling out from directly beneath her.

‘Mommy.’

Yoshimi’s strength nearly left her. Her exhaustion was so great that it was all she could do to keep her hands and feet from losing their hold on the aluminum ladder. Her jaw pressing against her left armpit, she saw Ikuko standing there in pajamas.

‘Mommy? What are you doing up there?’

There was a hint of reproach in Ikuko’s tearful question.

In the morning, she led her daughter by the hand to the elevator at the usual time. Once in the elevator, she noticed that the straining sound of the elevator cable was subtly different from how it had sounded late last night, although she couldn’t articulate the exact change. All she could say was that the light of day had brought a totally different nuance to the noise. Yoshimi unconsciously tightened her grip on Ikuko’s hand.

Yoshimi had spent a sleepless night during which she had repeatedly asked herself whether Ikuko had lied, or whether her own behavior had been the impulsive result of an obsessive delusion.

Ikuko had insisted that she’d been in the bathroom when her mother had inexplicably dashed out of doors. ‘You can’t imagine how hard it was to go up the stairs to the rooftop by myself! What on earth were you doing there?’ her daughter had said.

Seeing her mother clinging to the wall of the penthouse, Ikuko’s heart had pounded violently as if to prove that she’d just rushed up the stairs. The anger in her voice came from the terror of having been left alone. As an infant, she would always cry hysterically if she ever woke up to find herself alone. She couldn’t possibly have been feigning all this. It must have happened just as Ikuko said it had. Yoshimi had rushed out into the passage without thinking that her daughter might have gone to the bathroom without turning the light on. The numbers on the elevator floor indicator had put the notion of the rooftop in her head. In the absence of any other possible interpretation, she had to take her daughter’s word for it. While she was ashamed over having behaved like a possessed woman, something still failed to convince her. Why did the elevator stop at the second floor? There had been nobody there. Yoshimi remembered quite distinctly the presence that had sneaked into the elevator. She remembered the moment the warm air had turned chilly inside the elevator.

As soon as the elevator doors slid open on the ground floor, Yoshimi took in the morning sun as it streamed all the way to the center of the lobby. The powerful rays of the sun seemed to banish the morbid aura of the night before. She spied the super ahead of her, broom in hand.

‘Morning, ma’am,’ he greeted her with a broad smile.

Yoshimi tried to walk past, avoiding his gaze and with only a token greeting. But changing her mind, she stopped and said, ‘Excuse me.’

‘Ah, if it’s about that bag…’ he offered.

‘No, it’s not that.’ There was something else on her mind that Yoshimi didn’t know whether to ask him about or not.

He no longer held his broom upright, and his hand hung casually by his side as he turned to Ikuko and asked affably, ‘You’ll be on your way to nursery school, then?’

‘It’s nothing to do with me, I know, but you mentioned that the family that used to live on the second floor suffered some kind of tragedy. What exactly was it that…’

Yoshimi let her inquiry trail off unfinished. The super reined in the cheery smile, contriving an expression more suited to recounting the misfortunes of others.

‘Ah, that? Well, it all happened two years ago. The little girl was about the same age as little Ikuko is now. She was playing somewhere around here and went missing, you see.’

Yoshimi placed her hands on Ikuko’s shoulders and pulled her daughter closer to her.

‘When you say that she went missing, do you mean she was kidnapped?’

The super leaned his head to one side. ‘I don’t think it was done for a ransom. You see, the police turned it into an open criminal investigation.’

As long as there was a possibility that a kidnapping had been committed with a view to financial gain, the police conducted its investigation with utmost secrecy. But as soon as that possibility was ruled out, they usually launched a public investigation and announced it to the media. That way they could obtain more information faster.

‘So you’re saying that they…’

The super shook his head. ‘They never found her. For nearly a year, the parents never gave up hope that she’d return. In any case, when there was that move to buy up the apartments, it was Mr and Mrs Kawai on the second floor who objected most. They felt that if the apartment block were demolished, their daughter would have no place to return to. But in the end, they probably did give up hope. At any rate, they moved to Yokohama last summer.’

‘They were called Kawai, the family?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Mitchan—that was the little girl’s name—she was a lovely little girl. There are some evil people in the world, and that’s a fact.’

‘Did you say “Mitchan”?’

‘Her name was Mitsuko; we called her Mitchan.’

Mi, Mitchan, Mitsuko…the imaginary playmate that Ikuko was talking to in the bath. It all began to take shape, to fit into place, with that name. That column-like figure that Ikuko had fashioned out of a soaked hand towel and set up in the middle of the washbasin, the figure resembling a road-side jizo statue that Ikuko had chattered to like a friend, the figure that her daughter had called Mitsuko.

Yoshimi felt the blood drain from her face. Placing her hands on her temples, she sought support against the wall, and slowly let out a deep breath.

‘Is anything the matter?’

She tried to deflect the super’s concern by glancing at her watch. There was no time to explain. If they didn’t hurry they’d miss their bus. She gave a slight bow in the direction of the super and quickly left the lobby.

To learn more, she could take advantage of the odd spare moment at work to go through the newspaper archives on microfiche. Even without an exact date, she was sure to find an article concerning the disappearance of a small girl named Mitsuko Kawai without difficulty if she looked meticulously through the newspapers from two years ago. From what the super had said, it seemed clear that Mitsuko hadn’t been found. She had probably either been abducted by some pervert or had fallen into the canal. Either way, the poor girl no doubt lay dead and undiscovered somewhere.

About eight o’clock in the evening that day, Yoshimi had just turned on the hot water for a bath when the telephone rang. She let the water run and hurried into the living room to pick up the phone.

It was from the super’s office. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve gone and sprained my left ankle.’

The super’s remark made no sense to Yoshimi, who was at a loss to reply with anything but an ‘Oh.’ She had no idea why he was calling. It was only after giving an account of how he sustained the injury to his foot that he finally got to the point.

‘There’s a delivery for you.’

She finally caught his drift. The super would often accept her home deliveries because she was seldom home during the day. Usually he brought the deliveries up to her. What he was driving at was that his sprained ankle prevented him from doing so. If the package required urgent attention, he wanted to ask if she’d mind coming down to his office to collect it herself. She knew whom the delivery was from, and it was nothing that couldn’t wait. Still, she thanked the super for his trouble and, before putting the phone down, told him she was coming right away.

Upon reaching the super’s office, she saw that there was a cardboard box on the counter. The super stood with his elbows on the box. As she thought, it was from her friend Hiromi. Hiromi had a daughter who would soon be starting elementary school, and she had kindly taken the trouble to send Ikuko the clothes and shoes that her daughter had outgrown.

She found the box surprisingly heavy and could understand why it had been too much for the super with his sprained ankle.

‘Is your ankle all right?’ She affected concern by drawing her eyebrows together.

‘Nature’s way of telling a foolish old man he’s not as young as he used to be.’ The super laughed as he said this and betrayed signs that he wanted her to ask him how he had sprained his ankle.

However, Yoshimi’s interest lay elsewhere. During the day, she had gone to her firm’s archives to look through all the newspapers dated between July and October of the year before last. She had not succeeded in finding any article that reported Mitsuko’s case. Yoshimi found ‘the year before last’ not precise enough for her liking. She wanted an exact date.

She didn’t really expect the old man to remember, but she tried asking all the same.

‘Just a minute,’ he replied as he checked inside the counter, bending down awkwardly. He brought out a thick battered notebook and thumped it down on the countertop.

The cover bore the words ‘Superintendent’s Log’ in thick black felt pen. Apparently he was in the habit of recording each day’s events in the logbook so he could furnish his employer with some kind of report. The super muttered to himself as he licked his finger and turned the pages.

‘Yes, here we are. Look.’

He turned the notebook upside down and slid it across to her. The page was dated March 17th two years ago. It was now September, so, to be precise, they were not talking about something that happened two years ago, but rather, two and a half years ago. Even the time of day was recorded in the notebook. The authorities had concluded that there was no further justification for handling the disappearance of Mitsuko Kawai of apartment 205 as a case of financially motivated abduction and consequently turned the investigation into an open inquiry, at 11.30 p.m. Yoshimi committed the exact date and time to memory. As she was about to return the notebook to the super, an image of that flesh-colored overhead water tank flashed through her mind, though she didn’t know why. No doubt the image had come through an association with some word or words. What had set it off were the following words, written higher up under the same date heading of March 17th.

Cleaning operations performed on intake tank and overhead tank. Water inspection conducted.

There it was—the overhead tank.

This was the same overhead tank that floated like a giant coffin in the starry night sky. The cleaning operations in question had been performed on the same day Mitsuko Kawai had gone missing. Two cleaners hired by the building management had come and worked inside the water tank.

Yoshimi let out an inaudible scream.

‘The water tank…’ Yoshimi paused to take a breath. ‘Is the lid of the tank usually kept locked?’

The super tilted his head to one side, puzzled as to why Yoshimi had turned the conversation to the water tank. But when he saw the entry in his own log about the cleaning operations, a look of satisfaction registered on his face.

‘Ah, this? Yes, under normal circumstances, it’s kept carefully locked.’

‘When is the tank opened? Only when it’s cleaned?’

‘Of course, of course.’

Yoshimi put her hands around the cardboard box. ‘Has the tank been cleaned since?’

‘Ehh, we don’t have a maintenance association here, so it’s…’

‘Has it been cleaned?’ she repeated, unable to bottle her impatience.

‘Well, it’s about time they got down it again. It’s been two years.’

‘I see.’

Lifting the box, Yoshimi staggered backwards and reeled out of the office. So unsteady was her gait that it was a wonder she made it back to her apartment without stumbling.

Being careful not to touch the water in the bathtub, she pulled out the plug and watched the water level drop gradually. She no longer felt like taking a bath. Ikuko had plaintively asked again and again why they couldn’t take a bath that day. Her persistence had seemed unending; only a minute ago had she finally fallen asleep. To all appearances, the water looked perfectly clean. Yet Yoshimi couldn’t but picture the particles floating in it.

She opened the kitchen cupboard, took out the bottle of sake she kept there for cooking, and poured herself a glass. Although alcohol did not really agree with her, she felt that she was not likely to get any sleep without it that night.

She made an effort to think about something else. The novel by that writer of violent fiction, the novel she was proofreading at work, would do as well as anything else to occupy her thoughts. What she needed to do was to recall some of those appalling scenes and thereby sever the chain of associations. Yet this just wasn’t possible; the swelling images always converged on one point. The red bag with the Kitty motif that was found on the rooftop, the missing child Mitsuko, the fleeting shadow under the tank, the mysterious stop made by the elevator at the second floor. The evening before, a thin stream of water had linked the bathroom in their apartment with the overhead water tank on the roof. Immersed in the bathwater, Ikuko had been talking openly to Mitsuko as if she were actually there. All this led to a sole conclusion. Yoshimi forced herself to block out this train of thought with a scene from the novel she’d been proofing. In that fictitious world thick with the stench of gore, a punk had been abducted and confined by a rival gang, who were subjecting him to a series of brutal beatings, when purely by coincidence…Yes, that was it: she should think of it as a coincidence. The overhead water tank just happened to be cleaned the very day little Mitsuko disappeared. How absurd to think it could have been anything other than coincidence. Yes, now that she thought about it, every part of it could be explained rationally. In the case of the Kitty bag, neighborhood children had put it on the rooftop in some kind of ritual, out of some childlike fancy, perhaps to signal a UFO. No doubt the children had seen the bag in the garbage dump, retrieved it, then quickly returned it to the rooftop. The elevator had stopped at the second floor quite simply because someone living on that floor had pressed the button with the intent of going down. When the elevator started dithering at the fourth floor, however, he or she had clearly lost patience and decided to walk down the stairway. That was why there hadn’t been anyone waiting when the door opened.

By forcibly disconnecting one event from another, Yoshimi sought to find a logical underpinning for each mangled fragment. Yet no matter how hard she tried to disrupt her train of thought, the severed fragments would instantly link up again, like some serpent growing larger every time it reconnected. She was already aware of the truth, but didn’t want to accept it. The one and only possible conclusion. The inescapable conclusion.

There was no mistaking it, Mitchan was in that overhead tank on the rooftop.

She tried to suppress the thought, only to have the scene unfold in her mind. While the cleaners were away on their lunch break, the little girl had either fallen in the tank or been intentionally thrown in by someone. The decomposing corpse. The Kitty bag she clasped so tightly. The water-filled coffin. She had been drinking that water for the past three months. She had cooked with it, made coffee and chilled summer drinks with it. How many times had they soaked in hot bathwater that teemed with countless putrid cells? How many times had they washed their hands and their faces in it? More than you could tally.

Yoshimi pressed her hands to her mouth. The odor of sake mixed with an eruption of gastric juices. She made a dash for the bathroom, crouched down over the toilet bowl, and vomited. Her eyes were bloodshot. A stinging sensation burned the back of her throat and nose. She flushed the toilet, the water immediately streaming into the bowl before her eyes and swallowing up her vomit in its downward spiral. What remained was to all appearances clear water. The water that trickled down to cleanse the toilet bowl contained skin cells, which had peeled off; it teemed with little pieces of hair, fine, downy hair. Her feeling of nausea did not abate. Yet there remained nothing more to bring up.

As she wiped her mouth with toilet paper, Yoshimi coughed violently again and again from the choking sensation in her throat. She remained in her crouched position, waiting for her breathing to settle. It was then that she heard it. The sound of water dripping one drop at a time into the bathtub beside her. She thought she had turned off the tap tightly. Still, a tiny amount of water seemed to be leaking through. Her knees pressed against the floor, she clasped the toilet bowl with both arms. She frantically swallowed back the saliva, trying to prevent her delusions from becoming reality. Hallucinations! It was obvious. Hallucinations coursed through her very veins. She saw something that looked like the corpse of a little girl floating in the foul water that had collected in the bath. The face was purple and swollen to almost twice its original size. She tried to scream ‘Stop!’ and fell back on the wet floor. A red plastic beaker floated near the breast of the corpse. A green plastic wind-up frog swam across the surface of the water, its front and back legs jerking busily. The frog bumped into the shoulder of the corpse, swam away, and returned to bump into the same shoulder, over and over again, each time gouging a tiny piece of flesh from the corpse with its plastic claws. The bright-red bag with the Kitty motif bobbed up and down, its strap held tight in the grasp of the corpse, the bone of whose clenched hands showed in places.

Apart from jerky gasps, Yoshimi had all but stopped breathing. The stench that assailed her nostrils was not unlike that of rotting kitchen waste. As she tried to avert her eyes from the putrefying corpse whose stench filled the bathroom, she struck her head on the door and collapsed in a heap, her cheek striking the chilly wooden floor of the corridor. She was quickly losing consciousness. A voice from far off that sounded like the chirping of a small bird penetrated the gloomy boundary between consciousness and darkness.

‘Mommy! Mommy!’

Yoshimi’s retina registered the form of Ikuko clad in baggy pajamas.

Her hand on the nape of her mother’s neck, Ikuko’s trembling voice turned to sobs. The tiny hand moved back and forth near Yoshimi’s ear. This was Yoshimi’s only reality, the warmth and tiny proportions of Ikuko’s hand. The tiny body brimming with life was enough to banish her hallucination.

‘Help me up.’

The plea was but a hoarse whisper. Ikuko put her hands under her mother’s arms and heaved with all her might. Once Ikuko had her mother sitting up, Yoshimi put one hand on the edge of the bath and managed to stand up on her own. The jumper skirt she always wore at home was soaked from the waist down. She glanced at the bath and found that countless droplets of water clung precariously to the gleaming cream curves of the bath. The awareness that she had been hallucinating hadn’t been enough to fend off the hallucinations. Amid sobs, Ikuko looked up at her mother and simply murmured ‘Mommy…’ It would take enormous emotional strength to be a good mother to her. Yoshimi felt ashamed of herself for her near collapse. Incited by her daughter’s sobs, she too began to weep.

As they crossed the bridge over the canal, Yoshimi resisted the impulse to turn back and look at the apartment building. She carried a bag containing their valuables and a change of clothes. Each time she shifted the bag from one hand to another, Ikuko would also switch sides so as to keep a firm grip on her mother’s empty hand.

Her behavior must have appeared very silly. Yet it was impossible to live even one more day in an apartment whose water supply was unusable. Tonight, if only for a single night, she wanted to sleep soundly. The water tank could be checked the next day. Convincing the super to have the tank examined, opening the lid, and looking in—these were things better done in the light of day.

The ground felt no more secure across the canal bridge than on the landfill. Yoshimi saw an approaching taxi with a vacancy light and hailed it. She helped Ikuko into the back seat and bent down to get in herself. As she did so, she caught a fleeting glimpse of the rooftop of the apartment building. There, dwarfed by the distance, loomed the flesh-colored water tank, high above the reclaimed ground. Was little Mitsuko still having fun splashing about in that sealed rectangular bath of hers? Whatever the case, Yoshimi wanted to sleep well. As she slid into the back seat, she gave the taxi driver the name of a hotel.

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About the Author

KOJI SUZUKI is a literary star in his native Japan, where Ring has sold 2.8 million copies to date. Ring is the first book in a hugely successful thriller trilogy that continues with Spiral and Loop. It has been filmed as Ringu in Japan and as The Ring in Hollywood. Koji Suzuki lives in Tokyo but loves to travel.

Also by the Author

Ring

Spiral

Loop

Dark Water

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