EDGE (30 page)

Hashiba found himself subconsciously averting his eyes from Kagayama. Why? There was no reason for him to be feeling guilty about anything. When all this was happening he had been at Kitazawa’s office, listening to his report on the progress made in their ongoing investigations. If he’d been at the TV station he’d no doubt have heard the news, but he’d been engrossed in his date with Saeko. Since he didn’t work in news but rather in the variety show division, he wasn’t expected to be on call. After all, he and Saeko were the ones who had linked the dots between the other disappearances and this case here in Atami, and no one else on the payroll could see the connection. It was his own quick thinking to get Kagayama to come down early, knowing that he lived in nearby Odawara.

“The police investigation went up a whole load of notches early this morning,” Kagayama continued. “Not a single person turned up come dawn … Spending a night out in the hills in this season could be catastrophic especially for elderly folk. The fire and police departments are up there now combing the whole area with search parties.”

A waitress brought their lunch as Kagayama wound up his update on events. While wielding his knife and fork, Hashiba asked a slew of questions that popped into mind. “Do we have an exact figure for the number of people that disappeared?”

“Let’s see …” Kagayama pulled a notebook out from his bag, flipped through the pages, and began reading from his notes. “There were seventy-nine passengers on the tour buses. Nine people had come in their own cars. There were also the three janitors. That makes a total of ninety-one people. Most of the passengers on the tour bus were elderly women.”

“Ninety-one … And the police? What’s their view of all this?” Even if
they were utterly at a loss, they needed a hypothesis to conduct an effective investigation.

Kagayama picked up one of the menus from the table and positioned it so that it inclined at a roughly thirty-degree angle. “Let’s say this is Herb Gardens. Basically, the flow of visitors is one way from the parking spaces at the top all the way down to the main entrance at the bottom. There are a number of paths that crisscross with each other, and the visitors can choose any particular route they want. Now, there’s a point right here, in the center, where all of these paths converge. So, let’s imagine that there was a group of kidnappers waiting here for the passengers. They could, potentially, order the passengers to go back to the top, instead of continuing down. Just shouting orders wouldn’t be enough, of course, so we have to assume that they threatened the passengers in some way. Perhaps they were armed. They could have, in theory, sent all the passengers back up without letting a single one through. Then they could have forced them all down a mountain path away from the garden.”

“Kidnappers? What kind of group would do that?”

“It’s just a hypothesis. Maybe it was some new religious cult. They’re also considering the possibility that some members of the group were among the passengers from the beginning. But then again they were mostly elderly women …”

Hashiba snorted. Why would anyone want to lead ninety-one people out of an herbal garden? Besides, there were no signs that cars had been used. It was impossible to pull off such a deed without leaving a trace.

“But there’s no other explanation. Unless, of course, a UFO landed and spirited them all away. I’ve asked around on that but haven’t come up with anything we can use. Some people did joke that they saw a bluish light in the sky above the garden …”

Kagayama himself didn’t seem to be joking at all. Hashiba remembered that during the meeting with Saeko, when one of the writers had suggested the possibility of a link between UFOs and the disappearances, Kagayama’s face had betrayed interest in that track.

“There was an old road that linked Shimoda and Atami since the Kamakura period several centuries ago.” Saeko’s voice sounded relaxed and graceful, as though floating down from somewhere on high. She’d interrupted the flow of the conversation but looked quite serious.

Both Hashiba and Kagayama turned to her, surprised. “An old road?” Hashiba asked.

“It’s more like an overgrown footpath now, but it used to be one of
the region’s arteries. There were no coastline roads back then, nothing where Route 135 is now. I think there’s a shrine up top of the garden, the Soga Shrine. The path that winds off it heads towards the Atami Nature Resort.”

“The Soga Shrine? Of the Soga Brothers?”

Saeko nodded. “That’s right, the same Soga Brothers of the Kabuki vendetta. They avenged their father not too far from here.”

She didn’t seem to be proposing that the disappearances had anything to do with the vendetta. Rather, given that no one’s imagination was up to the task of explaining the mystery, she was adding a bit of local historical flavor to the conversation.

Yet, having heard this, Hashiba could not but picture ninety-one people, in single file, being forced along an ancient path that had once been trod by many. They progressed silently, apart from a subtle rustling of the undergrowth, the occasional snapping of a twig underfoot. Like spellbound rats mindlessly plunging into the sea, or ants instinctively swarming around food, each was robbed of individual will. Nevertheless the march had a solemn mood because some heavenly force dominated them.

“Let’s take a look up there, afterwards,” Saeko said.

Her suggestion sounded out of sorts, but they would definitely end up going. Once the cameramen, sound people, and equipment arrived, they would wait for the psychic Shigeko Torii to arrive, and begin filming.

Just then Hashiba’s cell phone, which lay on the table, began to ring.

Probably Nakamura
, Hashiba guessed and glanced down at his phone, but the name flashing on the screen caught him completely off guard.

“Err, excuse me for a moment,” he said, snatching up the phone and getting up from his seat. Even while doing so, he worried whether his sudden movement had struck Saeko as unnatural. He was making it quite obvious that the call was private; if it were work-related, there would be no reason to get up. Hashiba glanced over towards Saeko and was relieved to see that she registered no suspicion.

Hashiba stopped outside the bathroom next to the register and answered the call.

“Where are you, darling?” the voice of his wife sounded from the other end of the receiver.

“Sorry,” Hashiba started with an apology. He felt a surge of guilt wash over him, bringing him back from his passion for work. He realized that he hadn’t called home last night when he’d stayed over at Saeko’s place, and
now his wife was gently reproaching him for forgetting to call.

“I know you’re busy with work, but couldn’t you find time for just one phone call?”

Hashiba could handle it better when his wife raised her voice at him. When she was really angry, her voice seemed to seep viscously into the wrinkles of his brain matter instead. Hashiba switched the phone to his other hand and swallowed hard.

Recently, there had been a number of times where he’d had to stay out working all night. Last night had been different; he hadn’t called because he didn’t want to alert Saeko. Thinking back to it now, he felt as though he hadn’t been himself. Why had he lied about his marital status? It hadn’t been simply out of lust for her. When she asked the moment had already passed, their sexual longing dissipated.

A devilish whim had won over. There was no other way to put it. He remembered a program he had worked on about a politician who had lied about his academic record. Now Hashiba could understand how the man must have felt. Forced to answer with a yes or a no, to tick a box, knowing very well that he shouldn’t, he had pushed the truth away.

Hashiba cursed his weakness. When she’d asked him about it, Saeko had had this look, almost pleading. It would have been obvious even to a less narcissistic man which answer she wanted to hear. Hashiba had bent the truth because he couldn’t bring himself to crush the hope he had seen in her eyes. Fully aware that a convenient lie would bring consequences, he had given in to the temptation. Walls were hemming in on both sides of him now as payment.

“Some urgent work came in and I didn’t want to disturb you by calling so late. Sorry.”

“It’s not like it ever wakes up Yusuke.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

While pregnant, Hashiba’s wife had contracted a bout of German measles, and Yusuke, Hashiba’s son, had been born hard of hearing in one ear. It hardly affected Yusuke; his determination to pick up on even the smallest sounds made him in fact more sensitive. All the same, Hashiba’s sense of guilt deepened at the thought that he’d hunted for ass while leaving his wife at home with their hearing-impaired child.

His wife was silent for a few beats. Hashiba had a bad feeling about what would come next.

“The results of the test came back,” she said at last, her tone sagging now, heavy, dragging Hashiba down with it.

“So soon?” Four days ago, his wife had undergone a test for breast cancer. She had been told that the results would be back in two weeks. So the results were early; Hashiba didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

“They asked me to come back for more detailed cell testing.” His wife’s voice quivered slightly.

I see …
Hashiba was shaken by an awful conviction that his affair last night had somehow affected the result.

Just two weeks ago, his wife had told him that she had found a lump under her breast. She had guided his hand towards the underside of her left breast, and there he had felt the small, unnatural lump—a small change in his wife’s body, the body that he had not touched in a long time. He remembered thinking that, if it was cancer, the lump was already quite large. “It’s probably nothing, just some inflammation,” he had said, not wanting her to worry unnecessarily. “But perhaps we should get it tested, just in case,” he had gently recommended as well. Four days ago, his wife had finally dragged herself to the hospital.

The lump was in exactly the same place as Saeko’s and almost the same size.

Last night his sexual desire had dried up the moment he had felt the lump under Saeko’s breast, but it was not because of worry that she could have cancer. The image of his wife had flashed in his mind, as clear as day, and he had been unable to wipe it away. His wife had employed an unexpected tactic to stop him from continuing the affair.

Would Saeko try to explain this using physics terminology, as the contraction of wave functions?
Not that Hashiba really understood the laws of physics—his own impression was simply that he was being punished by heaven. The test results had overlapped, at fifty-fifty, but had been shifted towards the worse by his staying at Saeko’s. Two once equally likely possibilities, through the contraction of wave functions, had converged into a single state, cancer.

Glimpsing a moment of the workings of the world, Hashiba prayed:
Even if they do have to remove her breast, please let my wife live
.

“If something happens to me, it’s okay if you found someone else, you know.”

Hashiba’s eyes darted over to where Saeko was seated in the distance, deep in conversation with Kagayama.
Has she caught on about Saeko?
he wondered. Bad test results, cheating husband—if his wife was beleaguered by two fears, it was Hashiba’s duty to assuage her anxiety. “I’ll be home
tonight, I promise,” he assured her, adding a few more comforting utterances before he hung up the phone.

He glanced over towards the table where Saeko and Kagayama were still engrossed in conversation. It didn’t look like they had picked up on anything in his behavior. Hashiba shut his eyes and took a deep breath, wiping away the sweat that had gathered on his forehead. He found himself walking into the bathroom. After washing his hands meticulously, he looked up and saw his face in the mirror.

What the hell are you going to do?

Until this point, his life had been smooth, but it was as if a small cut had appeared and was gradually widening. He had to tend to it before it festered.

Yet, Hashiba was at a loss as to where to start. His flesh-and-blood self was genuinely worried for his wife. But the face in the mirror shone with desire for Saeko. The discomfort of reality dissociating from its mirror image wasn’t something that vanished no matter how assiduously he washed his wands.

2
Late in the afternoon, as if with foresight of the improvement in traffic, Shigeko Torii arrived in a cab. The low winter sun had already begun to cast the shadow of the mountains against the east-facing hills of the park. When her foot emerged from the cab, Hashiba felt that the air grew even chillier. Though it had been almost a month since he had last seen her in person, she had aged far more than one would expect. As her legs found the ground he saw that they were feeble and unreliable. He ran up to the taxi to help, taking the luggage from her lap. The bag, like its owner, seemed somehow weightless.

“Sorry to be a burden,” Shigeko said, bowing her head lightly, revealing her thinning hair and mottled scalp. It was a painful sight, and Hashiba found himself looking away. He busied across to the staff caravan and put Shigeko’s luggage on the back seat.

The timing of her arrival was perfect; they had just wrapped up the last of their interviews of family members of the missing tourists. Most of the people that had come to the park had sent their parents off to enjoy a package trip and were around Hashiba’s age. While all of them were worried, the strangeness of the disappearances gave them an air of puzzlement. Hashiba had tried to imagine how he would feel if his mother had been involved, but instead his thoughts had kept on returning to his
conversation with his wife.

Calling Kagayama over, he gestured towards the closed entrance and asked, “They’ll let us in now, right?” Before the day was over they needed to capture incontrovertible images and sounds of the site, mixing in Shigeko Torii’s reactions.

“Yes, we have an agreement.” The place was still closed to the public, but media had a way in. Kagayama had obtained permission to film inside by talking to the hotel that owned the place.