Edge

by Kōji Suzuki

  “I’m afraid she’s passed away.” The manager probably would have preferred to keep the matter quiet, but that wasn’t exactly an option when someone discovered a dead body in a hotel. “I’ll notify the police,” he informed them.

  He called the authorities from the room’s phone. As he explained the situation everyone else stood completely still, stunned, while Saeko staggered over to the sofa by the window and collapsed down onto it. It was then that she noticed letter paper, the kind provided by the hotel for free, sitting on the coffee table in front of her. It bore words, and Saeko leant forward and began to read.

  I’m so tired now, just exhausted.

  I’m so sorry not to have been of more use.

  When my son died, the ability to read memories etched into objects just by touching them was given to me. I don’t know by whom, but looking back, it’s been an annoying talent. Sometimes I would touch something and it would reveal its essence to me. Other times, I would get nothing. My gift was incomplete and worked only capriciously. As people came to expect results, there were times when I had to make things up.

  But lying to others is less trying than lying to oneself.

  At the park this afternoon, I realized my powerlessness, my smallness. What have I been doing until now? The world is falling apart. All I’d do by putting myself forward is further compound my shame.

  Is it possible for me to withdraw from this one? My soul is worn, my energy drained. My body doesn’t listen to me anymore.

  I apologize for my selfishness. I am grateful for all you’ve done for me.

  Mr. Hashiba, I thank you for your many kindnesses. But now, at least, your wish seems ready to be granted.

  Saeko, I hope from the bottom of my heart that your wishes come true too.

  Myself, I look forward to finally being reunited with my son.

  December 22, 2012

  Shigeko Torii

  It was a suicide note—that much was unmistakable. Saeko indicated the stationery to the others and took another look at Shigeko’s face. There was no sign of pain, only the dignity of a natural death, akin to an ebbing tide. This was in complete contradiction to the fact that there was a suicide note. If the old woman had taken an overdose of pills, there would have been salient signs of a struggle between life and death on her countenance. Instead, Shigeko looked as though she had simply died of old age.

  Once the police and ambulance staff arrived Saeko knew that she and the crew would have to stay to answer any questions that may arise. If the police suspected the possibility of foul play at a hotel, they would order an autopsy, and that would drag this mess out for even longer. Saeko wanted to speak with Hashiba before that happened. She left Shigeko’s room and walked back to her own.

  She checked the time on her wristwatch. Hashiba would certainly have arrived at the television station by now. She summoned up his number on her cell phone and punched the call button. It went straight through to his voicemail. Strange—he must have turned his phone off for some reason. Even when he was busy, Saeko knew that Hashiba made a point of keeping his phone on. Why would he have turned it off tonight, of all nights? The words in Shigeko’s suicide note came back to her as she stood holding the phone in her hand:

  But now, at least, your wish seems ready to be granted.

  Somehow Shigeko must have known something that Hashiba wanted. If only she could hear his voice, she knew she would feel better. But it was no use—the dead tone served only to intensify her growing anxiety.

  5The police investigation was pushed back to the next day, and Saeko spent a tense, mostly sleepless night in her hotel room before waking to meet them at nine the next morning.

  The initial tests had shown that there was no possibility of a crime having being committed. “Heart seizure” was the term that came to Saeko’s mind, but she thought “old age” more apt in the absence of any discernible pain. If a full autopsy was carried out they would be able to ascertain whether or not she’d had any other illnesses, especially of the heart, but in any case it was clear that her death was of natural causes. It was the presence of the suicide note that threw confusion over the situation. Sitting with the police now, she realized that their line of questioning was based on the trouble they had reconciling the contradictions implied.

  Saeko answered their questions as faithfully as she could. She told them that last night she had gone to close her window to ready herself for bed and seen a white figure out on top of the Nishikigaura Cliffs and that the figure had been that of Shigeko Torii. At that point, one of the detectives interviewing her cut her off mid-sentence.

  “You do realize that it would be impossible to make out that kind of detail at that time of night, and from the distance you describe?”

  What he said was true, Saeko couldn’t deny it. It had been too dark; she had been too far away for that kind of detail to register. “Still,” she said, “I just knew it was her.”

  The two cops cast their gazes out of the window then back to Saeko. “Hrm,” one of them grunted, “so you think it was some kind of premonition?”

  That could be it, she supposed. A premonition, a hunch. Shigeko had sent Saeko a message from her deathbed in the room next door. The vision hadn’t been real; rather, the image had been delivered straight into her mind. The cops seemed to have intuited that interpretation.

  One of the men was in his thirties, the other in his fifties. With sufficient years on their jobs, they’d probably come across a few instances where a “premonition” was the only explanation. Surprisingly few people dismissed such supernatural phenomena outright as being unscientific; it was more common not to doubt that they were perhaps a possibility.

  “What did you do next?” the older one continued.

  “I was in shock for a moment. Then I called Kagayama and told him what I saw.”

  “Did you feel any uncertainty about what you had seen?”

  “I did think that it might have been a hallucination. But after seeing Ms. Torii earlier in the day, I had a bad feeling about her.”

  “A bad feeling?”

  “I worked with Ms. Torii once before. This time, she looked completely exhausted to the core, like she’d lost the will to live.”

  “You saw the suicide note I assume.”

  “Yes, I was the one that found it, on the table in front of the sofa.”

  “A strange woman. Something about her defies the common understanding of our like.”

  The note obviously didn’t sit right with the two, who said as much to each other. Saeko felt the same, but perhaps because she knew something of Shigeko’s nature she found herself less surprised than she might have been.

  It was Saeko who asked, “Do you know what Ms. Torii did for a living?”

  “I’d seen her a few times on TV.”

  “A few people accused her of being a fake. But from what I’ve seen, I believe that her powers were real.”

  “And that’s why she could’ve done something like that?”

  Leaving a note alluding to suicide and then, immediately afterwards, dying naturally in bed with no signs of an overdose was a feat completely beyond common sense, but Saeko nodded. Shigeko had willed her life to end, and with that clear goal in mind, had made it happen.

  “She chose to perish, like some exalted monk of old?” the detective asked without sarcasm. There was no other possible interpretation; all that was left was to accept the facts as they were presented.

  The younger one interrupted the exchange. “In the suicide note she refers to herself as powerless, small. She sounded as though she held herself in contempt. Do you know of anything that would have caused her to lose confidence in herself so suddenly?”

  “We were visiting the herb garden to film for a show we were putting together on the group who vanished there the day before yesterday.”

  “Ah yes, that one.”

  “Have you been to the site?”

  The two men nodded. “We went there initially but were called to j
oin the rest of the search parties. We scoured the mountains between the park and the Ito Skyline. Couldn’t find any traces at all.”

  Saeko looked hard as if boring through the men’s skulls and let her line of sight trail out the window, along Nishikigaura to a single point on the hillsides. For the first time she realized that the herb gardens’ slope was visible from her room. Come to think of it, she had been able to see the hotel from the park yesterday.

  Saeko was more sensitive than not. She was proud of her ability to hear things and see phenomena that others wouldn’t or couldn’t notice. It was perhaps because of that sensitivity that she had felt such a heavy physical and emotional strain at the gardens yesterday. Even now, she wasn’t sure how to describe the experience. In purely physical terms, her body’s natural sense of regulation had been disturbed somehow—that was closest to the mark. She thought back to the almost unbearable pressure she had felt on her bladder, the sudden dryness of her throat, the heaviness of her feet. If she were ever abducted by aliens and spirited away to a different planet, she’d feel much the same way.

  If she had felt the change so acutely, though, it must have felt worse for a psychic like Shigeko. To use her own word, she’d felt small, and Saeko could grasp the sense of it. If the world, which had provided them with a secure footing until now, had lost its own supports and begun to crumble, a human being could only feel as powerless as an ant.

  It couldn’t have helped that Shigeko had a growing sense that Hashiba didn’t need her. Saeko was beginning to understand the process through which the elderly woman had lost her confidence so.

  “I think Ms. Torii grew tired of living,” she summarized her thoughts, deciding against trying to explain the shock Shigeko must have felt at the park. After all, they had been there and felt nothing.

  Other than Saeko, the detectives spoke with Kagayama, Kato, and Hosokawa, and after clearing up any possible contradictions between everyone’s stories, left the hotel. With Shigeko dead, it was more than likely that the program would be sent back to the drawing board. Saeko and the others returned to their rooms and began to get ready to check out of the hotel. There was no longer any reason for them to stay in Atami.

  6The station escalators led Saeko out into the crush of the downtown crowds. It was an evening late in the year, and people walked with fast, narrow steps. The Christmas songs seemed to come from the town as a whole rather than from the shops lining the streets. When it dawned on Saeko that it was Christmas Eve, she stopped next to a high-end jewelry store and found herself looking in through the show windows. At the same time, Hashiba’s face appeared in her mind. In her thirties, Saeko no longer found herself caught up in the frenzy of Christmas, but it still brought to mind the image of couples.

  She remembered the last Christmas she had spent with her ex-husband; they might as well have been strangers. When she was young her father had always given her a present, always somehow educational: a backgammon set, a microscope, an electric typewriter, a book binding kit, a telescope, an encyclopedia, a lithograph, a globe … One time he’d come close to setting up a loom in her quarters. She’d often wanted him to get her cute, girlish accessories, but her wish had never been granted.

  Coming out of the bustle of the shopping district into a residential area, Saeko saw a house with a display of black flowers.

  After the procedural autopsy, Shigeko’s body had been returned to her home in the Oimachi district of Tokyo in preparation for tonight’s wake. Saeko was not particularly surprised when she’d heard that no specific cause of death had been discovered. It was just as she’d expected.

  Shigeko’s home was a stand alone that had been built on the land of her old family home with the money she made from her television appearances. The house was too large for just one person, and now its ample spaces only accentuated the sparse mood of a wake where no one seemed truly saddened by the deceased’s passing, driving home just how alone Shigeko had been during her life.

  If I were to die now, it would be like this for me.

  Just when the thought crossed her mind, she caught a glimpse of Hashiba coming through the front garden gate. She looked around, making sure there was no one else they knew nearby, and ran over and took his hands and nuzzled her head into his chest. Immediately she felt comforted by his warmth, the lingering cold from her walk from the station seeming to just melt away. It may have looked as though she were mourning Shigeko’s death, but in fact she was trying to suppress her joy at seeing Hashiba again. Without such camouflage, her feelings threatened to explode in a manner unbefitting the occasion. Saeko was surprised by how much she had missed Hashiba after only a day apart. Where had her melancholy after her divorce gone?

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go straight back to the station after this, then to Atami,” Hashiba whispered, reading Saeko correctly.

  Immediately, Saeko’s thawing body turned rigid. Hashiba hadn’t asked her outright, but Saeko had been looking forward to them spending at least Christmas Eve together. Her romantic mood spoilt, she expressed displeasure with a tilt of her head and asked, “Why?”

  “To get this program wrapped up,” Hashiba winced and spat out.

  He took Saeko aside and began succinctly to explain the changes to the program agreed to in the production meeting the day before. Rather than see Shigeko’s death as a throwback, the producer had actually asked Hashiba to edit together as much as possible of the footage they already had. The film crew had already assembled in Atami.

  If Shigeko had died in an accident during the course of filming then the program would have been canceled, but a death from natural causes was deemed not to require such a measure. On the contrary, a well-known psychic’s mysterious death, potentially by suicide, was newsworthy enough for other channels to cover it. They had to get the program out as soon as possible so as to net the highest ratings.

  “It’s too soon,” Hashiba let out with a bitter smile.

  Hashiba had been the one to ask the elderly Shigeko to come all the way out to Atami for the filming, and Saeko saw that he felt responsible. The ambience at Herb Gardens was weirder than anything before, and even those without any particular psychic powers had registered it and shuddered. How much more of that anomaly did Shigeko, with her honed antenna, sense and ingest? The impact on her body must have been immense.

  “But can you finish the program without her?”

  They would need to find someone to take Shigeko’s place. At such short notice, however, involving a celebrity was a tall order, and they would likely end up having to book one of the female newsreaders from the station. Even if they managed to book a star, it didn’t really solve matters. The other idea was to get a scientist, and names had been suggested.

  Shigeko had offered very little usable commentary at the park about the disappearances, the only memorable moment her resigned remark that it was all too much for her. They could use that footage to say that the incident could not be construed as a supernatural phenomenon and segue into a more scientific direction.

  Indeed, the local magnetic field had experienced a disturbance, and aurora-like lights had appeared in the evening sky. Fault lines, sunspots, geomagnetic disturbances, luminous atmospheres—it could all be brought together scientifically, perhaps in a way that suggested an influence on group psychology.

  Hashiba outlined the possible format to Saeko: a good-looking female reporter in front of the camera, the scientific advisor playing second fiddle throughout.

  “Have you found anyone suitable?” Saeko asked.

  “I have a friend who’s a science professor at a national university, and he introduced me to this guy who’s quite a character—Naoki Isogai, a genius of sorts with doctorates in math and physics. He’s youngish, only in his thirties, just back from America and looking for work. They say he’s got a few quirks but also a strong interest in the media. I’d say he’s just about perfect for the role. Actually, I have a favor to ask, Saeko. Do you think you’d be able to meet him tom
orrow, either at Shinagawa or Atami? I’d really appreciate it if you could show him around the park.”

  Saeko could only nod her assent since she was still part of the crew. “I guess so …”

  There was no denying that Shigeko’s death had played havoc with the program’s original concept. The move away from an occult interpretation toward a heavy reliance on scientific analysis was exactly what Hashiba had wanted. Only, Saeko found herself worrying that the program wouldn’t gel if they tried to use both types of footage together.

  But if she, who usually worked alone, tried to preach ideals to a man who worked as part of a team, she could end up sounding naïve. In order to get the best ratings, even Shigeko’s death could be used as a trump card. Perhaps it was the norm in television.

  “One can only do one’s best, I suppose,” she remarked.

  “What do you mean?” Hashiba put an arm around her, not sure how to place the comment.

  “Nothing really.” Saeko hadn’t meant anything by it; a phrase her father had often used had come to her.

  She could feel the warmth of Hashiba’s arm through her coat, but his touch seemed different than before. It was not only more hesitant but included a delicate movement of the fingers that concealed some sort of bad conscience on his part.

  Though Saeko noticed the change from a slight detail, she had no idea of Hashiba’s true inner struggle. All he wanted to do was take her in his arms, kiss her, and make love to her. She was within physical reach now, but he was limited to expressing himself with hesitant fingers. His affection for her was building up to the point where he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back for much longer.

  If only he could indulge his male selfishness, how splendid that would be: have both his family and a lover … But if he did this, his wife would die. It was no longer a mere superstition for him but a conviction.

  It wasn’t until a few hours after he became privy to Shigeko’s suicide note that he came to feel that a code meant only for him was hidden in the words. When the staff first faxed the letter to him, he was drawn as a matter of course to the sentence that mentioned him directly and hinted that his wish would be granted.