Edge

by Kōji Suzuki

  “No. That honor was always reserved for his editor. My father never liked me to read the galley proofs—by the time I was in high school, I never saw them.”

  “How come?”

  “It really bothered him if I said anything negative about the manuscript. For some reason, he really took everything I said to heart. He said that if I expressed so much as the slightest criticism, it made him want to change everything around.”

  Despite his cantankerous, despotic attitude toward his subordinates, Shinichiro had been so sensitive to his daughter’s opinions that he would slave away and rewrite his manuscripts. The memory of that childlike, endearing tendency brought a smile to Saeko’s lips.

  “Does that mean you never saw the manuscript he was working on when he vanished?”

  “Right. I never read it.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  After her father’s disappearance, Saeko had searched for his final manuscript. Portable word processors were the norm in that day, and Shinichiro had just recently adopted their use. But Saeko could locate no hard copy version of his latest nor a floppy disk containing the file.

  “But now and then, he would discuss bits and pieces of what he was working on. He said that discussing his ideas with me helped him organize his thoughts and figure things out. Whenever he got an idea, he always pulled out his day planner and jotted it down …” Saeko trailed off.

  “What is it?”

  “His day planner! It might give us an idea of what he was working on.” Saeko clapped, remembering the agenda book she had found at the Fujimura residence. It was still in her handbag. Her father had carried his planner at all times, but his handwriting was so terrible that it would require a great deal of time and patience to decode. Nonetheless, if they were looking for specific information, it was quite possible they might be able to find it.

  Saeko returned to the bedroom, located the planner in her handbag, and brought it back to the study.

  “Mind if I have a look?” Hashiba asked.

  “Please.” Saeko handed it to him.

  Immediately, Hashiba was surprised by its weight. It was a size larger than the average agenda book and bound with a real leather cover. The year 1994 was stamped in gold lettering on its front, and overall it gave off a stately air.

  Peeking inside, Hashiba saw that the pages were covered in writing all the way until late August. After that, the entries were spotty. In addition to using it to keep track of his schedule, it seemed Shinichiro had used it to jot down notes and ideas.

  As he leafed through the pages, Hashiba immediately noticed something strange. When the book was open to the middle pages, he felt something unnatural about the way the pages fell open. He closed and reopened the book several times, trying to figure out what it was.

  That was when he first noticed the strange ridges under the book’s cover.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed and removed the cover. Something slipped out and tumbled to the floor, landing soundlessly on the carpet.

  Hashiba retrieved the fallen object and held it up at eye level. It was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Like the day planner, its label read “1994.” There was no need to double-check: the handwriting clearly matched Shinichiro’s.

  For a few moments, Hashiba and Saeko stood staring at the floppy, turning it this way and that without speaking.

  “Could this be …” Hashiba began.

  “… my father’s last manuscript?” Saeko finished the thought.

  Shinichiro had purchased several portable word processors to use at his office, vacation home, and so forth. When he traveled for work he brought one with him so that he could write wherever he was. Of course he had kept a floppy with him at all times.

  No wonder Saeko had never been able to find it. The disk had been tucked into the cover of Shinichiro’s day planner, and the day planner had been at the Fujimuras’ home in Takato.

  “I don’t suppose we could open the file on a computer,” Hashiba mused. Nowadays, there weren’t a lot of word processors around anymore. But if they wanted to read the manuscript, they would need to open it on an old word processor and print it out.

  Saeko approached a shelf near the window and drew open a lace curtain. Behind it sat a stately black word processor, a relic from another era. “First things first. Let’s open the file,” she proposed.

  Saeko found the cord of the long-defunct machine and plugged it into an electrical outlet. When she pressed the power button, the machine emitted a faint beep as it whirred to life, words streaming onto its long, narrow monitor.

  Perched on a stool, Saeko worked carefully. It was the first time she’d ever touched her father’s word processor, and the ancient machine was tricky to operate.

  Saeko offered up a little prayer as she gingerly opened the documents and scrolled through them. The floppy contained fourteen files, each roughly ten pages long. Each page was approximately 800 characters long—handwritten, it would amount to roughly 300 pages of writing. It wasn’t long enough to comprise an entire volume. Shinichiro’s manuscripts had always been between 500 and 800 pages. Clearly, this manuscript was unfinished. The content on the disk was probably less than half of what Shinichiro had planned to write.

  The word processor’s screen only displayed half a page at a time, and the resolution was terrible. They would definitely need a hard copy if they wanted to read the text.

  Saeko entered the print command. She checked that the ink ribbon was in place and inserted the first blank page. When she pressed the Enter key, the machine languidly began printing the text, line by line, at an appallingly slow tempo by modern standards. It was so slow it was almost ridiculous, and yet there was no other option.

  By the time a few pages had finished printing, Saeko figured Hashiba had grasped the process. “Can you take it from here?” she asked.

  “Sure. No sweat.”

  “Would you mind standing in, then? I’ll prepare us some coffee and a simple breakfast.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  Saeko stood up, and Hashiba took her place on the stool as the word processor slowly churned out the fourth page.

  8As Saeko closed the door to her father’s study behind her, the sound of the word processor printing grew muffled. Its high-pitched chirp reminded her of an insect’s song, growing ever fainter as she walked down the hallway.

  The clock on the wall read eight-fifty. Since they’d risen just after seven, that meant Saeko and Hashiba had spent over an hour in her father’s study.

  Saeko knew Hashiba hadn’t planned on staying over here last night. She wondered if he needed to be at the station soon. What time did he normally wake up and go to work? She was well aware that many media men didn’t begin operations early in the morning, but she also didn’t want Hashiba to be late to work on her account.

  As Saeko crossed through the living room on her way to the dining room, she stopped suddenly in her tracks. The 50-inch liquid crystal television set against the wall was on. The volume was low, and the channel was tuned to a morning talk show.

  Suddenly, Saeko remembered hearing the television last night. Its sounds had reached her just as she was drifting off to sleep, even though she had no recollection of turning it on. She had fallen asleep wondering why it was on but hadn’t given it another thought since. Now, however, looking at the screen, Saeko began to recall the snatches of sound she’d heard last night. She had imagined the voices rising up from the bottom of the ocean in little bubbles, bursting at the surface to deliver fragments of information. She hadn’t succeeded in piecing it together into a cohesive narrative, but the little she had heard had filled her with a sense of foreboding.

  As she remembered the wariness she’d felt the night before, Saeko forgot about making coffee and stood stock still in front of the television. Ever since her father’s disappearance, she’d taken to picking up the remote and clicking the TV on the moment she entered the apartment. She felt uneasy all alone in the penthouse apartment, and before she knew it,
turning the TV on had become an unconscious habit.

  Her ex-husband had admonished her about it on numerous occasions, scolding, “Don’t leave the TV on if you aren’t even going to watch it!”

  Saeko agreed with him on a theoretical level. But despite herself, she couldn’t seem to break the habit.

  “Hey! You’ve got me for company, don’t you?” Exasperated by the implication that his presence did little to mitigate Saeko’s loneliness, her husband had actually flung the remote at her once.

  So it was entirely within the realm of possibility that Saeko had once again clicked the TV on last night without even realizing it. But she was sure about one thing: the circumstances last night had been unusual. She and Hashiba had embraced the moment they’d stepped through the front door and had remained entangled in each other’s arms as they’d staggered through the living room before collapsing onto the bed. Was she really so pitiful that she had switched on the TV even as she and Hashiba had passionately explored each other’s bodies, feverishly focused on the act? That would be painful evidence of how badly Saeko’s father’s disappearance had scarred her even after all this time.

  Saeko gazed despondently at the screen, focused more on her own thoughts than on the images being displayed. But after a few moments, her mind began to zero in on the topic of the television program. Something about it had caught her eye.

  A female reporter stood in front of the ocean, talking in an urgent tone. “Yesterday, in this herb garden by the sea, an extraordinary incident took place.” A white station wagon passed slowly behind the reporter, followed by several other cars. They all traveled at a sluggish pace—evidently the road was crowded, even though it was a weekday.

  In the background, the ocean was placid, but on the left side of the screen, a steep, rocky cliff plunged into the sea at a dramatic angle, and the water was slightly frothy where the waves lapped against its base. The microphone picked up the whir of helicopter blades—they weren’t visible on screen, but from the sound of it several choppers were circling overhead.

  Saeko recognized the landscape behind the reporter instantly. It was just a few kilometers south of Atami on Route 135. Having visited her paternal grandparents’ home in Atami frequently as a child, Saeko knew the area well.

  What happened in Atami?

  Saeko picked up the remote and turned up the volume.

  As the word processor languidly spat out each page, Hashiba had plenty of time to read the manuscript. When the seventeenth page finished printing, he fed the next clean page into the machine and stood up with the sheaf of pages he’d finished reading.

  Saeko still hadn’t returned to the study after leaving to make coffee. If breakfast was ready, perhaps he should just come out into the dining room to eat. But more importantly, he was in a hurry to let Saeko know what the manuscript was about. Shinichiro had been writing a book about mysterious group disappearances.

  There had been many such unsolved disappearances in history. In the seventh century, a group of Mayans living in present-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras had vanished without explanation. The number of people who disappeared was not known. In 1590, one hundred and twenty English colonists vanished without a trace from Roanoke Island, south of Norfolk in North America. In 1711, during the War of the Spanish Succession, every last member of a four thousand-man expedition into the Pyrénées went missing, despite the troops’ familiarity with the area. In 1923, the 605 residents of the Joya Verde settlement on the Amazon River disappeared in a single day. In 1980, four thousand indigenous inhabitants had vanished from their villages in Central Africa. Their disappearance was also accompanied by an inexplicable decline in wildlife populations in the area.

  Other examples included the Marie Celeste ghost ship mystery, and the sudden disappearances of airplanes and ships in the area between Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda—otherwise known as the Bermuda Triangle.

  Thus, various group disappearances had taken place all over the world, affecting anywhere from several dozen to several thousand people at once. In each of these cases, not a single body was ever found, nor were there any signs of conflict or violence.

  The manuscript seemed to be an exploration of these historical incidents, and an attempt to offer a personal interpretation of the mysteries. In other words, Shinichiro had been working on a book about unsolved group disappearances when he himself mysteriously vanished. Could it be a simple coincidence?

  Hashiba headed for the dining room. He had to tell Saeko.

  He found her in front of the television.

  “I found out what your father was writing about,” Hashiba announced, waving the sheaf of papers at Saeko, who stood listlessly in front of the screen.

  Saeko didn’t respond. She stared absently at the television, looking completely stunned. Hashiba turned towards the screen as well, following Saeko’s gaze.

  A female reporter spoke shrilly, her microphone clenched in one hand. “Yesterday afternoon at two o’clock, at an herb garden three kilometers south of Atami, nearly all of the visitors were reported missing. Presently, the exact number of visitors is not known but is estimated to be roughly one hundred.”

  The pitch of the whirring helicopters elevated a notch, perhaps due to an increase in altitude. The reporter hunched her shoulders against the cold while a group of boys standing behind her excitedly flashed peace signs at the camera.

  The reporter’s expression was tense, but she wasn’t fully cognizant of the weight of the situation. It was clear from her face that she was intentionally trying to dramatize the bizarre situation to stir up interest. She didn’t really believe that a hundred people had just vanished off the face of the earth. There had to be some mistake. Perhaps some religious cult had staged the incident to create a stir. Before long, someone would get to the bottom of the mystery …

  But Hashiba and Saeko knew better. They both experienced the same flash of intuition: the group disappearance in Atami was the latest and greatest in a string of mysterious cases.

  After all, they had seen the relief map in Kitazawa’s office the night before. They had taken in the geographical details of the American West Coast and Japan on the full-color maps. And they both knew: Atami was located right on top of the giant subterranean rift at the intersection of the Eurasian and Philippine Sea Plates.

  Chapter 4: Awe

  1December 22, 2012

  An atmosphere of bustling tension percolated through the Atami JR station; even those who didn’t work in the media could tell from the multiple helicopters circling overhead that something was wrong. People lining the crowded platforms craned upwards and asked each other what was going on. Most of them didn’t know, and those few who had caught morning news shows casually informed the others that a large group of people had suddenly disappeared. Since the ones giving these answers hardly understood the details, they only added to the doubts.

  Hashiba and Saeko wove their way through the noisy crowd, heading towards the ticket gates. Atami was like a second home to Saeko. Hashiba, too, had spent his early school days in the neighboring city of Mishima and knew the old hot-spring town and its geography well. They both knew that the herbal garden was about a ten-minute cab ride from the station, about an hour on foot.

  Now, however, the roads would be jammed with traffic. Hashiba had heard from a colleague already at the garden that the going would be slow and that they should definitely avoid the direct route down Route 135. On top of the ever-growing crowds of onlookers, the police and the fire brigade had set up search parties to carry out a wide sweep of the area. According to the colleague, relatives of the near to a hundred missing people had also started to turn up, further exacerbating the traffic situation. The garden’s parking lot, whose capacity was just a few dozen, was already overflowing with cars, and traffic had begun to spill out into the streets outside and near to the park.

  Hashiba had called the TV station almost immediately after seeing the news of the mass disappearance back at Saeko’s
apartment earlier that morning. It had only taken a couple of minutes to make the decision to head out to Atami. Needless to say, he asked Saeko to accompany him. He spent the journey calling around and making the necessary preparations for filming. But the one thing he couldn’t secure was a means of transportation at the locale itself.

  When they passed the ticket gates, the two of them made straight for the nearest taxi bank, still trying to work out what their best course of action would be.

  When Hashiba finished another call, Saeko suggested to him, “There’s a back route we could use.”

  “A back route?”

  “It’s longer, distance-wise. If we make a circle around the hillside villas, we’ll come out on a street that connects to the Atami New Road,” Saeko explained. “If we turn south before Nishikigaura that’ll take us to right behind the garden.”

  “You think the traffic will be better?”

  “It should be; only the locals know that route. If we get stuck we’ll just have to get out and walk, but it’s our best option.”

  “I hope it’ll be close enough to walk.”

  “Either way, it’ll be easier than walking all the way from here.”

  It was a gamble for Hashiba. If the back roads were crowded too, then there was a chance they could end up stuck further away. Still, just waiting in the face of a developing situation was unbearable; to keep moving seemed healthier on the mind.

  “Okay, the back route it is,” Hashiba decided, ushering Saeko into the backseat of the nearest free cab.

  As soon as Hashiba finished explaining the route to the driver, drowsiness washed over him. It had been after one in the morning when he finally fell asleep in Saeko’s bed. He’d woken up after seven and gone straight to her father’s study to print out the document they’d found before the morning news reported a mysterious mass disappearance in Atami. They had left on the fly, their breakfast almost untouched.

  The events of the night already felt an age away: his visiting Saeko’s luxurious apartment, their fumbling together, his sudden pulling back, the awkward moment following. Still, despite that, Hashiba felt that he and Saeko had crossed a certain threshold. They may not have consummated their relationship, but at least their mutual attraction was out in the open.