by Kōji Suzuki
The lump was in exactly the same place as Saeko’s and almost the same size.
Last night his sexual desire had dried up the moment he had felt the lump under Saeko’s breast, but it was not because of worry that she could have cancer. The image of his wife had flashed in his mind, as clear as day, and he had been unable to wipe it away. His wife had employed an unexpected tactic to stop him from continuing the affair.
Would Saeko try to explain this using physics terminology, as the contraction of wave functions? Not that Hashiba really understood the laws of physics—his own impression was simply that he was being punished by heaven. The test results had overlapped, at fifty-fifty, but had been shifted towards the worse by his staying at Saeko’s. Two once equally likely possibilities, through the contraction of wave functions, had converged into a single state, cancer.
Glimpsing a moment of the workings of the world, Hashiba prayed: Even if they do have to remove her breast, please let my wife live.
“If something happens to me, it’s okay if you found someone else, you know.”
Hashiba’s eyes darted over to where Saeko was seated in the distance, deep in conversation with Kagayama. Has she caught on about Saeko? he wondered. Bad test results, cheating husband—if his wife was beleaguered by two fears, it was Hashiba’s duty to assuage her anxiety. “I’ll be home tonight, I promise,” he assured her, adding a few more comforting utterances before he hung up the phone.
He glanced over towards the table where Saeko and Kagayama were still engrossed in conversation. It didn’t look like they had picked up on anything in his behavior. Hashiba shut his eyes and took a deep breath, wiping away the sweat that had gathered on his forehead. He found himself walking into the bathroom. After washing his hands meticulously, he looked up and saw his face in the mirror.
What the hell are you going to do?
Until this point, his life had been smooth, but it was as if a small cut had appeared and was gradually widening. He had to tend to it before it festered.
Yet, Hashiba was at a loss as to where to start. His flesh-and-blood self was genuinely worried for his wife. But the face in the mirror shone with desire for Saeko. The discomfort of reality dissociating from its mirror image wasn’t something that vanished no matter how assiduously he washed his wands.
2Late in the afternoon, as if with foresight of the improvement in traffic, Shigeko Torii arrived in a cab. The low winter sun had already begun to cast the shadow of the mountains against the east-facing hills of the park. When her foot emerged from the cab, Hashiba felt that the air grew even chillier. Though it had been almost a month since he had last seen her in person, she had aged far more than one would expect. As her legs found the ground he saw that they were feeble and unreliable. He ran up to the taxi to help, taking the luggage from her lap. The bag, like its owner, seemed somehow weightless.
“Sorry to be a burden,” Shigeko said, bowing her head lightly, revealing her thinning hair and mottled scalp. It was a painful sight, and Hashiba found himself looking away. He busied across to the staff caravan and put Shigeko’s luggage on the back seat.
The timing of her arrival was perfect; they had just wrapped up the last of their interviews of family members of the missing tourists. Most of the people that had come to the park had sent their parents off to enjoy a package trip and were around Hashiba’s age. While all of them were worried, the strangeness of the disappearances gave them an air of puzzlement. Hashiba had tried to imagine how he would feel if his mother had been involved, but instead his thoughts had kept on returning to his conversation with his wife.
Calling Kagayama over, he gestured towards the closed entrance and asked, “They’ll let us in now, right?” Before the day was over they needed to capture incontrovertible images and sounds of the site, mixing in Shigeko Torii’s reactions.
“Yes, we have an agreement.” The place was still closed to the public, but media had a way in. Kagayama had obtained permission to film inside by talking to the hotel that owned the place.
“Right, let’s go.”
There were six of them in all: Hashiba, Saeko, Kagayama, cameraman Mitsuru Hosokawa, sound technician Ryoichi Kato, and Shigeko Torii. They made their way in through the restaurant and met with Herb Gardens’ PR rep, Mitsuo Sodeyama, who would be their guide.
“Thanks for agreeing to take us around.” Hashiba made a low bow in greeting.
“Please all of you get in this bus,” Sodeyama said. While he worked as the PR rep, when he had spare time Sodeyama also drove the garden bus. Today, he had agreed to accompany Hashiba and the others to the parking lot at the top and escort them for the rest of the day. Sodeyama had luckily been in the office at the base last afternoon; if not, he might have been one of those included among the missing.
When they reached the top, he decided to turn the bus around, drive back down, and walk up to rejoin them. Just in case, he didn’t want to leave the bus at the top while he escorted them since they would be taking their time with all the filming.
It was already close to 4 p.m. At this time of day there would usually still be a few groups of tourists making their way down the paths. Today, with the gate still closed to the public, the garden was eerily still. As Sodeyama worked his way up the hillside, he stopped many times to catch his breath. Having just turned thirty, he was confident about his stamina and was used to walking up and down the garden. Yet today, he found himself awfully short of breath. His whole body felt oddly heavy—or rather, it was as though the atmosphere were thinner. Sodeyama had never experienced mountain sickness, but his whole body registered a new, odd sense that the altitude had suddenly shot up.
When he stopped again, he was on a pedestrian path weaving diagonally up a hill that looked down on Athletics Square. One side of the path traced a gentle slope downwards and was covered in rosemary, the tips of the bristling oval leaves flowering white, its grassy scent so heady as to interfere with breathing. Sodeyama wondered whether it could actually be these flowers blooming out of season that gave him the odd sense. He stopped and leaned against the handrail on the valley side and looked back the way he’d come. Through the gap in the valley he could see a section of the serpentine Route 135. As though the earlier lines of traffic had been a mirage, it was almost empty of cars now. Now and then, white shapes meandered across his V-shaped vista.
Sodeyama shivered and pulled his jacket closed. Standing here alone seemed terribly lonely, unbearable. As he forsook the handrail and essayed to continue up the path, pure-white rosemary burst into view even brighter than before. Their whiteness netted his consciousness and halted his step. From tiny frays that gaped all over the place a subtle shift showed its face, and Sodeyama was unable to put the change into words.
He usually drove the bus up and down and didn’t take the pedestrian paths much. Perhaps staff that tended to the gardens could pinpoint the change. All he could do was describe the scene impressionistically, but a simple question reared its head: Did we ever have white rosemary planted here?
Maybe that was it, the color; in his recollection the slope had been covered in red and purple herbs. He found his gaze being pulled towards the dense growth of rosemary. The stem was jostling—thickening and thinning like the throat of an animal swallowing its chewed-up prey. He looked more closely and saw that the impression was caused by a swarm of ants crawling upwards, only upwards, thousands in layer upon layer in an undulating motion. The ants surged up to the base of the petals, then along their shaded sides, toward the tips. From there they could only fall off. The sight somehow brought to mind a crowd of elderly people jostling down a narrow mountain path.
The swarm fell off from the petal tips at a leisurely speed—much more slowly than their own legs had taken them up. They fell in formation and remained in a clump even after they arrived on the ground. Where they fell was a conical mound four inches tall from whose center ants poured out anew, crowded out, overflowing like foam, latching onto the rosemary stem and scrambling to
wards the white petals at the top. What had seemed like thousands seemed more like millions. Entranced, Sodeyama observed the intense welling. In thrall to a sight he’d never seen before, he nevertheless felt calm. While he maintained the customary poise of an observer, his breathing was becoming even more labored.
For a moment, the air itself seemed to halt. Was it a trick of the eye? The ants falling from the petals appeared to stop all and one, hanging in mid-air. As though that were the signal, the swarm changed course.
The falling ants, the welling ants, all joined into a mottled pattern on the ground, a sharp, narrow spearhead forming on the valley side, and they started making for the tips of Sodeyama’s feet. Overwhelmed, he took a few steps backwards and prepared to flee. There were two options: up and down.
Just then, he heard voices from above. It was the film crew, shouting something. Sodeyama couldn’t stand to be alone; he wanted to be near people and to feel their warmth. Relying on the voices, he ran upwards, ever upwards on the path, but it was like eluding the pursuit of something in a dream: his legs wouldn’t take him forward. At any moment, he felt, the millions of ants would reach his ankles, climb up his Achilles’ heels, and scurry over the back of his knees, up to his buttocks, and he felt his spine tingling—or rather, wasn’t that the sensation of innumerable ant legs scratching at his back?
Sodeyama nearly tripped, his torso twisting, and he saw what was behind him: a black band two feet wide cutting diagonally across the white cobbled path. The swarm was almost geometrical, the seething mass forming a long, narrow parallelogram.
Then, with amazing teamwork, the shape began to morph. The edges began to soften and clamber towards the center. In the blink of an eye, the parallelogram was swelling out into a circle. Enchanted by a change in formation reminiscent of mass choreography, Sodeyama stood staring, torso still twisted back unnaturally.
Achieving a perfect black circle on the white cobblestone path, the mass of ants maintained the shape as it slowly recommenced moving towards him. A ring filled with darkness, it was a moving pitfall gouged into the earth to trap prey. He pictured internal organs, small and large intestines, and somehow felt an intense urge to urinate.
At that moment, he heard the rustling of leaves and the fluttering of innumerable birds, and above them a woman’s scream. Released from his paralysis, Sodeyama charged up the incline.
3After getting off the bus at the top of the gardens, Hashiba and the others headed straight for the stone steps above the parking lot. A sign at the foot indicated the way to the Soga Shrine. It seemed that the current theory the police were following was that the tourists and staff had been forced back up the paths, passing the shrine, up into one of the mountain footpaths beyond. Whether the case or not, this was somewhere to stake out with the crew. A helicopter sounded overhead, describing a route towards Amagi. They had heard word that the search parties had already reached close to the Ito Skyline Road; now that it was getting dark they were probably getting ready to call it a day. Nakamura had promised to call Kagayama if there were any developments. The fact that he hadn’t meant that the police were yet to find anything.
Shigeko Torii walked a few paces behind Hosokawa and Kato who were carrying the heavy camera equipment. Every few steps she would stop and take a deep breath, exhaling heavily and stretching her back. Hashiba made sure to follow beside her, supporting her with an arm over one of her shoulders. He was feeling guilty as hell for forcing an elderly person to struggle so.
“Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.
A small stone shrine stood at the top of the steps. By the time they reached it, Hashiba had already begun to suspect that Shigeko’s fatigue was more a physical manifestation of mental exhaustion than simple tiredness. Standing next to the small shrine, Shigeko straightened up and made a show of looking around as though listening out for signs or indications of what might have happened. Every now and again her shoulders would shiver in resonance to something as she looked here and there; the way she peered through the air around the shrine gave Hashiba the impression that she was listening for something a normal human could not detect, as though with her entire being. She wore a long cashmere coat that covered her completely, exposing only a small part of her neck to the elements. The exposed skin was prickly with goose bumps, and Hashiba couldn’t help wondering whether they were simply from the cold, or whether they were caused by something she was detecting in the atmosphere around the shrine. The old woman had always said that she was able to detect things through her body first, as though her whole being was an eardrum, finely tuned to pick out anomalous vibrations in the air.
Hashiba tiptoed away and waved the cameramen to start filming, pointing for them to keep out of Shigeko’s way as they did. The low undergrowth that bristled around the roots of the trees surrounding the shrine undulated slowly from a breeze that had already died down. Towards the right Hashiba could make out the beginning of a footpath leading away from the shrine. Could so many people have disappeared down there?
Shigeko had come up to the entrance of the footpath and now stooped forwards, curving her back as she sniffed at the air as though to detect some trace or impression of the missing people. It was clear even to Hashiba that there were no discernible marks in the undergrowth, no broken branches, to suggest anyone had been forced down the narrow mountain path. The bamboo leaves stood straight, and the ground was soft with decaying leaves—if people had come through here he was sure they would have left obvious footprints. Had the search parties started out from somewhere else?
The shrine was remote and quiet as though nothing had happened.
A hollow, wooden clanking sound broke through the silence. It was coming from a set of wooden wish boards, the shrine’s ema, strung up on both sides on makeshift sets of wooden torii gates, two on either side. A few dozen ema hung from wooden bars along each of the structures behind a bench and a wooden box for donations to the shrine. Next to that lay a basket of blank ema, yet to have wishes written on. People would throw three hundred yen into the donations box, inscribe their wishes or words of gratitude onto one of the wooden planks with a marker pen, and then tie it to the bars along the torii with red string.
As though pushed from behind, some of the boards rippled, making the dry clanking sound. Each time they moved, a couple of them twisted around and reversed. Among mundane prayers for the safety of families and hopes to pass exams, one written with a thick red marker bore only the character for happiness. The character was bold and the ink had fanned out around it, bleeding into the wood. As was the custom, the name and address of the person that had bought the ema was inscribed on the back—Yoko Niimura from Gamagori in Aichi Prefecture. The same marker had been used for the name and address, but the touch was softer, the text neater. The ema suddenly jerked to the side, revealing a white, soft-looking thing wriggling behind it. The ema were clanking around despite the lack of wind because something was caressing them from behind.
Just as Hosokawa brought the camera into focus over Shigeko’s head, the six of them saw that the white thing could actually be a wing. Suddenly, the shape emerged through the sides of the boards and landed on the uppermost bar. The cameraman jumped backwards startled, and Shigeko actually pitched forward towards the boards, thrusting her hand forward to support herself and knocking a few off.
Perched on the beam, a seagull stared out inquisitively at them. Atami was close to the sea, and one could often see gulls circling the boats that ferried people out to Hatsushima Island. But they were hardly seen inland, and they weren’t even near the coastline here. The shrine was way up on a hillside over a hundred meters above sea level.
The gull pulled in its wingspan and fixed a careful gaze on Hashiba, Saeko, and Shigeko in turn. It seemed to be paying no attention to the camera or the sound equipment.
“Where have you come from now?” Shigeko asked.
The gull rapped its beak against the wooden beam at its feet a couple of times as though in answer to S
higeko’s question. Maybe it was just pecking randomly. It stood completely still apart from its head, which ducked left and right with its gaze. It looked strangely composed, like it was waiting for a signal.
How could a single stray water bird cause so much tension? Its dark eyes glared at the group of humans, as if commanding them not to move.
“What do you think? Do you feel anything different from when we visited the Fujimura house at Takato?” Hashiba broke the silence, whispering to Shigeko. It was a run-of-the-mill question, but he felt that he needed to diffuse the tension somehow.
“It’s too much for me,” Shigeko wailed, sounding defeated. She crumpled downwards, crouching on the ground. The gull cocked its head again, impassively observing Shigeko for a moment. Then it hopped upwards, spread its wings, and took off into the sky. At the same time the area around the shrine exploded in noise. What looked like hundreds or thousands of gulls pitched up from the grasses around them, casting upwards towards the sky in a flurry of beating wings. Had they all been there, hidden in the undergrowth all this time?
The birds continued to soar upwards in a deafening tumult of beating wings and birdcalls. The huge flock flew higher and higher, twisting upwards, cyclone-like. Saeko covered her ears and let out a piercing scream as the silence was violently broken. She wasn’t conscious of it, but her body reacted, subconsciously recalling the fear she had felt during the earthquake at the Takato house; she reeled backwards, wanting to cover her eyes and ears.
Hosokawa, unsure whether he should be trying to film the birds or Shigeko, tried to get Hashiba’s attention, but Hashiba and Kagayama both stood transfixed by the spectacle of the vast spiraling tornado of gulls in the sky; making his decision he pointed the camera upwards. Gradually the flock began to melt away into the distance. A heavy, black cloud obscured the green of the hillside below. All they could see now was a vast number of pinpricks in the sky, graying against the twilight coming from the sea. Eventually, the points were swallowed up in the swell of clouds beyond, vanishing completely.