by Kōji Suzuki
Nobuhisa Igarashi, age 19. Vocational school student. Missing since mid-September, 2011.
Originally from Namerikawa City, Toyama Prefecture, Igarashi had moved to Itoigawa to attend culinary school. His parents in Namerikawa lost contact with him in mid-September.
The attendance records at the culinary institute suggested that Igarashi had run into some sort of trouble between September 13th and 15th, but Igarashi’s attendance had always been spotty, so it was difficult to be sure. Igarashi didn’t have many close friends, so nobody had taken much notice of his absence from school.
Unable to reach her son by phone for several days, his mother grew concerned and paid a visit to his boarding house. The state of his room suggested that its inhabitant hadn’t been home for several days.
The missing persons report was filed with the police on September 19th.
Nishimura and Igarashi hadn’t known each other, but they both lived in Itoigawa City and Igarashi’s boarding house was extremely close to S Mart, suggesting a link between the two cases.
The obvious explanation was that they had both been involved in some sort of incident. Perhaps they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and gotten into an altercation with a group of bikers or such. The first step would be to search for potential witnesses, but if the police were already investigating the cases, they would have long taken such measures.
Saeko wanted to establish a hypothesis and then launch an investigation accordingly, but she wasn’t sure of herself based on how the Fujimura case had turned out. At the time, Saeko had pored over the documents and identified Kota Fujimura’s older brother Seiji as a shady character. She had pursued that line of investigation in her research but had found her expectations dashed upon meeting Seiji in person. As a result, her report had lacked a central focus. Even so, it had been fairly well received. Saeko should have derived more confidence from that fact, but she was a perfectionist, and it was hard for her to take the first step towards anything without establishing a clear roadmap.
As Saeko pondered where to start, the image of Kitazawa’s face in the back of her mind grew even stronger. What had been a mild impulse to visit his office grew into an irresistible need. It seemed like an unbelievable coincidence that Kitazawa’s image had popped into her mind just yesterday at the library; today she had been handed another missing persons assignment.
Kitazawa was a private detective who ran his own investigations agency specializing in missing persons. He’d been in the business forty years and had an extensive network of contacts, not just in Japan but worldwide. When it came to tracking down missing people, he was an unrivaled expert.
Kitazawa wasn’t an inconspicuous man—he weighed in at around a hundred kilos. At the same time, he had an incongruously high voice and his speech was often peppered with childish expressions. The effect was bizarre, and people who weren’t used to him often assumed he was having a laugh at them. But once you got to know him, it didn’t matter. He was a loveable character, and Saeko owed him a tremendous debt of gratitude. And now, she very much needed his help with this new assignment from her editor. After taking leave of Maezono, Saeko headed straight for Kitazawa’s office.
From the Yotsuya Sanchome intersection, Saeko turned up a side street and found the building she was looking for. As before, the office bore a sign that read “Man Search” in English letters, though the sign itself was new since her last visit.
At the age of seventeen, a desperate Saeko had gazed up at the same building.
Whenever her father was away on business, he called home at eight o’clock every night. On August 21, 1994, he had called from his hotel in Narita after returning from Bolivia and informed her that he would head out to Takamatsu, Shikoku the next day. But at eight o’clock the next evening there was no call. As far as Saeko could remember, her father had never failed to call when he was away on a trip. Even if he was on the opposite side of the earth, he always called promptly at 8 p.m. Japan time to check in with his daughter. No matter where he went, he was always concerned about his only daughter’s well-being, and the act of calling at eight every night seemed a compulsive habit.
That was why Saeko had been deeply perplexed on the evening of August 22nd when her father never called despite being back in Japan. When she didn’t hear from him the next night or the night after that, she quickly went to the police and reported that something had happened to her father. Of course, the police weren’t about to make a move just because a traveler had failed to call home. They maintained that it was too soon to launch an investigation and suggested that Saeko sit tight and wait a bit longer.
With no help from the police, Saeko had no choice but to take matters into her own hands.
She had never met Hideaki Kitazawa before. He was a total stranger. She found him in the phone book under the listings for detective agencies. A tag line in his business-card-sized ad read “specializes in missing persons.” There were lots of other detective agencies listed, but they all seemed to specialize in background checks and adultery investigations. Saeko came to the conclusion that Detective Kitazawa of Man Search was the only person who could provide the help she needed, and she decided to visit the agency directly without even calling for an appointment.
But as she got closer to the address and found herself surrounded by grimy businesses staffed by thugs specializing in debt-collection services, Saeko’s knees began to wobble. Would the detective agency even take an unaccompanied teenage girl seriously? If not, at best they might turn her away, but what if she wound up getting taken advantage of in the process?
She found the building she was looking for, confirmed that its address matched the note she had jotted down, and rode the elevator up to the third floor. When she arrived, however, she couldn’t quite bring herself to open the door of the office.
As the elevator doors closed behind her, she began to sweat in rivulets, and her t-shirt felt clammy. During the short walk from the subway station she had been almost too nervous to sweat, but all of a sudden she found herself streaming with perspiration.
In the bag she clutched to her chest was a bankbook with her father’s account balance. She had no idea how much it would cost to hire a detective to find her father. Even if they overcharged her, Saeko was prepared to pay whatever it took. It had seemed like a good idea to bring her father’s bankbook. Now, however, she realized what a sitting duck she would make in the eyes of the wrong sort of person.
The door directly opposite the apprehensive young woman was marked “Man Search”—the office was just across from the elevator. The wooden door with its frosted glass window offered little basis for Saeko to decide whether to enter or to go home. She moved closer to the door, leaning in with one ear. Just the sound of a voice inside might give her some idea as to what sort of people might await her on the other side.
But when her cheek touched the door, it began to swing open.
“Oh!” Saeko barely had a chance to exclaim before she caught sight of a woman at a desk intensely absorbed in a book. The presence of a woman was an immediate relief.
“Hello,” Saeko managed to say in a perfectly normal voice.
The petite middle-aged woman looked up from her volume and grinned. Her smile was so warm, it almost seemed as if she’d been expecting Saeko’s arrival. Saeko felt her apprehension melt away.
The woman’s name was Chieko Kitazawa, and she was Hideaki Kitazawa’s wife and business partner. The couple ran the detective agency together.
The office had changed dramatically in eighteen years’ time. The room had been renovated with modern updates, with several computers stationed conveniently in the center of the room. A visitor who didn’t know any better would never suspect that it was a detective agency.
Before, the agency had existed in a single room on the building’s third floor, but it had grown to occupy the entire floor; apparently, business had been good in recent years. In addition to Kitazawa, there were six other detectives and thr
ee female clerks. The office was connected to a nationwide network of experts in various fields and also provided services such as a detective training program, corporate research services, and the sale of other types of information. From an agency specializing exclusively in missing persons cases, the business had evolved into a purveyor of information of all different sorts.
But Chieko Kitazawa was gone; four years earlier, she had died of an illness. She and her husband had both been tremendous benefactors to Saeko. That summer when she was seventeen, if Saeko had encountered not Chieko but Hideaki Kitazawa’s intimidating glower behind the desk, she probably would have beat a hasty retreat without stating her business. It was Chieko who had taken command that day and inquired into Saeko’s situation.
In the four years since they had last met, Hideaki Kitazawa had aged noticeably. He had reached the age of sixty, and decades of hard living had taken their toll. Yet, not surprisingly, his weight didn’t seem to have declined from the hundred-kilo mark.
Kitazawa approached Saeko, his looming form lilting from side to side. “Hello there, young lady. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Kitazawa grinned from ear to ear and motioned for Saeko to have a seat at the sofa.
“You look well,” Saeko stated, trying to dissemble her surprise at how he had aged. She had last seen Kitazawa at Chieko’s funeral. Then, he’d looked so lost, it was almost unbearable to look at him.
A surge of regret flooded Saeko. When she had been overcome with grief at the loss of her father, Kitazawa’s support had given her the strength to go on. But when Kitazawa had been devastated by the loss of his wife, Saeko had done nothing to comfort him. She wished now that she had come back to talk with Kitazawa.
Come to think of it, Saeko’s life had been in such a state of flux over the last few years, with her impending divorce, quitting her job, and foray into a new career, that she had been too preoccupied to give much thought to other people.
“I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch,” she told him.
Kitazawa seemed confused by Saeko’s apology. “You really think I look well?” he asked, backtracking.
“You really do,” Saeko maintained.
“Well, I’ve aged quite a bit.”
“You did turn sixty. What do you expect? You know, instead of leaving those last pathetic strands of hair up on top, why don’t you just shave it clean? I think it would go well with your gangster look.”
When Kitazawa walked down the street, passers-by either avoided his gaze or quickly moved out of the way. Virtually everything about him was thuggish—his build, his hair, and the vibe he gave off.
In fact, when he had first landed a job at a nonbank lender, its administration had leveraged his intimidating features by assigning him a job much like a gangster’s: locating derelict borrowers. Kitazawa had worked with a partner, tracking down debtors by word-of-mouth and mercilessly shaking them down for cash. The experience had served as a foundation for his current missing persons services.
Weary of chasing after the weak, Kitazawa had left the company for a job in real estate, but once again he found himself assigned to debt-collection duties. Eventually, after a debtor he had tracked down committed suicide in his presence, Kitazawa could take no more of preying upon such miserable souls and resolved to pursue a different career path. Given that the only professional skill he had acquired was that of locating people, he decided to apply that ability towards a more welcome service—private detective work.
Initially, Kitazawa had found a position at a large detective agency, but after marrying a fellow detective from the company, Chieko, the couple decided to open their own outfit specializing exclusively in locating missing persons.
Kitazawa could never have done it alone. One of the cornerstones of detective work was approaching people for information, but any source he accosted would run terrified from his hulking form. Instead, Chieko became the face of the agency. She had the uncanny ability to put almost anyone at ease. Her magic even worked on animals—guard dogs wagged their tails at Chieko and neglected to bark.
They were quite the pair. Chieko got the ball rolling, encouraging clients to open up. Once they found themselves speaking with Kitazawa, they realized he was a genuinely good man. The impression was all the stronger after overcoming the initial fear.
Saeko had recognized Kitazawa’s heart of gold almost immediately.
“You know, I’ve always wondered something. How come you’re so formal and polite with other people, and so rude to me?” Kitazawa demanded.
“Because that’s what you deserve,” Saeko shot back, instantly overcoming the four-year blank in their relationship. It was something of a mystery to her that she could always relax so completely and speak her mind so openly with Kitazawa.
“The first time you showed up here, you brought your daddy’s bankbook, didn’t you? When my wife got a load of the account balance, she was completely dumbstruck, remember? Oh, the look on the old lady’s face when she saw those numbers!” Kitazawa opened his eyes wide and puffed out his cheeks in an imitation of Chieko.
Saeko burst out laughing. Chieko had been five years older than Kitazawa, and he’d frequently referred to her as “the old lady.”
“Excuse me for being so naïve,” Saeko laughed.
“You gave us a bit of a shock, that’s for sure. We figured we’d better look out for you or you’d be in big trouble.”
The first thing Kitazawa had done eighteen years ago when Saeko had hired him was to create a file containing the basic details of Shinichiro Kuriyama, the missing person. Name, age, date of birth, blood type, family tree, registered address, current address, educational history, employment history, physical description, social ties, driver’s license, passport, overseas travel history, hobbies, spending habits, religion, health insurance, frequent haunts, usual hospital, health condition, attire and possessions at time of disappearance …
Kitazawa and his wife weren’t the only detectives who worked on the case. They had deemed it necessary to hire three other detectives they sometimes employed, and the team of five had traveled to Takamatsu to conduct a thorough canvassing and to distribute flyers emblazoned with Saeko’s father’s picture and characteristics.
They had vetted the passenger lists at nearby airports and the ferry that served the nearest port, but Shinichiro Kuriyama’s name was nowhere to be found. He could have used an alias, so they combed over every facility where he might have stayed, including all of the hotels and motels in Takamatsu City and neighboring hot springs resorts. They found nothing. They questioned the staff at restaurants and department stores he might have visited, but to no avail. The entire search failed to unearth even the tiniest shred of information.
After returning to Tokyo, the team looked into other areas, tracing every destination reachable from Narita and gathering updated information at regular intervals. But in the end, Saeko’s father’s trail had gone cold on August 21, 1994.
8In early September, eighteen years ago, Kitazawa had sat at the sofa across the table from Saeko and shown her the report based on the team’s ten-day investigation. It was the same office where they sat now, though the ashtray that had once occupied the table had outlived its usefulness.
The content of the report had been straightforward: Kitazawa was throwing in the towel. It pained him deeply, but the scenario of a lone traveler vanishing mysteriously for no apparent reason presented more difficulties than any other type of missing persons case.
The investigators had confirmed only that Shinichiro Kuriyama had stayed in the N Hotel at Narita Airport on the night of August 21st. Beyond that, they were completely unable to determine whether he had actually reached Takamatsu or gone elsewhere. The word “unknown” appeared repeatedly in the report.
He was loath to say so to Saeko, but Kitazawa had a strong feeling, based on his many years of experience in the business, that Shinichiro Kuriyama was no longer among the living. When he worked on a case, Kitazawa sometimes experienced a flash of
inspiration that told him the person he was looking for had ceased to be. And often, it wasn’t long before those subjects’ bodies turned up. Accidents aside, the vast majority of these cases were suicides. In such cases, the client was usually frantic to locate the missing person as quickly as possible to avert the tragedy.
Five years into his private detective concern, Kitazawa had been hired to locate a man who had been wracked with shame after a blunder he’d made at work caused major problems for his company. On a whim, the man had failed to show up at work one day and flitted hither and thither before randomly boarding a northbound train.
The man had left behind a wife and two small children. Those who knew him reported he’d always had a meek, retiring personality. Kitazawa couldn’t help but think that the man’s inability to get over his mistake exceeded the bounds of earnestness into the realm of cowardice.
With the family’s breadwinner gone, the man’s wife had found her way to Kitazawa’s office and tearfully pleaded for help. “Please, find my husband. If you don’t find him soon, he’ll take his own life!” After hitting the road, the man had left a message on the family’s answering machine hinting at the possibility of suicide.
By the seventh day of his investigation, Kitazawa had tracked his target down in Sendai City. The man’s funds were almost depleted and he was wandering about in search of a place to kill himself. Using strong-arm tactics, Kitazawa escorted the man home to a tearfully overjoyed wife. She was so appreciative that Kitazawa was moved to shed tears of his own.
The satisfaction of being a private detective varied dramatically based on whether or not the investigations were successful, even though the fees were more or less the same. That was all part of the game.