S

by Kōji Suzuki

  The view from the twelfth floor wasn’t so precarious. The panorama overflowed with everyday life and felt stable. That was precisely because the height was fixed. During a plane’s takeoff and landing, the dramatic rise and drop coupled with the acceleration made reality recede…

  Toying with such thoughts, Takanori was reminded of the apartment in Shinagawa that he’d visited that afternoon. The view from each landing of that seven-story building was branded in his mind.

  Analyzing the video recorded on the USB stick, he’d managed to identify approximately where it had been shot.

  It was a unit in an apartment building not far from Aomono-Yokocho station on the Keihin Express line.

  To confirm his conjecture, he’d had no choice but to go there himself.

  After getting off at Aomono-Yokocho, he hadn’t gone directly to the site. Feeling hungry, and needing a little time to gather his composure, he’d decided to slurp down noodles at a ramen shop near the station while running a mental simulation of what he might soon encounter. He needed to steel himself in case he ran into something unexpected. You tended to forget yourself and make mistakes when you were caught flatfooted. Simply by thinking ahead, you could at least stay calm amidst a certain amount of trouble.

  Assuming that the man hanged himself in Room 303 in a building near Aomono-Yokocho station, the question was: when did it happen? According to Yoneda, the live video of the suicide had leaked online about a month ago.

  If it was real, it meant that more than a month had passed.

  Takanori foresaw two possible outcomes—he dared contemplate the worst-case scenario, which was proceeding to his destination unwarily and ending up as the first person to discover a dead body. Unlike in a solitary house in the countryside, with a studio apartment near a train station, there was little chance that a suicide victim’s corpse would be left for over a month, but it behooved him to be thoroughly prepared.

  Completing his mental simulation, Takanori mustered his courage and left the shop.

  He had a rough idea of where he was going and how far away it was. Just after climbing a hill, he located the building that looked like his target. Its name: the Shinagawa View Heights. An old, seven-story apartment building constructed at least thirty years ago. Takanori could guess the size of each individual unit from outside.

  In between the janitor’s room and the elevator hall was a space where the mail slots and coin laundry machines were located, and after entering, Takanori checked the numbers written on the mail plates one by one.

  The unit number he was looking for was 303. He’d imagined that the slot would be clogged shut, packed full of parcels and newspapers, but what he actually saw was quite different.

  The slot marked 303 had been neatly maintained, and when he peered in through the gap, there were two pieces of mail on the bottom. After quickly scanning his surroundings, he pulled the slot’s handle, and the little door opened easily for him. He took out the mail items and checked the addressee. The same person’s name was on both of them.

  “Mr. Hiroyuki Niimura.”

  There was a strong chance that the resident in Room 303 was this Hiroyuki Niimura. Takanori committed the name firmly to memory.

  Returning the sealed mail, he proceeded to the hallway and glanced around. It was a little past one o’clock on a weekday afternoon, and not a single person was in sight. There were no signs of any rooms being used as offices, either, and the entire place was quiet. From beyond the janitor’s door came the only noise, that of a sink being scoured with a brush.

  Instead of taking the elevator, Takanori went back outside and used the emergency stairwell to check the view from each floor.

  His first, unassuming step on the edge of an iron stair produced a surprisingly loud sound and made him lift his foot up by reflex. Despite his shoe’s rubber sole, a hard clang reverberated through the alley, which was densely packed with stores.

  When he finally made it to the third-floor landing and looked down toward the station, the same view as in the video on the USB stretched out below him. At roughly the oblique angle he’d seen from the unit where the man had killed himself, Takanori’s line of sight passed through the gap between the roof and the wall and rested on the Aomono-Yokocho station platform.

  Just in case, he climbed to the top to compare the views at different elevations, and upon returning to the third floor, he stood at the hallway entrance.

  It stretched straight ahead, and there were units on both sides just as he’d imagined.

  Six on the right with the elevator in between them, and seven on the left—a total of thirteen units facing each other. The afternoon sun shone in through a window fitted into the wall down at the end, but the area retained a gloomy ambience. Perhaps it was the grubby walls and the oppressively low ceiling, or the dark brown doors lined up at equal intervals…

  Glancing around as he walked, Takanori came to stand in front of Room 303 without even noticing.

  The time was 1:22 p.m. A typical office worker would be out at that hour. Maybe some total stranger was about to come rushing out of one of the doors right then.

  Takanori’s every nerve was focused on his sense of smell. He sniffed the air for any rotten odor seeping through the gap in the door, but all he detected were the ordinary scents of everyday life.

  Taking a few steps back, he stared at the door and squinted as if to see through to the other side.

  The electricity meter was moving slowly. It seemed like someone was living there and maintaining the apartment. Takanori pressed his ear against the door, hoping to figure out whether the current resident, Hiroyuki Niimura, was home or not. There was no sound, nor any sign of a human presence. He reached for the doorknob but pulled his hand back in spite of himself. The mere thought that the door might not be locked from inside, that it might open to reveal an unanticipated sight, sapped his courage.

  He couldn’t just keep on standing there in front of the door. He might be mistaken for a suspicious person. Desperate for a breath of fresh air, he made for the emergency exit.

  The landing felt like it was floating in midair. Leaning his body against the handrail, he tried to process everything that had happened up to that point.

  If Hiroyuki Niimura had been the person in the video and was still alive, that meant the video had been forged and uploaded for some reason. Yet the rawness emanating from the video had an impact that only a real human body could impart. The wrinkles on the skin from the rope eating into the neck, the way the clothes had filled with air and been lifted up when the body dropped, were perfect displays of physical resistance. If that was CG, its creator was unimaginably gifted. Even compared to Takanori himself, the winner was obvious, hands down.

  The other possibility was that somebody had committed suicide more than a month earlier and that Hiroyuki Niimura started living here after the unit had been renovated. That would make Room 303 a unit with a sordid history—the site of a recent suicide, with the rent dropping to less than half the market price. Still, even if it were dirt cheap, who’d want to live in a place right after some guy killed himself there?

  Takanori’s intuition ruled out both hypotheses. There had to be a third possibility, one that he couldn’t even imagine, but he had too little info to discern any path to the truth and couldn’t even get a rough sense of the right direction.

  He did manage to get two things out of this—he’d located the apartment where the suicide video was filmed, and it seemed the name of the person living there was Hiroyuki Niimura. Satisfied with these achievements, Takanori left Aomono-Yokocho.

  Once the vermillion tint faded from the view of the town from his balcony and darkness was about to take its place, Takanori went inside and closed the door.

  He’d turned on the air conditioner before stepping out, so the apartment was now cool and dry.

  First, he stood in front of the home phone in the corner of his living room and checked the incoming call history. When he went out on the balc
ony and closed the door, he couldn’t hear the phone ring. It felt a little late for Akane not to have come home yet. Thinking she might have left a message, he checked the machine, but the call log was still empty.

  Takanori turned on his computer and moved the cursor to Documents. Now that he’d gone to the site and observed the view in person, he thought he might be able to discover something new. Meaning to examine it quickly before Akane came home, he called up the video he’d saved.

  With his mind on the time, he couldn’t bring himself to concentrate on the screen, so he just allowed it to play. But he noticed a slight difference and stopped the video.

  When last he saw it, as soon as the hanging man kicked out the chair, the body broke through the ceiling, dropped down the center of the screen, and halted its vertical movement with the body hidden from the chest up.

  Before, the man’s toes were inside the frame, with ample room left.

  But now…his toes were closer to the bottom, which meant that the body had shifted downward a little more than in Takanori’s previous viewing.

  His eyes moved up as he thought this. Part of the body from the chest up—specifically, the rope eating into the man’s neck—was now visible. Last time, the rope itself had been outside of the frame.

  Maybe I’m just imagining things, Takanori muttered to himself with a weak laugh. It was somewhat funny to think that the man’s body, recorded on video camera, was getting dragged down. Gravitational theory, effective in three-dimensional space, working on a two-dimensional digital space was ludicrous in the extreme.

  Takanori was quite aware that not everything he saw was true. Perceptions only became settled in the mind as notions after being processed by consciousness. In other words, there was practically no way to distinguish between dream and reality. That he might be “just imagining things” was a valid interpretation here.

  His habit of trying to think through things as logically as possible yielded a certain question: If the video truly did change, when did it happen?

  What he needed to do was to categorize all the events into those that he could prove and those that he could not, to analyze them objectively.

  After 11 p.m. the day before yesterday—that was when he’d copied the video on the USB stick to his computer. The video split into two versions at that point, one being the original saved on the USB stick, and the other being the copy saved on his computer. It occurred to him to compare the two versions side by side.

  He hadn’t had an opportunity to watch the video on the USB stick again after copying it onto his computer, but now, for the first time in two days, he launched it on his monitor and compared the scenes in question.

  As before, the man kicked out the chair and fell, and after appearing to pass through the floor, he crashed through the ceiling and fell from above, only to stop at a position where he was hidden from the chest up. At that moment, his toes were suspended with plenty of room from the bottom of the frame.

  So I wasn’t just imagining it.

  The video on the USB stick was the same as before; the change appeared only in the copy on his computer. The man’s body in the copy was gradually shifting downward.

  When Takanori tried to check the video once more from the beginning, his cell phone rang. The screen showed Akane’s name.

  She sounded different than usual. Her voice was anxious and subdued, hinting that she was scared by something around her.

  At first, Takanori couldn’t understand what she was saying.

  Someone was tailing her. Monitoring her. Coming after her.

  She spoke in bits and pieces, but based on what she was describing, that seemed to be the situation. He knew quite well that Akane was cautious to a fault, and the only words that came to him were the ones that he’d told himself.

  She was just imagining things.

  3

  Usually she would be inclined to have a leisurely soak in the bathtub, but for some reason that didn’t appeal to her now.

  While she was showering, Akane realized why. She believed the hot water pouring down on her would wash away her paranoia.

  The man hadn’t been real…or rather he had been, but not intending her any harm, he’d simply been passing by.

  Takanori had come down to the coffee shop to get her and resolved the whole thing.

  He’d affirmed that having searched the area high and low, there had been no sign of any strange man. Afterwards, he’d explained that the GPS tracking app was something he’d secretly installed on her phone out of concern that she might fall unconscious again in some unknown place.

  “You’re just tired. Your nerves are so sensitive that you were reading some special significance into this tiny thing that seemed a little off.”

  Akane was only too eager to accept this theory, that the man who’d seemed intent on hurting her had been nothing more than a phantom born of her paranoia.

  Pelted by the hot water, her delusion was rinsed away, leaving behind an empty space that she tried to fill with more cheerful and pleasant thoughts. She began humming a tune.

  Having Takanori near her transformed her moments of anxiety into relief. She’d gotten acquainted with the most perfect man she could imagine, fallen in love with him, and become pregnant with his child, and now that she was about to be married to him, the future looked dazzlingly bright. Their child would be born early next year, and their life as a family of three would begin, releasing her forever from her solitary condition. She’d be able to enjoy a stable life and security. As for whether to quit her teaching job, she could think about that after starting to raise their child. If possible, she actually wanted to keep her job while also being a mother. Encouragingly, Takanori seemed to agree with her.

  For Akane, he was truly her “knight on a white horse.”

  Her mother had been unmarried when she gave birth and had died when Akane was three years old. Not knowing who her father was, Akane had become a child with no family, all alone in the world. She’d entered a foster home named Fureai, or “Contact,” founded right around that time, and there she had spent the next fifteen years. After she’d turned eighteen, there had been a party to celebrate all the children who were about to be independent, and that was where she had met Takanori for the first time.

  When any children were about to leave the facility and strike out on their own, the director rented out a hall belonging to the Japan Mutual Aid Association of Public School Teachers and held a party to send them off—a modest little gathering, really. Akane had been among the first generation of children to enter the facility, right after it was established, and some of them planned to start working, while others were to enter college. Akane had just passed her college entrance exam, so she was also celebrating her admission.

  She didn’t remember how their conversation began, but she could still remember what Takanori said to her.

  “I came because I wanted to see for myself what my father’s efforts accomplished.”

  That was when she learned that Takanori was the first son of a family that owned one of the top general hospitals in Tokyo.

  Fureai had been founded by Takanori’s father—Mitsuo Ando—at his own expense, as part of the facilities affiliated with the hospital. Its sole purpose was to make a contribution to society, with no regard for profits.

  Prior to then, at that type of facility, an “orphanage,” children like Akane without any parents were actually a minority. The vast majority either had parents who couldn’t raise them for whatever reason or had run away from home to escape abusive ones. Akane, who had no memories of ill treatment, might have been more fortunate than the other children in that respect.

  Just before she entered elementary school, an abuse case at another foster home came to light, after which all such facilities became a focus of public attention. While she’d been too young to grasp the nature of the case, Akane remembered how subtle changes had appeared in everyone’s behavior at the facility, starting from the director down to the childca
re workers and the supervisors. At the time, she couldn’t explain the change very well, but after becoming a high school student, she was finally able to find the perfect expression.

  They handled us with kid gloves.

  The changes that came to Fureai in the wake of the abuse case were welcome ones. Compared to other facilities, their educational policy had already been far superior, but subsequently it improved even further.

  Fureai was also a spectacular experimental facility for its founder, Mitsuo Ando. He’d gathered underprivileged children and invested an abundance of capital. Enough staff were hired to provide almost every child with his or her own childcare worker and supervisor, ensuring that the kids were raised with affection and given a high-quality education. And he did all of this out of a desire to see how much those children, once they’d grown up, would contribute to society, his curiosity focused entirely on that point.

  The best way to use his sizeable but not limitless funds was to invest them in nurturing more talented human beings who would be a force for good in the future.

  It wasn’t that he wanted to give his money away to unfortunate children out of mercy; rather, a certain feeling had sprouted inside him to raise these children with affection and give them opportunities, to make them want to give back to society. From one facility, he would raise twenty or thirty children who would then go out into the world and find themselves in a position to foster others’ growth—thus amplifying the social good in a sort of geometrical progression.

  And so, having always been made to hear about his father’s great ambition, Takanori had come to the party—not as a guest or as his father’s proxy, but of his own will, out of a desire to see for himself the fruits of his father’s labor.