S

by Kōji Suzuki

  Comparing them from every angle, Takanori was amazed after all this time as a video specialist at just how much info could be gleaned from pictures.

  There were still a lot of photos that Takanori hadn’t seen yet in the brown envelope. All of them had been printed out by Kihara. Eager to read the written materials in the file, Takanori had failed to realize the value hidden in those photos.

  Putting the pictures of the four girls aside for a moment, he placed the other photos on the table one by one as he took them out from the envelope.

  The picture of Kiyomi Sakata when she was young was worth beholding. It gave off the kind of bewitching aura that could seduce a man—”impish” was the word for it. It was a woman’s charm, clearly distinct from those neuter girls.

  Asakawa, the weekly magazine reporter, could be called a good-looking guy. A fine young man, nice and lean, he seemed the type to be popular with women.

  From Ryuji Takayama’s picture, Takanori could sense a masculine presence in contrast to Asakawa’s. His hair was very short, and his broad neck sat solidly on his shoulders. Given his physique, it made sense that he’d been a prominent shot-putter in high school. His jawline was sharp, hinting at an iron will. He had the face of a physical laborer rather than a scholar.

  Takanori looked at Ryuji Takayama’s picture for a little while. Somehow he gazed at that face much longer than he did at the photos of Sakata or Asakawa. For some reason, he found himself unable to look away.

  The more Takanori stared at the face, the more he came to feel that he might have met the man somewhere. He’d had the same feeling about the death-row inmate Kashiwada.

  Takanori took out some photos of Kashiwada from the envelope.

  Born in Maebashi, Kashiwada had spent all his years locally from elementary school to high school, and after graduating from college in Tokyo he’d joined a travel agency, but it hadn’t lasted long. He’d changed jobs one after another, knocking around overseas, but afterwards he’d settled down and worked as a college-prep school instructor in West Funabashi.

  His father had passed away when he was in high school, and his mother had died during his college years. After losing both parents in such a short span, his connections with his relatives had been severed. He’d never married, and he’d had few friends. His profile painted a picture of a lonely life.

  He’d grown a beard, and his face had looked lax while he was working as an instructor at the school. In the pictures, his lusterless hair was long and shaggy. He wore black-rimmed glasses, and there were signs that he’d neglected his health. The photos of him shown to the public after his arrest were all alike, and in the average person’s mind Kashiwada’s face was the one in the pictures from his instructor era, which Takanori was now viewing.

  Yet the ones from after he’d been locked away as a condemned man gave a completely different impression. The photos that Kihara had obtained using his connections hadn’t been available to the public, so the difference Takanori was seeing now was practically unknown to the world.

  After he was locked up, his beard and his hair had been shaved so that his head was as bald as a monk’s, and the plain, restricted diet had made him leaner, making him look like a whole other man.

  The two men were so different that Takanori was inclined to suspect Kashiwada had purposely disguised himself.

  Now lean and sharp, his face looked exactly like Ryuji Takayama’s.

  Placing side by side the picture of Ryuji taken from his bust up and a photo of Kashiwada, Takanori compared the two.

  They were very much alike, the resemblance surpassing even that of the female victims.

  Being an expert at image processing, Takanori could see through to their skeletal structures under the skin of their heads. To make sure of it, he scanned Ryuji’s picture and Kashiwada’s and put them on his computer, and then overlapped the two after enlarging them to the same size. The space between the eyes, the position of the eyes and nose, the length of the lips, the shape of the ears, the forehead—every constituent part of their faces—matched perfectly.

  What the hell?

  Doubting his own senses, Takanori looked up from the screen and thought through it all.

  A quarter-century ago, Ryuji Takayama had died after watching the demonic videotape and contracting the ring virus, and his body had been autopsied by Takanori’s father. The fact that he was dead was incontrovertible.

  Kashiwada had been arrested more than ten years earlier as a suspect in the serial abduction and murder of young girls, and his capital punishment had been carried out just one month ago. That meant that Kashiwada had been alive until then, and this too was a solid fact.

  How could the two of them be the same person? Takanori was only getting more and more confused.

  Ryuji Takayama had died on October 19, 1990.

  In the family register, Takanori had drowned and died in June 1989 and was found alive two years later in June 1991, after the old couple in Otoi had passed away.

  Ring had been published around that same time.

  June 1991…There was a certain scene that Takanori couldn’t forget. His father had often taken him to the sea to conquer his fear and memory of drowning. Takanori didn’t know the name of the beach, but given what his father had told him the other day, now he knew the exact place—the Toi coastline.

  It struck Takanori as odd that he should still be so concerned with that scene. To be sure, it did contain a certain crucial element that involved his own fate. People could be indifferent to something unrelated to them, but they remembered life-or-death events down to the last little detail.

  With his retinas acting as camera eyes, and his eardrums as recording devices, this one scene was saved to his consciousness. Yet as time passed it had become blurry, covered in a haze, and driven into his unconscious mind.

  Comparing Ryuji and Kashiwada’s photos side by side, however, had been like a gust of wind that dispelled the haze.

  The scene was gradually coming into clearer focus. Triggered by the two photos, it was returning to him now in the form of images and accompanying sounds.

  He could hear the waves crashing. His father was sitting on the embankment, his eyes fixed on the shoreline and watching over Takanori as he swam. Feeling thirsty, Takanori began walking to where his father was sitting to get something to drink.

  At the same time, he could see another man coming from the opposite direction. In the bright sunlight, the man’s face was like a dark silhouette.

  “Dad, I’m thirsty.”

  When he said so, his father handed him a bottle of oolong tea. As there was only a bit left, Takanori drained the contents in one sip, at which point the stranger addressed him in an overly familiar tone.

  To a young boy of three and a half years, the words that had come out of the man’s mouth sounded so unusual, and their meaning had been utterly unclear. Yet now, as the scene became more vivid, his remark seemed more intelligible.

  With a greasy sweat on his face, the man searched the plastic bag and produced another bottle of oolong tea, and then turned to face Takanori.

  “Hey, brother. Want another?” the man asked.

  Even not knowing what it meant, Takanori sensed something terrifying in that word, and staring upward at the man’s face, he slowly shook his head no.

  In his mind, Takanori saw that very same face now. The person who was standing on that embankment and looking down at him was Ryuji Takayama.

  After dying more than half a year earlier and being autopsied by his father, had Ryuji come back to life?

  “Brother” signified some sort of association. Ryuji Takayama had been clinically dead for some period—that much was beyond doubt. If he’d called Takanori “brother” as a statement of fact, and not as a joke, then Takanori’s death in the family register for two years wasn’t merely a mistake in the record. He’d been clinically dead, too, and for two whole years…Just as Ryuji had come back, so had he.

  Oh, God.

 
; Then it naturally made sense how Ryuji and Kashiwada could be the same person.

  Leaving aside the mechanism by which he’d come back from being dead, supposing that were the situation, a revived person would need a new family register. In Takanori’s case, it was fortunate that his body hadn’t turned up after he drowned at sea, as this allowed his father to fabricate some plausible lie and bring him back to life in the register. In Ryuji’s case, though, his body was autopsied and taken apart. Assuming he’d come back, there was no way he could have returned as Ryuji Takayama. To live as an ordinary member of society, he’d have been forced to obtain a family register illegally. Thus, he’d located a missing person of around the same age, one who’d lived a solitary life, and assumed his identity. That person had been Seiji Kashiwada.

  Once Takanori grasped the fact that Ryuji and Kashiwada were the same man and looked over the entire case, a mystery that had been put on hold was resolved, while at the same time a new question arose.

  By the entryway in Kashiwada’s home, there had been seventeen copies of the first edition of Ring, all tied up with vinyl rope and left there.

  Someone had gone around collecting the first edition of Ring, just as someone had sent a threatening letter to the movie studio so that the film would be shelved.

  Professor Miyashita and Takanori’s father had said that the danger of the ring virus had somehow been annulled, but Takanori could scarcely believe this was the result of some natural healing power at work.

  Somebody had gathered up all the copies of the first edition, and somebody had made every effort to get the film project cancelled. That person had circulated a nasty rumor about Kiyomi Sakata and sent the threat.

  The virus hadn’t simply died out on its own; it was far more logical to think that somebody had pulled some strings behind the scenes and guided it along to its demise. The person behind all of this had to be Ryuji, a.k.a. Kashiwada.

  The new question that popped up was: why had Ryuji, i.e., Kashiwada, done these things?

  Had he sacrificed himself to limit the horror of the ring virus as much as possible and put an end to it? Perhaps, but following that line of reasoning only led to a contradiction further down the road.

  Say Ryuji/Kashiwada had sacrificed himself so the harm wouldn’t spread to all of mankind, so the world would retain its diversity. If you took the act of saving the world’s diversity to be a good, then its opposing concept, fixity, was evil. Trying to eliminate heterodox genes ran counter to the notion of preserving diversity; it would be a tremendous evil that went against Ryuji/Kashiwada’s governing principle.

  Sadako getting copied on the scale of a few people would likely pose no danger to humanity. Or would the young girls have hatched some plot to steer the world in a dark direction? Takanori could find no evidence of that whatsoever.

  Right, even if the person who wanted to avert the horror of the ring virus intended to take responsibility for failing to fully cleanse the world of it, he couldn’t have plotted to kill the Sadakos, whose only crime was to be born. That was where the conflict between good and evil arose.

  The one responsible for abducting and murdering those young girls hadn’t been Kashiwada. Though the four young female victims had been posed as though they were subjects, not a single photo had been found at Kashiwada’s home.

  Since Kashiwada had been intimately involved with this whole matter, he’d left traces of his involvement here and there. It had worked against him when he was falsely accused of the crimes.

  The vague doubt Kihara felt was well-grounded after all. While writing Beyond the Darkness, he had slowly but surely come to doubt Kashiwada’s guilt.

  But if Kashiwada hadn’t been guilty, that meant the real killer was somewhere else. For argument’s sake, Takanori decided to call this person N. As there was absolutely no way a woman could have committed a crime like this, N was almost certainly a man.

  One requisite for N to be the killer was a deep connection to Ring.

  Another was that the person had to be connected to Kashiwada somehow. In the process of collecting the first edition of Ring, Kashiwada had been compelled to gather all the data he could on the Sadakos, who had been born into the world through no fault of their own. If there were no connection between Kashiwada and N, there was no way N could have been privy to this data on the Sadakos.

  After getting his hands on the addresses of the four Sadakos and other information on them, N had systematically committed the crimes.

  Who met all of these conditions?

  N had to be connected to Ring; he’d had some contact with Kashiwada and was around his age; he was a male who possessed the arm strength to methodically strangle four girls…

  Surveying the field, Takanori could think of only one man who satisfied them all.

  He needed to find evidence to identify the true killer right away.

  If Kashiwada had been the killer, then the threat had vanished when he was executed. But N—relieved that Kashiwada had been put to death in his place, and presently on the loose—might attempt what he’d failed to accomplish once before.

  N had just barely missed his chance to grab Akane, his fifth victim. It was probably Kashiwada who’d saved her. With the data on the Sadakos in his possession, he’d discerned what the targets of the serial murders had in common and thereby identified the killer. He’d also anticipated what would happen to Akane, who’d been saved for last, and tried to rescue her. He must have picked her up in his arms and hurried away through the mountainside.

  However, that very act had gotten him confused with the real killer.

  Now that Kashiwada was dead, that devil’s hand could be reaching out for Akane once again. It was entirely possible that their current address was already known to him.

  Takanori’s dark premonition was on the verge of coming to pass. If the series of events that began with analyzing the USB video merely fit in the category of the weird, they wouldn’t be at risk of getting harmed. Yet the vague and nebulous menace had taken on a definite physical nature.

  At the very least, N had killed those four young girls with malice aforethought. If he’d had the patience to wait for Kashiwada to be executed, he was truly a formidable opponent.

  This was entirely unlike facing an enemy in a game. This one had the heart of a monster, yet possessed a fully developed body—he was a flesh-and-blood man.

  As Takanori had never been in a single fight his entire life, he had no idea how to defend himself in such an emergency.

  Right now, what he longed for was the ability to fight back.

  5

  Something about the way Minakami puffed out his cigarette smoke gave him a cool profile. As he squinted to focus on the faraway scenery, he seemed to be really enjoying his smoke.

  Yoneda had never cared a whit about others as a heavy smoker, but once he quit, he mandated that everyone on staff smoke outside on the balcony. Feeling the breeze blowing in the patchy blue sky and breathing in the outside air was not so bad. Though not a smoker himself, Takanori had accompanied Minakami out to the balcony and was seeking his advice after briefly explaining the situation.

  Minakami was five years his senior at Studio Oz, but only four years older. The man knew enough about computers to be a hacker, and the security of the office’s computers was entrusted entirely to him.

  Even as he listened to Takanori’s account, Minakami’s expression showed no change at all.

  “Okay, got it. I take it you don’t know this guy’s email address.”

  “Not at the moment,” replied Takanori.

  “Do you have any leads I can go on?”

  “I have a postcard.”

  “A postcard, huh? Do you have it on you?”

  Minakami held out the palm of his hand and asked to see the item right then and there if Takanori had it with him.

  Takanori went back inside, retrieved the postcard from his bag, and brought it out to the balcony.

  It was the one that Akane had
nabbed from the mailbox for Room 303 at Shinagawa View Heights. She hadn’t called it stealing—she insisted that she’d only taken it on the sly—but it amounted to the same thing no matter how you looked at it.

  Taking the postcard, Minakami flipped it over front and back several times, read the text, and let out a single grunt.

  The addressee on the front read “Mr. Hiroyuki Niimura,” but a mere glance at the text on the back told him this was an invitation to a class reunion.

  The Funabashi Public ** Junior High Class of ** Reunion will be held at the following location, date and time. We hope you can join us!

  The date and time, location, fee, and other necessary information on the reunion were all given below, with the name of the secretary listed at the end.

  Yoshio Matsuoka, Director, Class of ** Reunion

  Written beneath that was Matsuoka’s email address.

  “What do you think? Will this guy be useful?”

  Akane had risked her life to obtain this trophy, and Takanori prayed that it might be.

  “Yep,” said Minakami. “If Niimura’s on a mailing list, it should be simple. All right, let me give it a try.”

  Minakami put out his cigarette in the portable ashtray he was holding and, somehow happy, led Takanori back inside.

  After taking a seat in front of his computer, he straightened his posture and faced Takanori with a rather serious expression.

  “I want to make sure that what we’re about to do is justifiable,” he said. “This Niimura person is a pretty bad guy, right?”

  Takanori nodded silently.

  Niimura being the real abductor and killer of the four young girls was nothing more than speculation. However, all of the circumstantial evidence fit.

  If Kiyomi Sakata had realized that Niimura was the real killer, then her rash actions made sense. She too was connected to Ring, and it was eminently possible that she’d noticed his strange behavior and figured out what was going on, simply out of maternal instinct.

  Just when she was feeling relieved that Kashiwada had been executed, settling the whole issue, someone had sent her a video linking Kashiwada to Niimura. One could only imagine how astonished she must have been. And this had occurred just before the release of the film she had produced. Recalling how Ring had been shelved, she must have feared that Studio 104 would suffer the same fate.