by Kōji Suzuki
…The live-streamed suicide by hanging was filmed in a studio apartment, not a prison execution chamber.
…The apartment was right near Aomono-Yokocho station on the Keihin Express line.
…It was Room 303 at the Shinagawa View Heights.
…The person living there was named Hiroyuki Niimura.
…Was there any chance that the strange guy she saw near Takanori’s place was this Hiroyuki Niimura?
The doors on the opposite side were still open.
People on the platform were waiting for the passengers onboard to get off.
In a flash, Akane decided to get off, slipping between the other passengers onto the platform. She didn’t want to waste this opportunity. It was her chance to reverse the disadvantage of being stalked by an unknown person. If this man in front of her went into Room 303 at the Shinagawa View Heights, her hypothesis that she was being followed by Hiroyuki Niimura would be correct. That would put her one step ahead of him in terms of the info they each possessed.
I can do this, she encouraged herself.
Just as the train began pulling away, Akane walked toward the stairs leading down to the ticket gate. Then she took her cell phone out of her bag and turned it off. If her activity were being monitored via a GPS tracking app, turning off the phone would surely disable the feature.
Yet she knew that she was also severing her connection to Takanori.
Around the time that Akane turned off her phone, Takanori was in his kitchen. An FM station on the radio on the counter directly behind him was playing a lighthearted bossa nova tune.
He sipped from his glass of red wine and poured a little into the beef curry that he had simmering away. He vaguely recalled seeing a recipe somewhere that said red wine paired well with beef curry. The bloody color mixed together with the curry roux and gave off a faint aroma. The beef had become nice and tender.
Once their child was born, Takanori would be working from home more often, and if Akane were to keep her job as a full-time teacher, he would have even more opportunities to cook their meals. His repertoire was still rather limited at the moment, and curry and fried rice were the only dishes that he could cook decently. That said, he was reluctant to attend a cooking class or consult a cookbook.
He certainly wanted to fulfill his responsibilities as a husband and father, but he believed the way to do that was to make the most of his masculinity rather than to copy the manner of a typical housewife. His features were the furthest thing from those of a rugged man, yet there were times when Takanori wished to be just that type.
How long has the curry been simmering? he wondered. He poked his head out from the kitchen to check the living-room clock and saw that it was long past 7 p.m.
Before leaving that morning, Akane had told him she would be home around seven or so.
Where could she be? Perhaps she’d gotten off at Roppongi and was walking over to his place, or perhaps she was still on the subway. She couldn’t possibly still be on the Keihin Express, Takanori figured. As he imagined Akane in transit, he remembered the GPS tracking app installed on her cell phone.
On top of concerns about her mental state, there was also the possibility that she was being targeted by some stranger, and thus Takanori had decided to install the software with Akane’s consent, much like a parent giving his young child a cell phone equipped with a GPS feature.
As a tool that let you know where your loved ones were, it really was useful.
Takanori lowered the heat under the pot of curry and wiped his hands. Moving to the living room, he picked up his cell phone. When he launched the application and searched for Akane’s whereabouts, he noticed that her phone had been turned off.
Why would she turn it off?
Since she almost never turned off her phone, something felt amiss to him.
When he proceeded with his search, the place where her cell phone had been turned off appeared onscreen.
The point on the map indicated Aomono-Yokocho station on the Keihin Express line. Moreover, the phone had been turned off after she’d stepped onto the platform, and not inside the train.
As far as Takanori knew, there was no connection between Akane and Aomono-Yokocho. To begin with, she had no relatives nor any friends around there.
Why Aomono-Yokocho?
Naturally, he associated the area with the live video of the hanging. The apartment where the video had likely been filmed was just a stone’s throw from the station.
Could she really be heading there?
This was one of the biggest puzzles he was contending with. He had no idea how the series of events surrounding the Kashiwada case, Shinagawa View Heights, and Hiroyuki Niimura—the resident of that unit—were connected. The only things he knew were the address and the name, and he had no leads as to what kind of man Niimura was. However, Takanori could be almost certain that there was something creepy about him.
An ominous premonition came over Takanori, and at once he lost his appetite.
The distance was not even far enough for it to be considered tailing. Akane went through the ticket gate and entered an alley in the residential area, and within only two minutes she spotted the apartment she was looking for. It was an old seven-story building with rows of studio apartments that were all the same size: the Shinagawa View Heights, which Takanori had also visited once.
On the short trip from Aomono-Yokocho station, Akane kept surveilling the man from behind. If it had been brighter outside, she could have made out all of his features, but in the dim light after sunset the man’s contours melted into the darkness.
He appeared to be in his thirties and had a slender, tall build, and even from behind she could tell that he was neat and well-groomed. The more she observed him, the more he seemed to be the same person as the stranger from the other day.
The man, who was walking about thirty feet in front of her, came to a halt. Seeing this, Akane headed toward a nearby greengrocer, pretended to pick vegetables from the outdoor stands, and tracked him with just her eyes.
Aiming the tip of his shoe at the base of a utility pole, he kicked it at a dramatic speed and went back to walking as if nothing had happened.
Akane resumed her pursuit. After he entered the lobby of the Shinagawa View Heights just as she’d expected, she looked at the base of the pole where the man had kicked it and found the remains of a moth stuck to its concrete surface. The splatter of the squashed bug’s bodily fluids was much larger than the size of its wings.
Akane shuddered. The act seemed like the opposite of how a man who projected such a clean appearance would behave. She simply couldn’t fathom the point of obliterating the moth.
She peered into the lobby, but there was no sign of him. The elevator was running, and she could hear the groaning of its motor. The display panel showed the elevator stopping on the third floor. As soon as she heard faint footsteps walking down a corridor, the motor produced a different sound and the elevator descended.
There was no guarantee that the man wouldn’t be there when the door opened. She looked around to see whether there might be some place she could hide and noticed a space set back from the residents’ mailboxes, just beside the janitor’s room, whose curtain was drawn now that it was after work hours.
The mailboxes were lined up along both sides in the space, and on the far wall were three pairs of coin-operated washing machines and dryers. One of the washers was in use, and the whole unit was shaking just before the end of its spin cycle as if it were suffering death spasms.
Just as she was about to step toward the building entrance, Akane glimpsed the number “303” on a mailbox. Room 303—Hiroyuki Niimura’s apartment.
Akane peeked inside and found a single postcard that had been tossed in at the bottom. The slot opened right away when she pulled it down with the tip of her finger. Go on, the postcard seemed to say, ripe for the taking.
After looking around behind her and verifying that no one was there, she picked up the postcard
and placed it in her bag. The elevator had begun to move again. With the mailboxes on the walls to her left and right, and the washers and dryers set against the wall further down, she found herself at a dead end with no avenue of escape.
Perhaps someone was coming down, timing when the washer would stop.
Akane held her breath as she stood in the recessed space with the mailboxes, just her nose sticking out into the hallway. Without making a sound, a woman passed right in front of her face. Caught off guard, Akane stood still, her arms folded across her chest, and a tiny shriek escaped her lips.
With an elegant gait, the woman was heading toward the bicycle parking space when she heard Akane’s cry and stopped.
The lady wore a sleeveless dress and a large pair of sunglasses and had slipped on pumps on her otherwise bare feet. Her profile was right there; her hair came down to the middle of her back, and her upper arms, the nape of her neck, and her chin line were practically pure white. Akane’s nose detected a peculiar scent unlike any perfume, and she instinctively held her breath. It was not that the smell offended her, but it was ever so faintly redolent of soil, a smell to which Akane was particularly sensitive.
You’ve come back to me.
So spoke a gentle voice, seemingly from nowhere, jolting Akane.
“Mom…why are you here…”
Just as she uttered this, the phantom of her mother vanished. The woman had looked exactly like Akane’s mother in her youth.
Her illusion always appeared about once a year, but with this instance, it seemed she was beginning to manifest more often.
Her head a jumble, Akane went outside and around to the front of the building and looked up at the third-floor windows. Only the third unit from the right had its lights on.
She was sure that was Hiroyuki Niimura’s apartment.
Having made certain of that much, she set out toward the station, turning her phone on as she made her way there.
All right, I’d better just get to Aomono-Yokocho.
All that linked Akane to Aomono-Yokocho was Room 303 at the Shinagawa View Heights. Takanori had identified where she was, at least.
Not being able to narrow down what lay in store for him there irked him. After changing out of his sweatpants into jeans, he rushed to his entryway.
He shoved his feet into his sneakers, but in his haste the momentum caused him to stumble and bash his head into the door, and just then he heard his cell phone ring.
Akane’s name showed up on the display. As relief washed over him, the strength left his body, and he nearly sank down onto his entryway mat.
There was no end to his anxieties. Yet he supposed that in essence, that was what it meant to love someone. You had to accept all that love entailed, worries included.
Sitting down properly on his mat, Takanori pressed the call button on his phone and heard Akane’s voice on the other side.
5
After scouring the bookstores, including secondhand shops, Takanori had finally acquired it. He placed the paperback on his table and proceeded to inspect it carefully from every angle.
Looking at the colophon, he saw that the first edition had come out in June 1991, with the paperback released two years later.
Five thousand copies had been printed of the first edition. It was exceedingly difficult to obtain one; scarcely any could be found in libraries, let alone in used booksellers, and even a search of online auctions yielded no hits. The first edition had vanished entirely from the marketplace, perhaps having been gathered up and collected someplace. The only copies that he could even hope to obtain were reprints and paperback versions.
There was a chance that the origin of the series of inexplicable events was explained in the book, that some hint to elucidating the mystery lay hidden within…The circumstances of the book’s discovery intimated as much.
None of the occurrences so far had been a coincidence. Phenomena which at first glance appeared to be unrelated were linked in remarkable ways, ways that were invisible to the eye. The spot to which they’d been guided by the car navigation was where the first victim’s body had been dumped in the Kashiwada case, and the young girl who had nearly become the next victim was Akane, the woman he would be marrying.
Given the flow of things, this development couldn’t be a coincidence, either.
Since the rare and valuable book appeared in both the live suicide video and the photographs taken during the house search, it had to be connected to all this somehow. What was more, the photos of the interior of Kashiwada’s room revealed a whole bundle of first editions sitting at the entryway.
It was Kihara who had noted this strange coincidence.
Takanori had learned of it yesterday morning at Kihara’s office.
Yesterday morning…
It was a muggy day, reaching about ninety degrees during the daytime. Just walking the few hundred yards from Takada-no-baba station to Kihara’s office, Takanori broke into a sweat. Yet the temperature wasn’t the only reason he was perspiring so much. On the previous occasion, he’d been able to kill time on the way there with a casual stroll, but this time his impatience made him walk faster.
He’d received a call earlier that morning from Kihara, who’d discovered that the live video of the suicide and the photos taken during the police search of Kashiwada’s place ten years prior contained an item in common. Upon hearing this, unable to contain himself, Takanori had dashed over to Kihara’s office.
“An item in common…”
That was how Kihara had described what he had found.
Responding to the bell, Kihara opened the door, and upon seeing the beads of sweat on Takanori’s face, lowered the temperature of his air conditioner by several degrees.
“Oh, so you ran here in this heat. Well, please come in.”
Assuming that Takanori was eager to know what was going on, Kihara didn’t waste any time serving coffee and instead loaded the video on his computer screen.
Kihara had given the two videos that Takanori had brought and copied for him repeated viewings, and after running a comparative analysis, he’d found something.
On the computer screen was the video in which Kashiwada had slipped out of the rope around his neck like an escape artist and run away. The disorderly studio apartment was full of inanimate everyday objects. What now occupied the center of the room was not a human being, but simply the ring of the rope hanging from the ceiling.
Kihara moved the cursor to focus on the ceiling where the rope should have been fastened. To support the body of a man, a rope needed to be affixed to a point on the ceiling. Yet in a typical studio apartment, there was surely no place on the ceiling to tie a rope.
With that question as his starting point, Kihara had searched for where the rope might have been fastened, but in the middle of the ceiling was a small, black, cavernous hole stretching even further above, with no place for a rope to connect. It was as if the rope had been hanging from this darkness like the thread of a spider’s web descending from another dimension.
“When I watched this video, right away it made me think of a magnifying glass.”
He’s right, Takanori thought. Hanging in the middle of the screen and ending in a ring, the rope resembled an inverted magnifying glass.
“Yes, that’s what it looks like,” he said.
“Taking that as a hint, I tried to enlarge the ‘convex lens’ section. I was curious about what I might see. At first, I was doing this half-seriously, but then…”
Working off the idea that magnifying glasses made tiny objects appear larger, Kihara had treated the ring of the rope as a lens and enlarged the image inside little by little.
When he’d done that, the focus had lined up with part of the bookshelf on the opposite wall.
“That’s when I got the idea to compare it with the version on the USB. In the middle of the screen, Kashiwada was hanging and blocking the view, so the items on the bookshelf behind him were hidden.”
After putting the
USB version on the screen and confirming this, Kihara reverted to the video saved on his hard drive.
With Kashiwada’s body gone, the view to the back was clear and revealed a single volume lying on its side where the lens was focused.
The title of the book was Ring.
Go on, take a look, Kashiwada seemed to beckon, leading Takanori’s eyes to the copy of Ring in the enlarged, ring-shaped hanging rope that so resembled a magnifying glass.
Could this really be a coincidence, too?
With everything around it a blur, the lone volume asserted itself emphatically.
“But that’s not all,” Kihara said, going through the materials related to the Kashiwada case and pulling several photographs from the file. “These photos were taken right after Kashiwada’s arrest. They were shot about ten years ago, when the cops searched his home, and they show every inch of the place.”
The mere mention of photos of the living space of a serial kidnapper and murderer of girls put notions in Takanori’s head and made him search for something abnormal. Banishing those thoughts, he peered closer and observed the room in the snippets captured by the camera until his nose nearly touched.
The unit was a studio apartment, larger than those at the Shinagawa View Heights, with a single bed positioned at one wall and a bookshelf stretching all the way to the ceiling at another wall. The bookshelf was stacked full of volumes with no free space.
The photos allowed him to read their titles.
They belonged to all sort of genres—natural science, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, religion, history, and literature—and a cursory scan was all Takanori needed to discern the resident’s high level of education.
He recalled that Kashiwada had worked as a college-prep teacher. He’d been at one of the leading schools in West Funabashi and supposedly taught three subjects, namely mathematics, physics, and English. It was therefore only natural for the books’ genres to be so wide-ranging.
There were also some magazines stacked on the table beside the bed. Many of them were critical and scientific journals, the furthest thing possible from obscenity.