by Kōji Suzuki
At the same time, something about the way her father came across in the text jarred. The more she thought of the man she knew, the more she began to feel that something was odd with the way he came across in the document. She was sure he had written it, but she had felt a vague dissonance here and there.
She turned back to the first page and began to scan the text to try to work out what was causing this impression. As she read through again she began to realize that the odd feeling she got came from the journal-like passages; somehow they didn’t match the image of the man she remembered. There was the one where he stood before the carving of Viracocha, describing a sense of déjà vu or nostalgia. She remembered how he recounted shedding a tear. Saeko had never known her father to cry—to the day he disappeared eighteen years ago she had never seen him shed a tear. Moreover, the way he wiped away his tears—she had never known her father to carry a handkerchief. The image just didn’t fit; Saeko couldn’t picture her father standing there wiping away tears with a handkerchief. She wondered if her father had simply never revealed this side of himself to her. It was completely possible that he had kept some habits hidden, not wanting to show any weakness in front of his daughter. Of course Saeko knew that people often learned things about their parents after their death, from old friends and such—there was nothing too odd about that. She back-burnered the thought and continued to skim the text.
She stopped once more. Here it was again in the scene where he picked up the hitchhiker. It had been early evening, and on his way back from Tiwanaku her father had come across a young Japanese hitchhiker and decided to give him a lift back to La Paz. She came to the part where he described their conversation:
… he leant forwards, his head poking out between the front seats as he spoke excitedly about his own theories about the ancient civilizations.
She hadn’t picked up on it during her first reading, but her father had clearly written that the hitchhiker had leant forward between the seats. Saeko couldn’t quite reconcile the description. She knew from reading his other works that images in her father’s descriptions were usually clear and flowing, easily recreating whatever he wanted to describe. What was it about this one sentence that made it so hard for her to picture the scene?
She went back to the beginning of the passage. Her father had seen the hitchhiker and given him a lift. She’d naturally assumed that the hitchhiker would have sat in the front passenger seat. That was why the description felt strange: if he’d been in the front seat he wouldn’t have had to lean forward to talk with her father. It would only make him hit the windshield, so he must have been sitting somewhere else. He hadn’t been riding shotgun at all but had been in the back of the jeep. With that realization, the description immediately made sense.
But why did her father ask him to sit in the rear seat? Saeko had never known him to do that; she’d always sat next to him in the front. When she’d sat in the back there had always been some reason.
Maybe he just had luggage piled up in the front?
But no, he had already checked into the hotel and would have left his suitcases and any heavy luggage in the room. If he had anything with him at all it would be a light daypack. Saeko dismissed the possibility of excess baggage.
The only other possible reason was that there was already someone else seated next to him. She recalled the passage where her father had almost fallen asleep at the wheel on his way to Tiwanaku. Again there had been a phrase that didn’t sit right. He wrote about tiredness being catching. Saeko picked out the sentence:
They say that drowsiness is catching—I must have dozed off.
The sentence made perfect sense if there had already been someone sitting next to him in the jeep. That someone had probably dozed off, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the jeep, so her father tried to employ his mind to fight the temptation himself.
Saeko went through the rest of the text in her mind, applying this theory to each description in turn. Her father wrote that he had put his bag down and checked the time on the nightstand between the beds. There had been two beds … Her father had been staying in a twin room. As far as she knew, it was her father’s habit to always book a double room when he was staying by himself. Whether he was staying in a standard room or a suite, he always wanted a double bed. He would only ever book a twin room if there was someone staying with him.
He also wrote about phoning ahead to book a table at a cafe for dinner. Now that she thought about it, this was also completely unlike him. Her father usually liked to take a stroll around the hotel’s vicinity and just drop in wherever caught his eye. The only time he would ever take the trouble to book a table was when he was with someone special that he didn’t want to keep waiting while they walked around looking for a place to eat.
Having spent seventeen years traveling around the world with her father, Saeko felt confident that she knew his habits like the back of her own hand. While giving the initial appearance that he was traveling alone, her father had actually been traveling with someone. Someone had handed him a handkerchief for his tears in front of the statue of Viracocha. There was no doubt about it, then. Her father had been traveling with a woman.
The sentence that stood out the most was the one at the very end of the text:
I realize only when it is pointed out to me …
Again, a sign that someone else had been there with him. Moreover, this person had told her father that the bird-like figure looking out from behind Viracocha must have been modeled on someone rather than being an abstract representation. There were no photos included, so all Saeko could do was try to picture the scene in her mind. She thought of the description, the image of a horned reptilian face. The first picture to come into her head was that of a devil. Once in her head, she found it almost impossible to get rid of the image, which stuck like glue. Saeko shivered and a whimper escaped her lips.
She breathed deeply and tried to calm herself, using reason to dispel the image. There was no evidence to any of this; it was just the product of a series of associations. But try as she might, she couldn’t get rid of the idea, and Saeko knew herself too well. If she didn’t control the image now, it would propagate until she was unable to budge, trapped under its weight.
The last thing she wanted was to live through another experience like the night at the Ina hospital. Her mind continued to race, out of control. That night, after the earthquake, she’d been taken directly to the hospital from the Fujimura house. She remembered the feeling of helplessness that had taken hold as she found herself completely immobilized, the conviction that someone had been standing there, watching her from the darkness. The image had taken on the form of a particular person …
She looked down at her father’s document on the desk before her, feeling her back prickle as if to warn her that someone was in the room and standing directly behind her. She tried to tell herself that no one was there, but the terrifying sensation persisted. Her imagination was running off on its own, doing too good a job of recreating the feeling of a presence. It felt more real than if someone had actually been there. Her ears picked up the echo of keys jangling behind her.
There’s no one here, there’s no one here …
Saeko sat repeating the mantra in her head, pleading for the feeling to dissipate.
8Kitazawa had known it before Saeko had even pointed it out. There was no chance that the discovery of her father’s notebook at the Fujimura house could be attributed to mere chance. He slumped deeper into the office chair behind his desk. The chair slid backwards and he almost fell off. Quickly, he straightened up.
It was clear that, at some point, something had happened that led to Saeko’s father’s notebook being picked up by the Fujimuras. Kitazawa wondered if it was possible that Shinichiro Kuriyama had known anyone in the Fujimura family. If he hadn’t, could he have come across any of them at some point? Was there anything they had in common?
He decided to start with places; perhaps there had been a time when someone
from the Fujimura family had been in the same place as Shinichiro. Kitazawa started to examine the files he had put together so far. The amount of information he’d been able to gather differed greatly depending on the case. He looked at the three files before him. There was one for the Fujimura family, and one for the three disappearances in Itoikawa. Finally, there was the file for Saeko’s father.
When Saeko had enlisted him to research her father’s disappearance she had given him a huge advance payment that allowed him the luxury of spending a longer period of time researching the case than he usually did. As a result, that file was much thicker than the others. In contrast, the file for the Fujimuras had the least information. There were a mix of sheafs that he’d put together and some that Saeko had provided. The Itoikawa file was in the middle. Of the three people that had gone missing from the convenience store, Kitazawa had spent the most time investigating the disappearance of Mizuho Takayama since her parents had hired him specifically to work on the case.
Mizuho had been caught on film just before her disappearance by the cameras in a convenience store. Kitazawa could picture the scene now, having seen the footage—the image of her thin arm writhing on the floor during the earthquake, the silver bracelet on her wrist. She’d been the editor for a trade journal and had been visiting Itoikawa to research an article on local jade handicraft when she’d vanished without a trace.
In fact, Kitazawa had a very comprehensive file on Mizuho’s case. When he’d just started out as a private detective he’d taken on a case concerning a missing woman. During his investigations he’d researched her travel history and discovered that she’d visited Vietnam just two months before her disappearance. Working on a hunch that there could be a link, he’d visited the place in Vietnam and had actually found the woman living there with a lover. She’d explained to him that she’d returned to Japan unable to forget this man she’d had fallen for while travelling and had decided to run away. But she had found herself missing her old life soon enough; to the joy of his client, Kitazawa was able to persuade her to come back to Japan.
Since that time Kitazawa always made a point of researching where people had visited prior to a disappearance, paying special attention to any trips abroad. He noted that Saeko’s investigations into the Fujimura family’s disappearance were missing such information—she hadn’t checked their travel histories. His own investigations had shown no potential links between her father and Kota Fujimura in Japan. As a natural next step he had looked into their history of travel abroad.
Shinichiro Kuriyama had made a vast number of trips out of Japan. His travels spanned all parts of the world: Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, Africa … Kitazawa limited the search to the few years prior to the disappearance, but even then the number of places visited was huge: England, France, America, India, Mexico, Russia, Mongolia … Kuriyama’s most recent trip had been to Peru and Bolivia in South America.
In stark contrast to this, the Fujimura family seemed to rarely travel abroad. When they had, it was through a standard tour package: once to Guam, once to Hong Kong. Both had been family trips taken when the two children were still in elementary school. Kitazawa sighed and looked up to the ceiling. He felt heavy, lethargic. It was difficult to concentrate. He probably needed a change of pace.
He went to the bathroom, splashed water over his face, and walked back to his chair. He flicked through the data cards he had put together for each member of the Fujimura family, trying to organize his thoughts. He stopped as soon as he reached Haruko Fujimura’s. The words jumped off the page—South America. She was the only member of the family to have visited the region. Moreover, she had been travelling by herself. It stood out like a sore thumb.
Haruko was the children’s mother, Kota’s wife. During summer vacation in August of 1994 she had travelled alone to South America. She had been twenty-eight at the time, married to Kota but still without kids. Their first child, Fumi, had been born in the following year. Could this be the link Kitazawa had been looking for? The feeling of lethargy seemed to lift as his thoughts began to race with the possibility.
The question was where the two of them could have met. He knew that Shinichiro had only visited Peru and Bolivia, so if they had met, it had to be one of the two countries. But those were large countries, and he had to narrow the focus somehow. He remembered that Shinichiro had penned a number of books on the ancient civilizations of South America. He would have visited one or more of the famous archeological sites during his visit.
Kitazawa didn’t know what sort of ancient ruins existed in Peru and Bolivia. At that moment, Toshiya opened the door and poked his head into the office.
“Dad, come and take a look at this.” Toshiya held up some papers for Kitazawa to look at.
Kitazawa ignored them and waved him over. “Good timing, kid—do you know anything about the ancient civilizations of Peru and Bolivia?”
“Huh? Bit out of the blue …” Toshiya walked across the room, taking care to weave around the clutter of papers and files stacked precariously on the desk.
“I think I’ve found a link between our girl’s dad and the Fujimuras.”
“And that’s got something to do with relics in Bolivia or Peru?”
“Exactly.”
“First place that comes to mind is that Incan site, Machu Picchu. Peru. I bet there are lots more though, hang on.” Toshiya sat in front of the computer and opened a search engine.
Kitazawa watched as his son pulled up a few websites detailing the ancient ruins of the two countries. He recognized a few of the names that came up on the display: Cusco, Nazca, Machu Picchu. They were all pretty well known, he guessed, although he didn’t know much about them. Toshiya clicked through the sites in turn and summarized the contents for his father. He explained that Cusco was well known for being the symbolic capital of the Incan empire, where the emperor had built his palace. Nowadays there were no ruins per se, just some stone foundations of old Incan buildings mostly hidden underneath the more recently built Catholic churches and other Spanish edifices. Nazca, he continued, was famous for the vast drawings visible only from the sky, the Nazca Lines. Again, he dismissed these as not technically being ruins.
Kitazawa remembered a program he’d seen on the wonders of the world that had shown footage of the drawings: giant depictions of spiders, monkeys, a hummingbird. He could see the geometric shapes in his mind’s eye. The program had presented a number of theories as to why the vast pictures had been made but concluded that no single compelling argument had been agreed on to date.
Machu Picchu, the city in the sky. Kitazawa knew that it was famous for its stunning location on the sheer cliffs of the Andes themselves. The site was first discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century when an archeologist stumbled across the vast stone structures of an abandoned city at the foot of the Andes. He had been hiking through the ancient Inca trails in search of the legendary city of Vilcabamba.
Kitazawa’s interest was immediately piqued by this image of Machu Picchu as it fitted perfectly with the image of ruins in his mind. He leant over Toshiya and scanned through the text on the monitor for more information. As he did so, one of the numbers on the screen caught his attention. He stopped and went back over the last few sentences, reading more slowly this time.
At the beginning of the 16th Century, the site was abandoned, seemingly overnight. The reasons for the sudden exodus are currently unknown. 400 years later, Bingham’s archeological dig uncovered a mass open grave containing the remains of 173 bodies. Of the bodies, it was determined that 150 were female. In all cases, the bodies had had their limbs severed before death. One theory for this is that the Incans thought to free themselves of anyone that would have slowed them down and thrown these bodies into an open grave. However, the theory does not explain why the limbs of the discarded bodies had been severed. We are still far from finding out the truth of what happened here.
They finished reading the passage and looked at each othe
r. Toshiya took a deep breath; he looked sickened by the mention of mutilated bodies.
“Nasty way to go …”
Kitazawa sat trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Had Shinichiro and Haruko met at Machu Picchu?
Saeko was due to stop off at his office on her way to Atami the next morning, and she would definitely want to know about this development. Her father, Shinichiro, had been travelling in South America at exactly the same time as Haruko Fujimura. There had to be a point of connection. It was the only explanation for their finding his notebook at the Fujimura house. Kitazawa pulled together some papers and looked up at Toshiya.
“Didn’t you say you had something to show me?”
“Ah yes, I almost forgot.”
Toshiya showed his printouts from the Internet. The top page bore the title, “Disappearances at Zero Magnetic Field Points.”
“I was looking for links between the disappearances and magnetic disturbances. This article came up.”
Kitazawa ran through the content of the pages. The article was about people supposedly going missing at a point off Route 152, the Akiha Road, that once connected Tenryu and Imoya. Because it crossed directly over an active fault line—the median tectonic line—the road had been severed and never repaired. Due to this, going north of Hamamatsu required splitting off via Oshikamura towards Komagane, turning left on a T-intersection just by the Bungui mountain pass. The article cited a number of cases of people vanishing mysteriously from the woods there, a short walk from a parking area near the pass, right at the spot where there was a zero magnetic field.
