He grapples for something at the back of the futon cupboard. He throws a book at me. I catch it in both bands. Japanese for Busy People.
“Get through a chapter a day and in a month you can get a job. But even if you don’t land a job you’ll have kept yourself out of trouble. I don’t want to hear another word about the crazy man in a mask or that the police have picked you up. No more trouble. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’m serious. This is it. You want to stay here, there are two conditions. If you agree to them, we can be family. If you disagree, we go our separate ways. For good. OK? You got it?”
“Yes.”
“Condition 1. Forget about the crazy man with the sword. I guarantee if you forget about him, he will disappear. Do you agree?”
I dig my hands in my jeans pockets. I wonder if what he says is true, but I hope he’s right. But what choice do I have?
“Yes.”
“Condition 2. Forget about Steve and living in England. Your future is here. Start acting like it. Do you agree?”
I keep my hands in both pockets of my jeans. In one I have Firefly’s ID card. In the other is a plastic card. I pull it out. It’s Hayashi Hikaru’s press pass for the AKB concert. The cops gave it back to me, the desk sergeant didn’t realise what it was, and I didn’t think to set him straight. I toy with it. I look at the smiling face of a Japanese woman who has made it to the top of her profession, and I feel sad. But what Uncle Kentaro says is true, there is nowhere else I can go. Not now, not without Steve.
“Do you agree?”
I bow my head and I know there’s only one answer I can give.
“Yes.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A minute spent reading Japanese for Busy People is a long time. A whole day is murder. Uncle Kentaro makes out that life in a Shinto shrine is an unending list of duties and religious rites, but apart from blessing a car in the morning, a building site in the afternoon and counting the donations in the box at the end of the day, (two ¥100 coins) he spends most of his time on the telephone and smoking Lucky Seven cigarettes.
That leaves him an awful lot of time to make sure I’m doing what I promised. He leaves me be, but is serious about making me study. I start with a chapter in the morning and he checks whether I have done the exercises correctly at lunch, then I have to read to him in the evening before he settles down in front of the television. He makes a note of the sports results, then gives me my homework for the next day.
But just before he goes to bed, he hands me a leaflet.
“What’s this, Uncle?”
“I didn’t think you’d remember. I showed this to you a long time ago. I figure you need something real to focus on between your studies. You need to focus on something other than studying polite Japanese. I got it from the Abiko police kōban.”
I sigh.
The less I have to do with policemen the better.
Uncle Kentaro translates the text. “Let’s see now. It says she was five when she disappeared from the street outside her Abiko home in 1996. Nobody has seen her since; the police have no leads. But they do have a ¥10 million reward.”
“Great. I could do with the money. Just, not with the police.”
“But think of the mystery! You can try to solve this. Do you think she knows she’s been abducted? Where is she now? What do you think her parents are going through every day not knowing the truth? You’re pretty good at uncovering the truth, Hana, and this needs to be solved. Put your growing Japanese skills to good use.”
I sigh again. “If she’s still alive.”
“If she’s still alive.”
He passes me the flier. A blurry snapshot of a little girl in the grey empuku uniform of a kindergarten school. She has a bowl cut and a single topknot tied with a pink ribbon. She’s too shy to look straight at the camera.
She’d be twenty this year.
“Interested?” Uncle Kentaro says.
“What’s her name?”
“It says Ishihara.”
“Ishii — stone.”
“Yes, that’s part of the family name. But her first name is a colour.”
I’m good with colours. I look over at Uncle Kentaro. But he’s not saying. I sigh and take a stab in the dark.
“Aoi?”
“Aoi. Aoi is Japanese for blue. Very good. A lucky guess?”
Hardly. I want to scream at him that A O and I were in the drawing Steve made, but I think better of reminding him, maybe this is all part of some plan of his?
“Maybe. How do I find out about Aoi?”
“Well, you could check the internet, but there’s nothing about it in English or Japanese, I looked. You will have to do what people did before the internet.”
“Go to cocktail parties?”
“No. Check the library, or go to a newspaper and check their back issues.”
“I don’t think my Japanese is up to it.”
“You don’t know until you try. And I think you may find that it forces you to improve.” He takes out a Lucky Seven and lights it, then speaks between his teeth. “The best way is not to seek the easy way out but to challenge yourself.”
I feel the plastic ID in my pocket. I have a better idea of how to challenge myself.
“Uncle Kentaro, do you mind if I take a break from my studies and visit Tokyo tomorrow to do some research?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I’m around the side of the NHK building. Foreigners talking loudly walk in. They look a little flushed like they have been drinking. They must be journalists. Perhaps web journalists. That means they don’t have to dress up. That would explain their sloppy clothes and torn jeans. Aunt Tanaka wouldn’t have approved. They flash their press passes and are waved through with a little bow by an old man in a security uniform.
I hold Hikaru Hayashi’s press pass. The important thing is to keep my nerve. I come in after the foreigners. To anyone not paying close attention, I look like I’m a straggler, a last one in with the group. I flash my pass at the old guard. I’m gambling that all foreigners look the same and he wouldn’t dream of stopping me for fear of having to speak English. But just in case, I have tied my hair back with an elastic band and put on my flu mask. In the half-light my hair might look black and I could maybe pass for Hikaru Hayashi. Her photo could have been anyone. I can be anyone. At first glance.
And I’m in. I waltz past the guard in the glass box at the inside of the long grey concrete corridor. I pin Hayashi’s ID plastic cover to my chest, realising that I look nothing like the picture in the ID, but that maybe nobody does. And also, it doesn’t matter. As long as you follow the rules, follow the appearance of what is the right thing to do, actually doing the right thing doesn’t make the slightest difference. If that means I have to pretend to be someone I’m not, I can live with that. All this surface stuff doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is finding out the truth of what happened to Steve. And that means, for now, finding Aoi.
I let the gang of foreigners ahead of me slip further ahead out of my sight. But I can hear their voices and feet on the concrete grey corridors. Somehow there’s not a hint of the glamour of being in a TV studio, just the musty smell of alcohol and stale tobacco. Not so very different from Uncle Kentaro’s.
I need the newsroom. But I have no idea where it is. The talking and footsteps ahead of me end. I stride purposefully along the corridor. There are benches on either side like in a doctor’s waiting room or in the police station. Black pinned things with no arms. On every other one, men in need of a shave are sleeping. A man in green overalls is looking at one of the news tabloid magazines. He’s too busy to notice me. I get to a lift and stairs. I call the lift, but I don’t want to get in. I see it has gone to the seventh floor. I turn and climb the concrete staircase. I pass the man in green. He’s unfolding a picture from the centrefold of the tabloid magazine. He whistles. They often carry the latest scoops on political scandals. I’m impressed that NHK employees aren’t t
oo snooty to read them.
I hurry on. Two windowless flights for every floor. By the time I count 14 I’m sweating. Knowing that I’m high up is enough to give me the shakes, but when I come out into the corridor on the seventh floor, it’s so huge, even the row of outside windows isn’t too scary, revealing the lights of Tokyo all around. I pass a door marked “studio” and then I’m in a single room filled with white light. There are Japanese people all around, but no one pays me any attention. I try to work out what kind of order there is in the mess. Cigarette smoke fills the corridor and a man who looks like a goldfish is sitting next to a nest of tables. He has big eyes behind glasses that went out of fashion before I was born. He wears a white silk shirt and brown tie. His hair is slicked back. He’s deep in thought about the next programme or else he’s daydreaming—it’s hard to tell—but I think it best to give him a wide berth. He doesn’t have a pass pinned to his shirt, which could mean he’s a rebel who hates authority or that he’s so important everyone knows his name. Around him are a mixture of Japanese men and women and some foreigners. I don’t want to be around him.
A great white-haired Japanese man in Bermuda shorts and polo shirt sits cross-legged in a chair behind a pile of printouts and two computer screens. But his attention is on a baseball game on a television perched on a brown filing cabinet against the wall. The sports department? One team wins, one loses. I don’t get the point. I wouldn’t know how to fit in there.
A few computers are on behind piles of papers, newspapers and pictures of family. A handful of foreigners: a woman and two youngish men are the only people in one of the newsroom who weren’t with the group of foreigners I saw in the corridor downstairs. I don’t belong in either area, with the foreigners or the Japanese. But the computers hold the information, which is what I need more than anything else right now. If I sit on the Japanese side, I might be exposed as a fraud if someone just looks at my face and I’d be out of luck before I have even begun. That leaves the foreigners. They might think I’m Japanese rather than Western. If I don’t speak any English to them I figure I can carry on unnoticed. If they speak Japanese to me, I’ll just play dumb. That isn’t a stretch for me.
I sit down at a nest of computers at a desk closer to the foreigners than the Japanese. I try to turn on a computer, but it prompts me for a password. I didn’t think of that.
A Japanese man passes by carrying a printout, he has a slight tremor and his head keeps nodding. I can’t tell if he’s greeting me, checking me out or has the beginnings of Parkinson’s, it’s impossible to tell, but I think it best to offer pity. I crease my brow and nod as wisely as I can. I try my best to communicate sympathy: “I know what you’re feeling. I, too, belong here and I, too, suffer.”
It must have worked, because he looks straight through me and leans over the white woman with a big nose and red cheeks. His hands are shaking. She’s staring into the distance. He’s leaning on the desk now with both hands. He’s talking in dull tones, but her voice gets louder.
“I don’t understand. It’s totally unclear. Who is doing the action? Why are they doing it? Do you see, in English we need subjects and verbs and people doing things. And in news stories, we need, er, news.”
“It’s a word-for word translation; it’s perfectly clear what it means. It’s not my fault if you cannot understand the nuances of Japanese. Some things are untranslatable.”
“Some things are not stories.”
“Some things you will never understand. You are a woman and not Japanese.”
“How very observant of you, Tonkatsu-san. You might even make a journalist one day, Lord knows you might want to consider a second career. Translating is just a hobby for you, eh?”
“My name is Tokatsu. Tonkatsu is fried pork cutlet. Tokatsu is my name. Either you are very stupid or you are making a joke at me. It’s not right to make jokes at me. I will not stand for it. I’ll tell buchō you were unhelpful. You can go back to teaching English at the clam school.”
“Cram school. Yeah, sometimes I wonder if I ever left.” She sighs. “OK, keep the translation your way.”
“Thank you.”
He brushes past me.
“… anytime Tonkatsu-san. Enjoy your desk dinner! I’m out of here for dinner. Got a hot date with my Indian curry,” she shouts after him. She gets up and leaves. I bury my head in a Japanese newspaper and pretend to be studying it closely.
Then she’s gone along with the other two foreigners. I don’t know how long a dinner break will last, or if there is a restaurant in this building, but I figure I have at least 30 minutes or at best one hour to find what I need to know. I hurry to her terminal. As long as the screensaver doesn’t come on, I won’t need to type a password.
I look at her screen; it’s some kind of word processing program. There is a world wire page updating itself like a Twitter feed. There is a “search” option. I type in “missing girl Aoi” but it opens a file about blue movies, whatever they are. I close the file and look around the desktop. I find an icon called “archives”. I click on there and type in missing girl Aoi. Still no good.
I take out my missing girl leaflet.
She had disappeared on February 3rd, 1996, from Abiko. So I type for news from Abiko from that date to three months after. This search gets me two news stories. The first is a brief:
CHIBA CITY: — Chiba Prefectural Police have appealed for information from members of the public in the ongoing search for a girl, aged five, who went missing from her front garden in Higashi-Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, on Tuesday while waiting for a kindergarten bus. Police have interviewed the distraught parents and have issued this picture of her. Police believe she wandered away from her home in the Kounoyama wooded area of the city and are combing the woods nearby.
The second was even briefer:
CHIBA CITY: — Police have interviewed the father of a missing Abiko kindergartener. She went missing last month. Police interviewed the father, Mr Ishihara, 35, a scientist at NEC, specialising in the study of DNA.
And that is it. I broaden my search and I include all of Chiba, then Japan, but there are no more stories on it. I look up at the clock on the computer. I’ve eaten up thirty minutes already. The journalists might be back any second, and I don’t fancy trying to explain myself. I’ll have to think of a cover story, or else be someone completely different.
Then I find a story from two years ago. Again another brief.
CHIBA: A Chiba mother has issued a heart-felt plea to members of the public for any information on the disappearance of her daughter.
Aoi Ishihara, 5, went missing while waiting for a bus on the way to kindergarten. Mrs Ito said she would not rest until she knew the truth.
Strange. Her mother is Ito, not Ishihara. And no mention of a father this time.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The white woman is back. With the two security guards and the bucho.
On the TV is a news report: An imposter with Hikaru Hayashi’s ID had infiltrated a pop show. A blurry version of my face is showing on the screen. All eyes in the newsroom are on me.
“I can explain.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
But I can’t explain. At least, not in a way the journalists can understand. Or that even I can understand.
The NHK people take the press pass from me and escort me to the entrance where a police car picks me up.
Uncle Kentaro is still angry with me for getting into trouble and having to pick me up from the police station in Shibuya. Detective Watanabe takes notes and tells me he’s very disappointed in me too. But I’ll tell you what I really think. I think Uncle Kentaro didn’t like it that it was really his fault. I wouldn’t have gone off to Tokyo if he hadn’t given me the leaflet about Aoi. Or maybe it’s the fact that he hates authority. He pretends he’s not at home when the man from NHK comes to the door asking for the TV licence fee. But he’s like that sometimes, can’t face up to his own responsibilities for all his talk of d
oing the right thing. That’s why he drinks. So, here I am once again, working through my Japanese homework, only this time Uncle Kentaro is stricter than ever. But if the whole thing hadn’t been his fault, he might not have taken me back in, so there’s that. But now he makes me make another promise: no more investigations into Aoi. Or anyone. Just study and promise to accept Japan as my saviour or something.
I promise that to Uncle Kentaro. It’s an easy promise to make. It’s keeping promises when you don’t really believe them — that’s the difficult bit.
I have plenty of time to think about what I’ve found. And what I’ve found are more questions. I don’t know much about the pre-internet age, but it’s got to be odd that a five-year-old goes missing and there are only three stories in 15 years about her. Also, that the mother’s name changes without explanation from Ishihara to Ito. And, how does a five-year-old go missing while waiting for a bus? Doesn’t the mother always stay with her kid until she gets on the bus?
Something doesn’t add up.
Where can I go from here? Which makes me wonder. Where had Aoi been going that morning? When Uncle Kentaro isn’t paying attention, I check the internet on my phone for kindergartens in the Abiko area. That nets five results. I look on the websites of each. Two started up in the last ten years, leaving two that were established before Aoi went missing and one that started in the year after she went missing.
So that narrows it down to two. I look over their websites. It’s like I’m looking for an out-of-date carton of natto in a poorly-lit supermarket. What do I think I can find now, that couldn’t be found 20 years ago?
Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) Page 8