by Kōji Suzuki
His conclusion that it was a video machine, of course, had to do with what Mai had told him. According to her, the day after Ryuji's death, Asakawa had visited Ryuji's apartment and asked her repeatedly about a videotape. The very next day, he'd put a video deck on the passenger seat of a car and gone somewhere, only to get in an accident on his way home to Shinagawa. Where had he been with that deck? If it was just to get it repaired, there was no need to get on the highway; surely there were electronics shops in his neighborhood. It bothered Ando. Asakawa couldn't have been driving around with a bare VCR for no reason.
Ando went through the photos again. When he found one that showed the wrecked car's license plate, he took out his planner and noted it. A Shinagawa plate, WA 5287. From the WA, Ando knew it was a rental. So not only was Asakawa driving a video deck around, he'd gone to the trouble of renting a car for the purpose. Why? Ando tried to put himself in Asakawa's position. If he were carrying around his own video deck, why would he be doing so?
Dubbing …
He could think of no other reason. Suppose A calls B saying he has a fantastic videotape. B wants a copy, but A owns only one video deck, naturally. If B really wants a copy, he has no alternative but to take his own deck to A's house and ask him to let him make a copy of it.
Even so … Ando lowered his head. What could a video possibly have to do with these deaths?
Ando was possessed by an urge he couldn't reason with. He wanted to get his hands on the tape-if at all possible, he wanted to watch it. The accident had happened near Oi. What police precinct was that? The wrecked car had to be stored temporarily at the traffic division of the local precinct. If there had been a video deck in the car, the police would have taken possession of it, too. With Asakawa's wife and daughter dead and he barely conscious, perhaps no one had come to pick up the deck; perhaps it was still at the stationhouse. As an M.E., Ando had quite a few acquaintances on the police force. Getting his hands on that video deck wouldn't be too hard.
But first, Ando realized, he needed to meet Asakawa. It'd save Ando a lot of time if he could learn the facts of the case from Asakawa himself. According to the fax, Asakawa had been catatonic when he was taken to the hospital, but that was over ten days ago. Maybe there had been a change in his condition. If there was any chance of communicating with Asakawa, then the sooner the better.
"Do you know which hospital Kazuyuki Asakawa is in?"
"The Saisei Aid Society Hospital in Shinagawa, I think." Checking his file, Kurahashi said, "I was right. But it says here the patient's catatonic."
"I'm going to pay him a visit all the same," Ando remarked, nodding several times as if to persuade himself.
8
Ando had dozed off with his face pressed up against the window of the cab. Then his head slipped off the support of his right hand, and he collapsed forward so that his face banged into the back of the driver's seat; at the same time, he heard something that sounded like an alarm bell, off in the distance. Reflexively he looked at his watch. Ten past two. Immediately on leaving Shuwa he'd hopped in a cab, and he couldn't have been riding for more than about ten minutes. He'd probably only dropped off for a couple of those minutes, but somehow he had the feeling that a long time had elapsed. It felt like days had passed since Kurahashi had shown him the photos of the accident. Feeling as if he'd been spirited somewhere far away, Ando sat in the sealed cab and listened to the clanging alarm.
The cab wasn't moving. It was in the left-hand lane of a four-lane road, and it must have been a turn lane, since all the other lanes were flowing. Only they were stopped. He leaned forward and peered out through the windshield. Ahead and to the left he could see a railroad crossing: the bar was down and the signal light was flashing. It could have been his imagination, but the rhythms of the light and the bell seemed to be slightly out of synch. The crossing for the Keihin Express Line was about a hundred feet ahead on the No. 1 Tokyo-Yokohama Freeway, and Ando's taxi had been waiting for a train to go by. Shinagawa Saisei Hospital, his destination, was on the other side of the tracks. A train went by, bound for Tokyo, but the bar still didn't rise; the arrow indicating a Yokohama-bound train began to flash. It didn't look like they'd be able to get across any time soon. The cab driver had resigned himself to waiting and was flipping through a sheaf of papers bound by a paper clip, writing something down now and then.
No need to hurry. Visiting hours last until five, so there's still plenty of time.
Ando suddenly raised his head from the headrest: he thought he'd felt somebody's gaze on him. Somewhere close, outside the car, a pair of eyes was staring at him. Maybe this was what it felt like to be placed between slides as a tissue sample and examined under a microscope. There was something of the observer in the gaze that had been turned on him. Ando looked all around.
Maybe somebody in one of the other cars had recognized him and was trying to catch his attention. But he didn't see a familiar face in any of the cars, and there was nobody on the sidewalk. He tried to convince himself it was just his imagination, but the gaze showed no signs of relenting. Once again Ando turned his head right and left. To the left, just beyond the sidewalk, the ground rose in a grassy embankment that ran alongside the railroad tracks. Something in the shadow of the weeds was moving. It moved and froze, moved and froze. Without once taking its gaze off Ando, some creature was crawling along on the ground, alternating between stillness and motion. It was a snake. Ando was surprised to see one in such a place. Its tiny, intense eyes glowed in the autumn-afternoon sun. There was no doubt that this was the observer he'd sensed, and it dredged up memories of a scene from his grade school days.
He'd lived in the country, in a little town surrounded by farmers' fields. Once, on his way home from school-Ando remembered it as a peaceful spring afternoon-he'd seen a snake on a concrete wall that flanked a ditch filled with water. At first the threadlike gray snake had looked to him like just a crack in the wall, but as he got closer he could see the roundness of its body emerge from the surface. As soon as he saw it was a snake, he scooped up a rock the size of his fist. He tossed the rock in his palm a few times, gauging its size and weight, and then went into a pitcher's wind-up. It was several yards from where he stood to the wall on the other side of the ditch. He really didn't think he'd hit the bull's-eye. But the rock arced high in the air and came down from above directly onto the snake's head, crushing it. Ando recoiled with a cry. He was standing more than a dozen feet away, but it felt like he'd smashed the snake's head with his own clenched fist. He wiped his palm over and over on his trousers. The snake had fallen into the ditch like a suction cup peeling off a stainless steel surface. Ando took a couple of steps into the tangle of grass on the bank of the ditch and leaned forward, trying to catch the snake's last moments. He got there in time to see its corpse float away. At that moment, he'd felt the same gaze upon him that he did now. It hadn't been the dead snake's gaze, but rather that of a bigger snake that lay in the grass watching him. Its smooth face betrayed no expression as it entangled him in its insistent, unwavering stare. Ando had been shaken by the malevolence of that gaze. If the little snake he'd killed had been the big snake's child, some catastrophe would befall him for sure. The big snake was laying a curse on him: that was the purpose of the insistent stare. His grandmother had told him many times that if he killed snakes something terrible would happen to him.
Repentant, Ando pleaded silently with the snake, hoping it'd understand that he hadn't meant to kill.
That was more than twenty years ago. But now, Ando recalled the incident with startling clarity. Snake curses were nothing but superstition, he knew. He doubted reptiles even had the ability to recognize their own offspring. Yet… the alarm kept on ringing. Enough! Stop thinking! Ando cried voicelessly. But still the image of a baby snake, white belly upturned, floating away in the ditch, parent snake swimming along behind, continued to pester him like threads that wouldn't come untangled.
I was cursed.
He was losing
control of his thoughts. Against his will, he could see the chain of karmic cause and effect looming before him. He couldn't shake off a vision of the murdered baby snake getting caught in the tangled vegetation lining the sides of the ditch, of the parent snake catching up with it and entwining itself around it, the two of them floating there… The image reminded him of DNA. The DNA within a cell's nucleus, he realized, looked like two snakes coiling around each other and flying up into the sky. DNA, by which biological information is transmitted endlessly from generation to generation. Perhaps a pair of snakes perpetually ensnared humanity.
Takanori!
His silent call to his son was filled with misery. He was afraid he wouldn't be able to hold himself together for much longer. Ando lifted his head and looked out the window. He had to distract himself, to interrupt this chain of associations at once. Through the windshield he could see the bright red Keihin Express train go by, slowly. With Shinagawa Station right ahead, it was moving no faster than a slithering snake. Snakes again. There was no way out. He closed his eyes and tried again to think of something else. The tiny hand grabbed at Ando's calf as it slipped away into the sea. He could feel the touch again. It was the snake's curse, it had to be. He was about to let out a sob. The situations were too similar. The baby snake, its head crushed, carried away by the flow. Two decades later, its parent's curse had manifested itself. Takanori was close by, but Ando couldn't save him. The beach in June, before the season had officially opened. He and his son, paddling out to sea, holding onto a rectangular float. He could hear his wife, back on the shore, call:
Taka! That's far enough. Come back!
But the boy was too busy bobbing up and down and splashing about. Her voice didn't reach him.
Honey, come back, okay?
Hysteria was beginning to tinge her voice.
The waves were getting taller, and Ando, too, thought that it was time to turn back. He tried to turn the float around. Just at that moment, a whitecap rose in front of them, and in an instant overturned the float and threw both him and the boy into the sea. His head went under, and it was then that he first realized they were so far out that even his own feet didn't touch the bottom. He started to panic. When his head broke above the surface again, his son was nowhere to be seen. Treading water, he turned around until he could see his wife running into the sea toward him, still fully clothed. At the same time, a hand grasped at his leg. His son's hand. Ando tried hastily to turn around towards the boy to draw him up, but that had been the wrong move. Taka's hand slipped away from his calf, and all Ando's hand managed to do was graze his son's hair.
His wife's half-crazed cries shot over the early-summer sea as she rushed through the water. I know he's close, but I can't reach him! He dived under the surface and moved blindly about but couldn't manage to make contact with that small hand again. His son had disappeared-for good. His body never surfaced again. Where had it drifted to? All that remained were the few strands of hair that had tangled in Ando's wedding ring.
At the railroad crossing, the bar finally lifted. Ando was weeping, holding his hand over his mouth to stifle his sobs. The cab driver noticed anyway and kept glancing at him in the rear-view mirror.
Get a hold of yourself, before you totally fall apart!
It was one thing to break down alone in bed, quite another to do it in broad daylight. He wished there were something, anything, he could think about that could bring him back to the here and now. Suddenly he saw Mai Takano's face in his mind. She was working on a fruit parfait with such enthusiasm that he thought she might lick the dish when she was through. The collar of a white blouse peeked out from the neck of her dress; her left hand rested on her knee. Finished with the parfait, she wiped her lips with a napkin and stood up. He was beginning to see. Sexual fantasies about Mai were the only thing that could draw him out of the abyss of his grief. He realized that he hadn't fantasized about a woman once since his wife had left him-or rather, since the death of his son. He'd lost all of his former attachment to sex.
The cab jostled up and down until it was straddling the tracks. At the same time, Mai's body was bobbing up and down in Ando's mind.
9
Mai Takano got off the Odakyu Line at Sagami Ohno and went out to the main street, but she couldn't decide which way to turn. She'd walked this route in reverse two weeks ago, but now she'd lost all sense of direction. When she'd gone to Ryuji's parents' house for the wake, it was in a car from the M.E.'s office. This time, making her way there on foot from the station, she hadn't gone more than a hundred feet or so before she found herself in unfamiliar surroundings. It wasn't a new experience for her. She always got lost when she tried to get somewhere she'd only been to once.
She had his parents' phone number, so all she had to do was call. But she was embarrassed to ask his mother to come pick her up. She decided to trust her intuition a little more. She didn't have far to go, she knew. It was only a ten-minute walk from the station.
Suddenly she saw Ando's face in her mind. She'd made a dinner date with him for the coming Friday, but now, she wondered if it'd been careless of her to accept. She was starting to regret it. To her, Ando was a friend of Ryuji's, someone with whom she could share memories of him. If she could get Ando to tell her stories about Ryuji's college days, maybe she'd understand Ryuji's impenetrable ideas better. In other words, she had to admit that some calculation had gone into her decision to go out with Ando. But if Ando started entertaining the sort of thoughts a man can have about a woman, things could turn unpleasant. Since entering college, Mai had learned the hard way that men and women wanted vastly different things. What Mai wanted was to keep the relationship on a level where she and the man could provide each other with intellectual stimulation; her boyfriends' interests, however, always tended to gravitate in another direction. She was forced to turn them down as gently as possible. The trauma her rejections caused them was always more than she could take. They'd send her long apologetic letters which only rubbed salt in her wounds, or they'd call and the first thing out of their mouths would be, "Listen, I'm really sorry about what happened last time." She didn't want them to apologize. She wanted them to learn and grow from the experience. She wanted to see a man turn embarrassment into energy and engage in a genuine struggle toward maturity. If the man did that, she'd resume the friendship any time. But she could never be friends with a guy whose psyche remained forever, and unabashedly, that of a child who refused to grow up.
Ryuji was the only man she'd ever been serious about. He wasn't like the juveniles who surrounded her. The things she and Ryuji had given each other were invaluable. If she could be sure that a relationship with Ando would be like the one she'd had with Ryuji, she'd accept any number of dinner invitations from him. But she knew from experience that the chances weren't very good. The likelihood, in Japan, of her meeting an independent guy, a man worthy of the name, was close to zero. Still, she couldn't quite put Ando out of her mind.
Just once, Ryuji had mentioned him to her. The conversation had been about genetic engineering, when suddenly he'd digressed and dropped Ando's name.
Mai hadn't ever understood the difference between genes and DNA. Weren 't they just the same thing? Ryuji had set about explaining to her that DNA was the chemical material on which hereditary information was recorded, while a gene was one unit of that nearly infinite amount of hereditary information. In the course of the discussion, he'd mentioned that the technology existed to break DNA down into small segments using restriction enzymes, and to rearrange it. Mai had commented that the process sounded "like a puzzle". Ryuji had agreed: "Absolutely, it's like solving a puzzle, or deciphering a code." From there, the talk had digressed, until Ryuji was telling her a story from his college days.
When Ryuji had learned that the nitty-gritty of DNA technology involved code-breaking, he'd started to play cipher games with his friends in med school, between classes. He told her an interesting anecdote about these games. Many of the students were fascinate
d by molecular biology, and so, before long, Ryuji had recruited about ten guys to play with. The rules were simple. One person would submit a coded message, and then everybody else would have a certain number of days in which to decipher it. The first one to get it right won. The game tested their math and logic skills, but also required flashes of inspiration. The guys loved it.
The codes varied in difficulty, depending on the skill of the person devising them, but Ryuji had been able to solve most of them. Meanwhile, only one classmate had ever been able to crack any of Ryuji's codes. Mitsuo Ando. Ryuji told Mai how shocked he'd been when Ando had broken his code.
I got chills. It was like he'd read my mind.
And so the name Mitsuo Ando had made a deep impression on Mai.
Which was why she'd been so astonished when the detective had introduced her to Ando at the M.E.'s office. He had to be the Ando-he'd even introduced himself as an old friend of Ryuji's. Knowing Ando had been the only one to ever unlock one of Ryuji's codes, Mai had felt she could trust him. She just knew his skills with the scalpel had to be way up there, and that he'd easily figure out the cause of death.
Mai was still under the sway of the words of a man who'd been dead for two weeks. If Ryuji hadn't mentioned Ando to her, she probably never would have been able to call the M.E.'s office to ask about the cause of death; she never would have ended up seeing Ando again on campus. She certainly never would have made plans to have dinner with him. One chance word from Ryuji had subtly bound her.
Mai turned off the main road into a maze of residential streets. There she spotted a convenience store sign that she recognized. She knew where to go from there. Once she turned at the convenience store, Ryuji's parents' house would be straight ahead. As two-week-old memories started to come back to her, she quickened her step.
It was a nondescript house, built on a parcel of about four hundred square yards. From the wake, she remembered that the first floor contained a largish living room adjoined to a smaller Japanese-style room.
