by Kōji Suzuki
When Akane told him that she’d be majoring in education at a national university, receiving scholarship money to pursue her goal of becoming a teacher, Takanori looked thrilled for her, and his eyes twinkled.
“I’m glad I came here. It’s convinced me that my father’s project isn’t some self-satisfied philanthropic whim, it’s really contributing to society. Please become a great teacher and instill noble ideals in your students.”
Akane could never forget the purehearted look he had in his eyes when he encouraged her thus.
Takanori was so different from the stereotype of a pampered millionaire’s son. Furthermore, despite having grown up in a doctor’s family, he was learning to draw at an art college, and after graduation he was to work at a big production company. It’d been obvious that he was free from the bonds so distinctive of wealthy households.
Thanks to her firsthand experience of his father’s educational ideals, Akane understood how this might be. Having felt the benevolence the founding family had bestowed at every turn and fully received its benefits, she could infer what Takanori’s home environment had been like. She’d never met a better man than Takanori, and she wasn’t exaggerating.
But it wasn’t as though, having grown up in a different world, he was just a different breed. When they first met, she felt an affinity with him for some reason, as if the gears in their hearts had clicked together.
Based on what she heard later, Takanori had the same impression, and from the moment they met they gravitated towards each other.
After she finished showering, Akane stood on the bathmat and caressed her skin with her towel. She dried her back, her hips, and her backside, then moved to the front side, and then placed her palms on her belly. It wasn’t showing any signs of sticking out yet. In fact, it was perfectly flat. When she thought about how a new life was forming and growing in there, an indescribable happiness welled up in her.
Yet as this happiness heightened, so did a proportionate sense of unease. It just felt too good to be true. As ungrateful as it sounded, she might have preferred it if he came from a poorer, more ordinary family at least.
She’d received a scholarship and worked hard at a part-time job to make ends meet and become a teacher after graduating college. The Ando family’s wealth defied the imagination of someone with her economic sensibilities.
Takanori’s father, who’d taught forensic medicine at a university hospital, had taken over his deceased father-in-law’s position and expanded it even further. Takanori’s paternal and maternal grandfathers had both been doctors, and now his younger sister was attending medical school, so he was certainly pedigreed.
Such a household environment was the envy of the average person, but to Akane it felt somewhat threatening.
Prejudices toward those who’d been raised in foster care, though not as bad as it once was, still ran deep. Takanori told her that she didn’t need to feel like she was inferior, that she should be proud of having worked so hard to make a life for herself despite her background as an orphan. He wasn’t just saying it—his sincerity came through in his attitude. Though she knew she had nothing at all to fear, she still worried about how his parents would react.
After all, they might think that her getting pregnant out of wedlock was a strategy to ensure that Takanori would marry her.
“Don’t worry. My parents have already consented to it.”
He’d already made it clear to them that he ultimately intended to marry Akane. And so, even though she’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock, Takanori assured her that she had absolutely nothing to worry about. Still, growing up in a bubble free from any hardship had made him so innocent, and she had to wonder if he’d given himself over to baseless optimism.
It’s precisely when you’re at your happiest that you can’t let yourself get carried away—you’ve got to watch out.
As Akane wrapped the bath towel around her and admonished herself, she recalled that her pajamas were still in her suitcase. She’d packed it full of everyday items, mainly her garments, and brought it over from her apartment in Tsurumi. She was sure the suitcase was leaning against the living room table with her pajamas still inside.
Akane went out to the living room and scanned the area.
The light of a desk lamp streamed out from the bedroom door, which was slightly ajar. Perhaps Takanori was lying on bed and reading a book.
The suitcase was right where she expected. She walked to it, and just as she was about to lean over, she noticed the light flickering on the computer monitor on the table. The power seemed to have been left on.
It was not the suitcase but the monitor that attracted her now.
The instant Akane saw the image, she got startled and stood up straight. Her instincts told her not to look, yet they failed to hold her back, and she found herself being irresistibly pulled closer to it by a mixture of curiosity and fear.
It showed a man with a rope around his neck. The body was moving downward at a deliberate pace. Even though she hadn’t seen the original footage, she felt with her very skin the oddness of the transition taking place onscreen.
When the man’s body fit precisely in the frame, its falling motion stopped, at which point the body began to rotate slowly.
She wondered whether it was a scene from some movie or television show, or perhaps a CG image that Takanori had been working on, but the rawness she sensed from the video wasn’t anything like an entertainment film. If that’s what it was, it could only be a horror movie.
What she saw now was the man’s entire body with nothing left out of the shot. His face was visible but both his eyes were covered, obscuring his expression as he turned his back to the screen.
…What is this?
Little by little, she came to understand what the video was showing. The man had just placed a rope around his neck and hanged himself. Both of his arms were dangling, and his toes were convulsing. He had ceased breathing, and his heart would soon stop beating. She couldn’t tell if he was still conscious.
The black stain spreading around his crotch was the only sign that he’d been alive.
His body was rotating slowly, and its front side was about to face her once again.
Right before his body came face to face with Akane—as if he had timed it—his blindfold fell away, revealing his dead face to her.
His eyeballs were slowly rolling back, with his pupils touching the edge of his eyelids, and saliva was dripping from his mouth down to his chin.
The moment Akane saw his face, she gasped aloud and felt a lump in her throat. Not because the image was unnatural and creepy—she knew his face. Instinctively, she covered her eyes with her hands, but it was too late. A memory that had been sealed in the nether reaches of her consciousness came rising up like a deep-sea fish hooked on a lure, broke through the surface and leapt into the air—springing to the top of her mind, the recollection oppressed her with staggering force.
The grassy mountain slope, the feel of the damp earth, the smell of soil striking her nose…
Her strength failing from the waist down, Akane fell to her knees on the carpet and began to lose consciousness.
No…got to…stay awake.
She tried desperately. Were she to pass out again, an ambulance would be called and she would be taken to a hospital. But she wanted to stay there in the room. The siren would extinguish her happiness, its sound nothing but a sinister omen.
Akane spread her arms on top of the table, just barely supporting her upper body.
With her cheek against the table, and her eyes open a sliver, she could still see the man’s face.
When she was twelve years old, she was dragged around and nearly killed by him.
4
Takanori was lying on bed, thinking.
What sort of interpretation was there?
When he heard Akane’s humming mixed with the sound of the shower, he grew even more serious. He wanted to rid her of her anxiety, give her peace. To do that, he needed
to find a well-grounded reason. Yet he simply couldn’t come up with a convincing explanation.
Who besides me could’ve installed a GPS tracking app on her cell phone, and in secret?
Akane’s unease was so intense it was painful to watch, and in the belief that the first thing to do was to calm her down, a lie had slipped from his mouth. He’d come up with a more plausible reason after buying some time and calm, but nothing occurred to him. The worst part was that if she really had been tracked by GPS, what she’d said about being followed by a stranger was also true.
Then he realized that the showering sound had died down at some point. It seemed like she’d finished.
Takanori thought he should consult somebody versed in GPS tracking systems for cell phones. Minakami—his coworker and a director at Studio Oz—knew quite a lot about these things. As Takanori pictured his face and bald spot, he heard the echo of a muffled thud from the living room.
He assumed that her suitcase had fallen over.
It had been very heavy when they brought it over from her old apartment in Tsurumi the other day, so much so that Akane couldn’t even move it an inch on her own. The surprising part hadn’t been the weight itself but the fact that almost all her clothes had fit. That one suitcase represented just how frugal and reserved her life had been.
Back when she was living at Fureai, the essentials, like clothes, shoes, and bags, had been provided for free. “Free” meant that personal preferences weren’t reflected very much, and everything had been plain. Even after Akane started living on her own, the habits she cultivated over many years didn’t go away, and her buying desires remained limited to the bare necessities.
That was one of the things that had endeared her to him.
Perhaps due to his home environment, his acquaintances and friends thus far all hailed from wealthy backgrounds. They lived in mansions, rode in luxury cars, and wore high-class brands. Back when he was in college, a former girlfriend who was studying piano used to boast about how her mother had gone to Paris and purchased an entire shelf of new top-brand items in a store. No matter how beautiful and talented the girls were, the relationships had never lasted long because he’d grown tired of their pampered, self-indulgent lifestyles.
Akane was so different from all the various types of women whom Takanori had met. With clothes that fit in a single suitcase, she’d sailed out into the world and maintained her simple beauty. She was very cautious, and somewhat timid, too, but her personality had a core. She was quite resolute, in fact.
That said, it was easy for Takanori to understand Akane’s fear—it was almost palpable. She was concerned about his parents’ reaction to the fact that she’d gotten pregnant. As understanding as they were, she was afraid that at the last moment, his parents might ruin things. Precisely because she felt happy, she couldn’t help but keep an eye on the pitfall that lay but one step away, and this cautiousness made her exhaust herself to no purpose.
No matter how many times he explained that his parents would never say no to them, Akane seemed unconvinced.
Since his childhood, Takanori had enjoyed tremendous freedom. He’d been able to decide everything on his own. Most notably, despite having grown up in a family of doctors who ran a general hospital, he hadn’t been forced to enter medical school and was able to attend an art college. With the way they’d treated him, there was no way they’d veto the woman of his choice. The only issue was, he himself didn’t know why his parents were always so delicate with him; perhaps that was why he failed to convince Akane.
Really, why?
When he looked deep inside, there was certainly some mysterious part of him that he couldn’t identify. Akane had a similar kind of darkness in her, too, and he sometimes thought that might be the source of the sound: at the party celebrating the first Fureai generation leaving the nest, Takanori had taken one look at her and heard their gears click. She seemed to have felt the same way, and it stunned him when she described her first impression of him using precisely the same expression—I heard our gears click. Their metaphors matching felt like more than a coincidence.
They’d sniffed out a kindred scent in each other, but as to exactly what it was, he was still feeling things out.
Takanori put the book he’d been reading down on the night table and dimmed the light.
As the room grew darker, the silence became more noticeable. That was when he first realized he was hearing too little. After that thud came from the living room, there’d been no trace of any human movement in the apartment.
A bad feeling came over him suddenly, and he leapt out of bed and into the living room.
The first thing he saw was Akane with her fingers latched onto the edges of the table and clinging on to support herself.
At first glance, he thought she’d had another attack like when she’d collapsed at the school gate, but her symptoms appeared to be different.
Just as he ran over to her, Akane fell into his arms. Lifting her up, he carried her over to the nearby sofa and laid her down. She looked to be in a state of shock but was fully conscious. She was blinking repeatedly, and her pupils moved about at a bewildering speed. The area from her neck to her chin was covered in cold sweat, and her pulse was racing.
Takanori ran to the kitchen, grabbed a glass of water, and made her drink some.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Should I call an ambulance?”
Akane shook her head no with a desperate look.
“Please, don’t. I’m all right,” she said.
With her face still turned away, she pointed to the computer on top of the table.
Takanori noticed the light flickering on his desktop monitor. He could have sworn he’d turned off his computer a while ago, after leaving Akane to herself in the bathroom, and yet it had restarted somehow.
She had to be pointing to the computer as the source of her shock.
Takanori went around the sofa, stood in front of the monitor, and looked at the screen.
The man who’d hanged himself was exposing his whole body, filling up the screen. When Takanori had viewed it in the evening, the toes had been higher in the frame, but now the man’s body had shifted down. Not only that—with the blindfold gone his face was showing, slightly cocked to the side and looking right at the screen.
When Takanori realized that the video saved on his computer was changing little by little, he suspected that this might end up happening. Faced with such an obvious difference, however, he was surprised that he was strong enough not to be panicking, but he knew why. With Akane in a psychologically weakened state, he had no choice but to be strong. If they both caved in, they’d fall into a bottomless mire.
Takanori continued staring hard at the dead man’s face. It felt familiar, but he couldn’t recall from where. If they’d met, it hadn’t been in the last few years. It would have been much longer ago.
“Kashiwada…The man…That’s Kashiwada,” Akane groaned.
Takanori was startled to hear that.
“Oh, yeah, I remember him,” he said.
It was only natural that he recognized the man’s face.
Kashiwada, a prisoner on death row for the abduction and murder of several girls, had caused a huge sensation about ten years ago. Around the time he was arrested, not a day had gone by without his face appearing in newspapers and on television. It made sense that Takanori knew his face, but unsettlingly, he couldn’t shake the impression that he hadn’t just seen but met the man. Takanori had been a high school student at the time of the incident. Back then, too, seeing Kashiwada’s face on television, Takanori had felt like he’d met the man somewhere before.
Kashiwada had committed his first crime in June 2003. In the year and three months until his arrest the following September, he had abducted four girls around the age of ten and taken them around before killing them.
Once apprehended, he underwent countless psychiatric evaluations, his mental state when he’d committed the crimes and ability to stand t
rial becoming an issue. The evaluation varied depending on the doctor, but it was determined that the subject’s condition fell within the bounds of sexual perversion or a personality disorder, and the prosecution proceeded to indict him.
Throughout the psychological exams and trial, Kashiwada mostly remained silent. His taciturn defiance suggested that he was schizophrenic, but if a man who had abducted and brutally murdered four young girls were found not guilty by reason of insanity, the prosecutor’s office would have utterly lost face. Supported by public opinion, which condemned the man as an enemy of society, the prosecution strenuously argued that Kashiwada was to be held responsible and ultimately convinced the court to find him guilty and sentence him to death.
Having followed the story in the papers and on TV news programs, Takanori knew that Kashiwada had received the death penalty. But then what happened? He couldn’t recall whether the sentence had been carried out.
An internet search would immediately provide him with info on the sentencing.
Takanori was kneeling beside the sofa and holding Akane close. He rose to his feet and was about to walk over to his computer, but she refused to let go of his hand. She seemed abnormally scared. Why would seeing a video of a serial killer of young girls hanging himself make her this frightened? Takanori didn’t understand.
Peering into her face, he asked her with his eyes…Is there some special reason?
Noticing his gaze, Akane read his mind and began telling him in spurts the source of her fear.
“I…I think maybe…I was almost killed…by this man.”
Her tone made it seem as though she wasn’t talking about her own experience. Indeed, when a distant memory sealed away in the depths of your consciousness surfaces out of the blue, you can feel like a stranger to it all. Akane was looking somewhere far away as if she were talking about some other girl’s terrifying experience.
“It can’t be…”
Takanori suddenly remembered. Kashiwada had been arrested just before he could kill a fifth girl he’d been taking around with him. After the police had received a report from some neighbors, she’d been discovered just in the nick of time, and with Kashiwada caught red-handed, she’d escaped becoming his next victim.