by Kōji Suzuki
“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 impre
ssion, 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 ye
ars 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.