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?”
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 interesting. 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.
“I don’t know … Now listen, you. Are you sure you’re not coming at this with preconceptions? If you took any two incidents, you could find things in common if you looked hard enough. You’re saying they both died of a heart attack. So they must have been in a lot of pain. So she’s pulling at her hair, he’s struggling with his helmet … It actually sounds pretty normal to me.”
While he had to recognize that this was a possibility, Asakawa shook his head. He wasn’t going to be defeated so easily.
“But, sir, then it would be the chest that hurt. Why should they be tearing at their heads?”
“Now listen, you. Have you ever had a heart attack?”
“Well … no.”
“And have