by Kōji Suzuki
Perhaps exhausted too, Saeko sat with her head resting against the glass window and her eyes closed. Hashiba placed his hand on hers and let his eyes droop.
Until this particular case, the disappearances had been limited to a few people. Now, suddenly, the number had soared nearly to three digits. It was true that Hashiba felt not just trepidation but excitement. Though his body craved rest, it was unlikely that sleep would come to him. Even a blink and he would thank himself for it later; there was no way of knowing what the rest of the day had in store for him. The psychic, Shigeko Torii, was due to arrive in the afternoon. The filming wouldn’t begin until she arrived, but he needed to work the location before she got there.
As Hashiba dozed amid such thoughts, the cell phone in his shirt pocket started to ring. Saeko, too, woke with a start, grabbing Hashiba’s hand in surprise—her sleep must have been deeper than his.
Hashiba answered the phone with his free hand. It was Nakamura, the director, who wanted an update on the situation. Hashiba explained that they were still on their way via a back route and went over a few details: Shigeko Torii’s time of arrival at Atami, their hotel for the night. When he finished up the conversation and returned the phone to his pocket, the cab was coming round to the Atami New Road. Saeko had been right; so far, they had managed to avoid the main crush of the traffic and were making good time towards the garden.
Once they got close to Route 135, the traffic got denser and the cab came to a standstill. Hashiba looked over to Saeko and raised an eyebrow.
“It’s not far from here,” Saeko assured.
Hashiba told the driver, “We’ll get out here.”
When they got out onto the street, as though in welcome a helicopter flew by low over their heads.
The main entrance to the garden was closed and before it crowded a throng of people. Hashiba recognized faces from a few competing stations interspersed in the crowd. He cut a path forward, looking for his colleague Kagayama.
“Hashiba,” a voice called out from behind. Turning, he saw Kagayama, whose bald pate reminded him of a vanquished samurai.
“Hey,” he responded with a raised hand. He gestured to show that Saeko had come with him.
“Nice to see you again,” she said.
“Ms. Kuriyama, what a surprise.”
Saeko had come along simply because they had been in the same room when they heard the news. Not wanting Kagayama to catch on to their relationship, Hashiba nonchalantly explained, “Ms. Kuriyama’s hometown is here in Atami.”
“Really?” Kagayama threw his head back in a slightly exaggerated movement.
“Actually, it’s my father’s hometown,” Saeko corrected. “My grandparents have both long passed away, and the house was sold on.”
Just like her to be honest. It was the first time Hashiba had heard that himself. “She’s pretty good with the local geography,” he emphasized her value to the team. “It’s actually thanks to her knowing all the back streets that we got here so quickly.”
“She was right. If you’d tried to come on the 135, you’d be stuck right now.”
The honking carried across from the main road. Congestion on the artery between Atami and Ito must have been incredibly annoying, and indeed the police had come to manage the traffic. It still didn’t seem to budge, though there were signs of easing.
“By the way, Kagayama, have you eaten?”
“Not yet.”
“How about you fill us in on what’s happened so far over some lunch?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The park restaurant was full to capacity and queued up, so the three of them decided to make their way across the road to the resort hotel that stood atop a sheer seaside cliff.
After ordering his lunch, Kagayama lit a cigarette and began to explain to Saeko and Hashiba what he had managed to work out so far. “Have you been to the garden before?” he asked.
Hashiba and Saeko shook their heads together. Saeko explained that the area had been part of a public forest preserve when she used to visit her grandparents and that Herb Gardens hadn’t existed yet.
Kagayama continued with the understanding that neither was familiar with the place. “Well, the garden stretches up a hillside slope. Visitors pay at the main gate and then take the facility’s bus up to the top parking area where they’re let off and make their way back down through the garden on foot, taking in the view of the sea, enjoying the flowers, that sort of thing. There’s a place halfway down to stop and take a break with some herbal tea. There’s also a little shop where you can buy handmade soaps, handmade postcards, souvenirs like that. You could kill a lot of time coming down. Anyway, almost all of the people who disappeared yesterday were here as part of a tour group, on those bus tours. I suppose the itinerary for the Izu area includes a stop here. Now, large groups like that don’t use the garden’s bus. Instead, the tour bus just takes them directly to the top parking area. The tourists make their way down on foot while the bus heads back down to the gate first and waits for them.
“Yesterday, there were two tour buses here after lunch. Each had just under forty passengers. There were also four or five smaller independent groups of visitors. In total, there should have been about a hundred people at the top of the gardens yesterday afternoon. The tour buses arrived at one o’clock, and the passengers were scheduled to meet at the bottom at two. The tour guides had gone back to the bottom to wait with the buses and their drivers. They started to wonder what was going on when, even after two o’clock, not a single person had arrived at the meeting place. The two buses were operating for different travel agencies, and not a single passenger from either had returned. So one of the guides started to make her way up to check what was going on. It didn’t take her long to notice that something was odd. ‘Notice’ may not be the word, she couldn’t but. There wasn’t a soul anywhere in sight.”
Kagayama paused. Hashiba and Saeko tried to imagine the atmosphere of the vacant park, recalling the scene at the Fujimura house in Takato. This time the disappearances hadn’t occurred in an enclosed space. The circumstances were closer to the two disappearances they’d learned about from America’s West Coast: here there were no walls or roofs, or even fences, just a wide, open valley stretching out to the sea beyond. It was one thing for people to disappear from a house; now they had to picture people vanishing out in the open.
“The tour guide must have been pretty bewildered,” Kagayama continued. “She went back down to the buses and reported to the other guide and the drivers. No one was sure what to believe. I don’t blame them. It just doesn’t make any sense for a hundred people to vanish all at once. They got the manager of the gardens involved at half-past two. He called around the facility’s staff, trying to get some information. It was at this point that they realized that it wasn’t just the tourists that were missing. The employees of the garbage disposal firm that tended the gardens were gone too, leaving just their van. So the guides began to call the cell phone numbers that they had of the people who had gone missing. No one answered—or rather, what the manager told me was that the phones didn’t even ring.”
“Wouldn’t even ring? So they were out of range?” Hashiba asked.
“I guess that’s what he meant,” Kagayama replied uncertainly. Many of the passengers were probably elderly tourists, and it wasn’t clear what fraction of them owned cell phones. Even so, for not even a single call to be picked up was quite bizarre.
“Go on,” Hashiba urged.
“They called the police at close to four. The Atami Station, well, I guess they had no idea how to respond. How could they, right? Anyway, they sent a car around to confirm the details but found nothing to suggest that a crime had taken place. Come evening, the garden closed its gates, and after that it was just calling people left and right. One of the buses had been headed for Shimoda, the other back to Tokyo. A travel agency can get in deep crap for not getting their customers back home in time. So the guides phoned their bosses, the passe
ngers’ relatives, in a flurry. By nighttime, the news had made its way to all the papers, television stations, and other media outlets in Tokyo.”
Hashiba found himself subconsciously averting his eyes from Kagayama. Why? There was no reason for him to be feeling guilty about anything. When all this was happening he had been at Kitazawa’s office, listening to his report on the progress made in their ongoing investigations. If he’d been at the TV station he’d no doubt have heard the news, but he’d been engrossed in his date with Saeko. Since he didn’t work in news but rather in the variety show division, he wasn’t expected to be on call. After all, he and Saeko were the ones who had linked the dots between the other disappearances and this case here in Atami, and no one else on the payroll could see the connection. It was his own quick thinking to get Kagayama to come down early, knowing that he lived in nearby Odawara.
“The police investigation went up a whole load of notches early this morning,” Kagayama continued. “Not a single person turned up come dawn … Spending a night out in the hills in this season could be catastrophic especially for elderly folk. The fire and police departments are up there now combing the whole area with search parties.”
A waitress brought their lunch as Kagayama wound up his update on events. While wielding his knife and fork, Hashiba asked a slew of questions that popped into mind. “Do we have an exact figure for the number of people that disappeared?”
“Let’s see …” Kagayama pulled a notebook out from his bag, flipped through the pages, and began reading from his notes. “There were seventy-nine passengers on the tour buses. Nine people had come in their own cars. There were also the three janitors. That makes a total of ninety-one people. Most of the passengers on the tour bus were elderly women.”
“Ninety-one … And the police? What’s their view of all this?” Even if they were utterly at a loss, they needed a hypothesis to conduct an effective investigation.
Kagayama picked up one of the menus from the table and positioned it so that it inclined at a roughly thirty-degree angle. “Let’s say this is Herb Gardens. Basically, the flow of visitors is one way from the parking spaces at the top all the way down to the main entrance at the bottom. There are a number of paths that crisscross with each other, and the visitors can choose any particular route they want. Now, there’s a point right here, in the center, where all of these paths converge. So, let’s imagine that there was a group of kidnappers waiting here for the passengers. They could, potentially, order the passengers to go back to the top, instead of continuing down. Just shouting orders wouldn’t be enough, of course, so we have to assume that they threatened the passengers in some way. Perhaps they were armed. They could have, in theory, sent all the passengers back up without letting a single one through. Then they could have forced them all down a mountain path away from the garden.”
“Kidnappers? What kind of group would do that?”
“It’s just a hypothesis. Maybe it was some new religious cult. They’re also considering the possibility that some members of the group were among the passengers from the beginning. But then again they were mostly elderly women …”
Hashiba snorted. Why would anyone want to lead ninety-one people out of an herbal garden? Besides, there were no signs that cars had been used. It was impossible to pull off such a deed without leaving a trace.
“But there’s no other explanation. Unless, of course, a UFO landed and spirited them all away. I’ve asked around on that but haven’t come up with anything we can use. Some people did joke that they saw a bluish light in the sky above the garden …”
Kagayama himself didn’t seem to be joking at all. Hashiba remembered that during the meeting with Saeko, when one of the writers had suggested the possibility of a link between UFOs and the disappearances, Kagayama’s face had betrayed interest in that track.
“There was an old road that linked Shimoda and Atami since the Kamakura period several centuries ago.” Saeko’s voice sounded relaxed and graceful, as though floating down from somewhere on high. She’d interrupted the flow of the conversation but looked quite serious.
Both Hashiba and Kagayama turned to her, surprised. “An old road?” Hashiba asked.
“It’s more like an overgrown footpath now, but it used to be one of the region’s arteries. There were no coastline roads back then, nothing where Route 135 is now. I think there’s a shrine up top of the garden, the Soga Shrine. The path that winds off it heads towards the Atami Nature Resort.”
“The Soga Shrine? Of the Soga Brothers?”
Saeko nodded. “That’s right, the same Soga Brothers of the Kabuki vendetta. They avenged their father not too far from here.”
She didn’t seem to be proposing that the disappearances had anything to do with the vendetta. Rather, given that no one’s imagination was up to the task of explaining the mystery, she was adding a bit of local historical flavor to the conversation.
Yet, having heard this, Hashiba could not but picture ninety-one people, in single file, being forced along an ancient path that had once been trod by many. They progressed silently, apart from a subtle rustling of the undergrowth, the occasional snapping of a twig underfoot. Like spellbound rats mindlessly plunging into the sea, or ants instinctively swarming around food, each was robbed of individual will. Nevertheless the march had a solemn mood because some heavenly force dominated them.
“Let’s take a look up there, afterwards,” Saeko said.
Her suggestion sounded out of sorts, but they would definitely end up going. Once the cameramen, sound people, and equipment arrived, they would wait for the psychic Shigeko Torii to arrive, and begin filming.
Just then Hashiba’s cell phone, which lay on the table, began to ring.
Probably Nakamura, Hashiba guessed and glanced down at his phone, but the name flashing on the screen caught him completely off guard.
“Err, excuse me for a moment,” he said, snatching up the phone and getting up from his seat. Even while doing so, he worried whether his sudden movement had struck Saeko as unnatural. He was making it quite obvious that the call was private; if it were work-related, there would be no reason to get up. Hashiba glanced over towards Saeko and was relieved to see that she registered no suspicion.
Hashiba stopped outside the bathroom next to the register and answered the call.
“Where are you, darling?” the voice of his wife sounded from the other end of the receiver.
“Sorry,” Hashiba started with an apology. He felt a surge of guilt wash over him, bringing him back from his passion for work. He realized that he hadn’t called home last night when he’d stayed over at Saeko’s place, and now his wife was gently reproaching him for forgetting to call.
“I know you’re busy with work, but couldn’t you find time for just one phone call?”
Hashiba could handle it better when his wife raised her voice at him. When she was really angry, her voice seemed to seep viscously into the wrinkles of his brain matter instead. Hashiba switched the phone to his other hand and swallowed hard.
Recently, there had been a number of times where he’d had to stay out working all night. Last night had been different; he hadn’t called because he didn’t want to alert Saeko. Thinking back to it now, he felt as though he hadn’t been himself. Why had he lied about his marital status? It hadn’t been simply out of lust for her. When she asked the moment had already passed, their sexual longing dissipated.
A devilish whim had won over. There was no other way to put it. He remembered a program he had worked on about a politician who had lied about his academic record. Now Hashiba could understand how the man must have felt. Forced to answer with a yes or a no, to tick a box, knowing very well that he shouldn’t, he had pushed the truth away.
Hashiba cursed his weakness. When she’d asked him about it, Saeko had had this look, almost pleading. It would have been obvious even to a less narcissistic man which answer she wanted to hear. Hashiba had bent the truth because he couldn’t bring himself to
crush the hope he had seen in her eyes. Fully aware that a convenient lie would bring consequences, he had given in to the temptation. Walls were hemming in on both sides of him now as payment.
“Some urgent work came in and I didn’t want to disturb you by calling so late. Sorry.”
“It’s not like it ever wakes up Yusuke.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
While pregnant, Hashiba’s wife had contracted a bout of German measles, and Yusuke, Hashiba’s son, had been born hard of hearing in one ear. It hardly affected Yusuke; his determination to pick up on even the smallest sounds made him in fact more sensitive. All the same, Hashiba’s sense of guilt deepened at the thought that he’d hunted for ass while leaving his wife at home with their hearing-impaired child.
His wife was silent for a few beats. Hashiba had a bad feeling about what would come next.
“The results of the test came back,” she said at last, her tone sagging now, heavy, dragging Hashiba down with it.
“So soon?” Four days ago, his wife had undergone a test for breast cancer. She had been told that the results would be back in two weeks. So the results were early; Hashiba didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad one.
“They asked me to come back for more detailed cell testing.” His wife’s voice quivered slightly.
I see … Hashiba was shaken by an awful conviction that his affair last night had somehow affected the result.
Just two weeks ago, his wife had told him that she had found a lump under her breast. She had guided his hand towards the underside of her left breast, and there he had felt the small, unnatural lump—a small change in his wife’s body, the body that he had not touched in a long time. He remembered thinking that, if it was cancer, the lump was already quite large. “It’s probably nothing, just some inflammation,” he had said, not wanting her to worry unnecessarily. “But perhaps we should get it tested, just in case,” he had gently recommended as well. Four days ago, his wife had finally dragged herself to the hospital.