by Kōji Suzuki
One wheel of the fallen motorcycle still spun slowly and oil leaked from the engine, pooling in the street and running into the sewer. There was no breeze. The night sky was clear, while directly over their heads the stoplight turned red again. Kimura rose shakily to his feet, clutching at the guardrail that ran along the sidewalk. From there he looked once more at the man lying in the street. The man’s head, pillowed on his helmet, was bent at nearly a right angle. An unnatural posture no matter how you looked at it.
Did I put it there? Did I put his head on his helmet like that? Like a pillow? For what?
He couldn’t recall the past several seconds. Those wide-open eyes were looking at him. A sinister chill swept over him. Lukewarm air seemed to pass right over his shoulders. It was a tropical evening, but Kimura found himself shivering uncontrollably.
2
The early morning light of autumn reflected off the green surface of the inner moat of the Imperial Palace. September’s stifling heat was finally fading. Kazuyuki Asakawa was halfway down to the subway platform, but suddenly had a change of heart: he wanted a closer look at the water he’d been looking at from the ninth floor. It felt like the filthy air of the editorial offices had filtered down here to the basement levels like dregs settling to the bottom of a bottle: he wanted to breathe outside air. He climbed the stairs to the street. With the green of the palace grounds in front of him, the exhaust fumes generated from the confluence of the No. 5 Expressway and the Ring Road didn’t seem so noxious. The brightening sky shone in the cool of the morning.
Asakawa was physically fatigued from having worked all night, but he wasn’t especially sleepy. The fact that he’d completed his article stimulated him and kept his brain cells active. He hadn’t taken a day off for two weeks, and planned to spend today and tomorrow at home, resting up. He was just going to take it easy—on orders from the editor-in-chief.
He saw an empty taxi coming from the direction of Kudanshita, and he instinctively raised his hand. Two days ago his subway commuter pass from Takebashi to Shinbaba had expired, and he hadn’t bought a new one yet. It cost four hundred yen to get to his condominium in Kita Shinagawa from here by subway, while it cost nearly two thousand yen to go by cab. He hated to waste over fifteen hundred yen, but when he thought of the three transfers he’d have to make on the subway, and the fact that he’d just gotten paid, he decided he could splurge just this once.
Asakawa’s decision to take a taxi on this day and at this spot was nothing more than a whim, the outcome of a series of innocuous impulses. He hadn’t emerged from the subway with the intention of hailing a cab. He’d been seduced by the outside air at the very moment that a taxi had approached with its red “vacant” lamp lit, and in that instant the thought of buying a ticket and transferring through three separate stations seemed like more effort than he could stand. If he had taken the subway home, however, a certain pair of incidents would almost certainly never have been connected. Of course, a story always begins with such a coincidence.
The taxi pulled to a hesitant stop in front of the Palaceside Building. The driver was a small man of about forty, and it looked like he too had been up all night, his eyes were so red. There was a color mug shot on the dashboard with the driver’s name, Mikio Kimura, written beside it.
“Kita Shinagawa, please.”
Hearing the destination, Kimura felt like doing a little dance. Kita Shinagawa was just past his company’s garage in Higashi Gotanda, and since it was the end of his shift, he was planning to go in that direction anyway. Moments like this, when he guessed right and things went his way, reminded him that he liked driving a cab. Suddenly he felt like talking.
“You covering a story?”
His eyes bloodshot with fatigue, Asakawa was looking out the window and letting his mind drift when the driver asked this.
“Eh?” he replied, suddenly alert, wondering how the cabby knew his profession.
“You’re a reporter, right? For a newspaper.”
“Yeah. Their weekly magazine, actually. But how did you know?”
Kimura had been driving a taxi for nearly twenty years and he could pretty much guess a fare’s occupation depending on where he picked him up, what he was wearing, and how he talked. If the person had a glamorous job and was proud of it, he was always ready to talk about it.
“It must be hard having to be at work this early in the morning.”
“No, just the opposite. I’m on my way home to sleep.”
“Well, you’re just like me then.”
Asakawa usually didn’t feel much pride in his work. But this morning he was feeling the same satisfaction he’d felt the first time he’d seen an article of his appear in print. He’d finally finished a series he’d been working on, and it had drawn quite a reaction.
“Is your work interesting?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Asakawa, noncommittally. Sometimes it was interesting and sometimes it wasn’t, but right now he couldn’t be bothered to go into it in detail. He still hadn’t forgotten his disastrous failure of two years ago. He could clearly remember the title of the article he’d been working on:
“The New Gods of Modernity.”
In his mind’s eye he could still picture the wretched figure he had cut as he’d stood quaking before the editor-in-chief to tell him he couldn’t go on as a reporter.
For a while there was silence in the taxi. They took the curve just left of Tokyo Tower at a considerable speed. “Excuse me,” said Kimura, “should I take the canal road or the No. 1 Keihin?” One route or the other would be more convenient depending on where they were going in Kita Shinagawa.
“Take the expressway. Let me out just before Shinbaba.”
A taxi driver can relax a bit once he knows precisely where his fare is going. Kimura turned right at Fuda-no-tsuji.
They were approaching it now, the intersection Kimura had been unable to put out of his mind for the past month. Unlike Asakawa, who was haunted by his failure, Kimura was able to look back at the accident fairly objectively. After all, he hadn’t been responsible for the accident, so he hadn’t had to do any soul-searching because of it. It was entirely the other guy’s fault, and no amount of caution on Kimura’s part could have warded it off. He’d completely overcome the terror he had felt. A month … was that a long time? Asakawa was still in thrall to the terror he’d known two years ago.
Still, Kimura couldn’t explain why, every time he passed this place, he felt compelled to tell people about what had happened. If Kimura glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that his fare was sleeping then he would give up, but if not, then he’d tell every passenger without exception everything that had occurred. It was a compulsion. Every time he’d go through that intersection he was overcome by a compulsion to talk about it.
“The damnedest thing happened right here about a month ago …”
As though it had been waiting for Kimura to begin his story, the light in the intersection changed from yellow to red.
“You know, a lot of strange things happen in this world.”
Kimura tried to catch his passenger’s interest by hinting in this way at the nature of his story. Asakawa had been half-asleep, but now he lifted his head suddenly and looked around him frantically. He had been startled awake by the sound of Kimura’s voice and was now trying to figure out where they were.
“Is sudden death on the increase these days? Among young people, I mean.”
“Eh?” The phrase resonated in Asakawa’s ears. Sudden death … Kimura continued.
“Well, it’s just that … I guess it was about a month ago. I’m right over there, sitting in my cab, waiting for the light to change, and suddenly this motorbike just falls over on me. It wasn’t like he was moving and took a spill—he was standing still, and suddenly, wham! And what do you think happened next? Oh, the driver, he was a prep school kid, 19 years old. He died, the idiot. Surprised the hell out of me, I can tell you that. So there’s an ambulance, and the cops, and then my
cab—he’d banged into it, see. Quite a scene, I tell ya.”
Asakawa was listening silently, but as a ten-year veteran reporter he’d developed an intuition about things like this. Instinctively, he made note of the driver’s name and the name of the cab company.
“The way he died was a little weird, too. He was desperately trying to pull off his helmet. I mean, just trying to rip it off. Lying on his back and thrashing around. I went to call the ambulance and by the time I got back, he was stiff.”
“Where did you say this happened?” Asakawa was fully awake now.
“Right over there. See?” Kimura pointed to the crossing in front of the station. Shinagawa Station was located in the Takanawa area of Minato Ward. Asakawa burned this fact into his memory. An accident there would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the Takanawa precinct. In his mind he quickly worked out which of his contacts could give him access to the Takanawa police station. This was when it was nice to work for a major newspaper: they had connections everywhere, and sometimes their ability to gather information was better than the police bureau’s.
“So they called it sudden death?” He wasn’t sure if that was a proper medical term. He asked in a hurry now, not even realizing why this accident was striking such a chord with him …
“It’s ridiculous, right? My cab was totally stopped. He just went and fell on it. It was all him. But I had to file an accident report, and I came this close to having it show up on my insurance record. I tell ya, it was a total disaster, out of the blue.”
“Do you remember exactly what day and time this all happened?”
“Heh, heh, you smell a story? September, lemme see, fourth or fifth must’ve been. Time was just around eleven at night, I think.”
As soon as he said this, Kimura had a flashback. The muggy air, the pitch-black oil leaking from the fallen bike. The oil looked like a living thing as it crept toward the sewer. Headlamps reflected off its surface as it formed viscous droplets and soundlessly oozed into the street drain. That moment when it had seemed like his sensory apparatus had failed him. And then the shocked face of the dead man, head pillowed on his helmet. What had been so astonishing, anyway?
The light turned green. Kimura stepped on the gas. From the back seat came the sound of a ballpoint pen on paper. Asakawa was making notes. Kimura felt nauseated. Why was he recalling it so vividly? He swallowed the bitter bile that had welled up and fought off the nausea.
“Now what did you say the cause of death was?” asked Asakawa.
“Heart attack.”
Heart attack? Was that really the coroner’s diagnosis? He didn’t think they used that term anymore.
“I’ll have to verify that, along with the date and time,” murmured Asakawa as he continued to make notes. “In other words, there were absolutely no external injuries?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely none. It was just the shock. I mean … I’m the one who oughta be shocked, right?”
“Eh?”
“Well, I mean … The stiff, he had this look of complete shock on his face.”
Asakawa felt something click in his mind; at the same time a voice in him denied any connection between the two incidents. Just a coincidence, that’s all.
Shinbaba Station on the Keihin Kyuko light-rail line loomed up in front of them.
“At the next light turn left and stop there, please.”
The taxi stopped and the door opened. Asakawa handed over two thousand-yen notes along with one of his business cards. “My name’s Asakawa. I’m with the Daily News. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to hear about this in more detail later.”
“Okay by me,” said Kimura, sounding pleased. For some reason, he felt like that was his mission.
“I’ll call you tomorrow or the day after.”
“Do you want my number?”
“Never mind. I wrote down the name of your company. I see it’s not far away.”
Asakawa got out of the taxi and was about to close the door when he hesitated for a moment. He felt an unnameable dread at the thought of confirming what he’d just heard. Maybe I’d better not stick my nose into anything funny. It could just be a replay of the last time. But now that his interest had been aroused, he couldn’t just walk away. He knew that all too well. He asked Kimura one last time:
“The guy—he was struggling in pain, trying to get his helmet off, right?”
3
Oguri, his editor, scowled as he listened to Asakawa’s report. Suddenly he was remembering what Asakawa had been like two years ago. Hunched over his word processor day and night like a man possessed, he’d labored at a biography of the guru Shoko Kageyama, incorporating all his research and more. Something wasn’t right about him then. So bedeviled was he that Oguri had even tried to get him to see a shrink.
Part of the problem was that it had been right then. Two years ago the whole publishing industry had been caught up in an unprecedented occult boom. Photos of “ghosts” had swamped the editorial offices. Every publisher in the country had been deluged with accounts and photographs of supernatural experiences, every one of them a hoax. Oguri had wondered what the world was coming to. He had figured that he had a pretty good handle on the way the world worked, but he just couldn’t think of a convincing explanation for that kind of thing. It was utterly preposterous, the number of “contributors” that had crawled out of the woodwork. It was no exaggeration to say that the office had been buried daily by mail, and every package dealt with the occult in some way. And it wasn’t just the Daily News company that was the target of this outpouring: every publisher in Japan worthy of the name had been swept up in the incomprehensible phenomenon. Sighing over the time they were wasting, they’d made a rough survey of the claims. Most of the submissions were, predictably, anonymous, but it was concluded that there was no one out there who was sending out multiple manuscripts under assumed names. At a rough estimate, this meant that about ten million different individuals had sent letters to one publisher or another. Ten million people! The figure was staggering. The stories themselves weren’t nearly as terrifying as the fact that there were so many of them. In effect, one out of ten people in the country had sent something in. Yet not a single person in the industry, nor their families and friends, was counted among the informants. What was going on? Where were the heaps of mail coming from? Editors everywhere scratched their heads. And then, before anyone could figure it out, the wave began to recede. The strange phenomenon went on for about six months, and then, as if it had all been a dream, editorial rooms had returned to normal, and they no longer received any submissions of that nature.
It had been Oguri’s responsibility to determine how the weekly of a major newspaper publisher should react to all this. The conclusion he came to was that they should ignore it scrupulously. Oguri strongly suspected that the spark which had set off the whole thing had come from a class of magazines he routinely referred to as “the rags”. By running readers’ photos and tales, they’d stoked the public’s fever for this sort of thing and created a monstrous state of affairs. Of course Oguri knew that this couldn’t quite explain it all away. But he had to approach the situation with logic of some sort.
Eventually the editorial staff from Oguri on down had taken to hauling all this mail, unopened, to the incinerator. And they dealt with the world just the way they had, as if nothing untoward were happening. They maintained a strict policy of not printing anything on the occult, turning a deaf ear to the anonymous sources. Whether or not that did the trick, the unprecedented tide of submissions began to ebb. And, of all times, it was then that Asakawa had foolishly, recklessly, run around pouring oil on the dying flames.
Oguri fixed Asakawa with a dour gaze. Was he going to make the same mistake twice?
“Now listen, you.” Whenever Oguri couldn’t figure out what to say, he started out like this. Now listen, you.
“I know what you’re thinking, sir.”
“Now, I’m not saying it’s not interesti
ng. We don’t know what’ll jump out at us. But, look. If what jumps out at us looks anything like it did that other time, I won’t like it very much.”
Last time. Oguri still believed that the occult boom two years ago had been engineered. He hated the occult for all he’d gone through on account of it, and his bias was alive and kicking after two years.
“I’m not trying to suggest anything mystical here. All I’m saying is that it couldn’t have been a coincidence.”
“A coincidence. Hmm …” Oguri cupped a hand to his ear and once again tried to sort out the story.
Asakawa’s wife’s niece, Tomoko Oishi, had died at her home in Honmoku at around 11 p.m. on the fifth of September. The cause of death was “sudden heart failure”. She was a high school senior, only seventeen. On the same day at the same time, a nineteen-year-old prep school student on a motorcycle had died, also of a cardiac infarction, while waiting for a light in front of Shinagawa Station.
“It sounds to me like nothing but coincidence. You hear about the accident from your cab driver, and you remember your wife’s niece. Nothing more than that, right?”
“On the contrary,” Asakawa stated, and paused for effect. Then he said, “The kid on the motorcycle, at the moment he died, was struggling to pull off his helmet.”
“… So?”
“Tomoko, too—when her body was discovered, she seemed to have been tearing at her head. Her fingers were tightly entwined in her own hair.”
Asakawa had met Tomoko on several occasions. Like any high school girl, she paid a lot of attention to her hair, shampooing it every day, that sort of thing. Why would a girl like that be tearing out her precious hair? He didn’t know the true nature of whatever it was that had made her do that, but every time Asakawa thought of her pulling desperately at her hair, he imagined some sort of invisible thing to go along with the indescribable horror she must have felt.
