gave him a start. But the avian cry, airy and expansive, also lightened his mood. It was such a contrast to the black depths of the ocean of his dream, and to the desperate cries of his wife for their son. It was Saturday morning, a clear autumn day.
Maybe it was the wonderful weather rubbing him the wrong way, but tears welled up in his eyes. He blew his nose. He was alone in his studio apartment. He collapsed back onto the bed. He thought he’d managed to fight back the tears, but now they came streaming out of the corners of his eyes.
Soon he was sobbing, hugging his pillow and calling his son’s name. He hated himself for falling apart like that. Grief’s visits weren’t regular; it waited until something set it off, and then it kept on coming. He hadn’t wept for his son for a couple of weeks. Although the hiatus between his crying spells was getting longer, when the sadness did come, it was just as deep as ever. How long was this going to continue? He could hardly bear to wonder.
Ando took an envelope out from between two books on a shelf and withdrew from it several tangled strands of hair. They were all that was left, physically, of his son. His hand had brushed the child’s head, and when he’d tried to pull the boy toward him, these strands had come off. It was some kind of miracle that they’d stayed stuck to his hand all the while he’d been thrashing about in the ocean. They’d gotten twisted around his wedding ring. The body never surfaced. They had been unable to have a proper cremation. The lock of hair was Ando’s only relic of his boy.
Ando held the strands to his cheek and recalled the touch of his son’s skin. When he closed his eyes, Takanori came back to life in his mind. Ando could almost believe the boy was right there …
When he finished brushing his teeth he just stood in front of the mirror, naked from the waist up. He put his hand to his jaw and rubbed it lightly. He felt the back of his teeth with his tongue: there was still a little plaque clinging to them. He saw a spot on his neck, just below his chin, that the razor had missed. He brought the straight razor to his neck and shaved off the little stumps of beard, and then froze, arrested by his own reflection. He raised his jaw and looked at his pale neck outstretched in the mirror. He shifted his grip on the razor and brought the back of it to the base of his throat, then slowly lowered it from his neck to his chest and then down to his midriff, finally resting it near his navel. A white line ran along the surface of his flesh, between his nipples and down his belly. Imagining his razor was a scalpel, he pictured dissecting his own body. Ando spent his days cutting corpses open, so he knew perfectly well what he’d find inside his chest. His fist-size heart sat cradled between his two pink lungs and was beating firmly. If he concentrated, he could almost hear it. But that persistent pain in his chest—where in his innards did sorrow lodge? Was it the heart? He wanted, with his bare hands, to scoop out the clump of remorse.
The razor felt as if it were going to slip on his sweaty skin, so he put it down on the shelf over the sink. He turned his head to see a thin line of blood on the right side of his throat. He’d nicked himself. He should have felt a little stab of pain where the edge of the blade bit into his skin, but as he stared at the blood he felt nothing. He was lately growing numb to physical pain. Several times already he’d only learned he’d been hurt after seeing the wound. Maybe he was losing his passion for life.
He pressed a towel to his neck and picked up his watch. Eight-thirty. He’d better leave for work. His job was his only salvation these days. Only by immersing himself in work could he elude the clutch of his memories. Ando, a Lecturer in Forensic Medicine at Fukuzawa University Medical School, was also a coroner for the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s office. Only when he was conducting an autopsy could he forget the death of his beloved son. Ironically, playing with dead bodies released him from the death that had touched him.
He left his apartment. As he walked through the lobby of his building he looked at his watch. A habit. He was five minutes behind schedule: the five minutes he’d taken to sign and stamp the writ of divorce. In a mere five minutes, the bond that had connected him to his wife had been severed. He was aware of three mailboxes between his apartment and the university. Ando made up his mind to drop the envelope into the first one along the way. He hurried off to the train station.
Today was Ando’s turn on autopsy duty. In the M.E.’s office, he ran his gaze over the file for his next corpse. As he compared the Polaroids of the scene, his palms started to sweat, and he had to walk over to the sink several times to wash his hands. It was mid-October and it wasn’t warm, but Ando had always been a heavy sweater. He was in the habit of washing his hands several times a day.
He spread the photos out on the table once more. One in particular held his attention. In it, a stocky man sat with his head resting on the edge of a bed, the position he’d been in when he stopped breathing. There were no evident external wounds. The next photo was a close-up of his face. No evidence of blood congestion, no signs of strangulation. In none of the photos could Ando find anything to establish a cause of death. Which was why, even though there was nothing to indicate a crime, the body had been sent to the M.E.’s office for a post-mortem. It looked to be a sudden death, an unnatural one at that, and under the circumstances the body couldn’t legally be cremated until the cause of death was discovered.
The corpse was found with both arms and both legs spread wide. Ando knew the man, knew him well—an old friend from college, whom Ando had never dreamed of having to dissect. Ryuji Takayama, who’d been alive up until a mere twelve hours ago, had been a classmate of Ando’s through six years of medical school.
Most graduates of their program were aspiring clinicians, and when Ando decided to go into forensic medicine, people called him an oddball behind his back. But Takayama had gone even further off track. He’d led his class at med school, but after graduation he’d started over as an undergraduate in the Department of Philosophy. At the time of his death, he’d been a Lecturer in Philosophy, specializing in logic. Lecturer was the position Ando held in his own department. In other words, even granting that the school had let Takayama re-enroll as a junior, his rise in the department had been meteoric. Thirty-two at the time of his death, he’d been two years younger than Ando, who’d spent a couple of years after high school cramming to get into the university of his choice.
Ando’s eyes came to rest on the line where the time of death had been noted: 9:49 the previous evening.
“This time of death is awfully precise,” Ando said, glancing up at the tall police lieutenant who had come to observe the autopsy. As far as Ando knew, Takayama had lived alone in his apartment in East Nakano. A bachelor, living alone, dying suddenly at home—it shouldn’t have been possible to get such a precise fix on the time of death.
“I guess you could say we were lucky,” the lieutenant said nonchalantly, seating himself in a nearby chair.
“Lucky? How?”
The lieutenant glanced at his companion, a young sergeant. “Mai Takano’s here, isn’t she?”
“Yes, sir. I saw her outside in the waiting room.”
“You wanna go get her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“She’s not a relative, but she’s the one who discovered the body. One of Professor Takayama’s pet students—his lover, in fact. If you find anything suspicious about her report, feel free to ask her some questions yourself. Any question, Doc.”
It was policy to turn the body over to the next of kin directly following the autopsy. In Takayama’s case, that would be his mother, or his brother and sister-in-law. They were out in the waiting room, where they’d been joined by Mai Takano.
The woman in question stepped into the office, then stopped and shook her head. Upon noticing her, Ando immediately stood up, bowed, and offered her a chair. “I apologize