EDGE (5 page)

But Maezono was right. Writing the comedic account of her divorce had helped Saeko to contend with those messy emotions.

“What do you have in mind?” she asked.

Maezono went on to propose a project spanning six months to a year, possibly longer. Saeko would explore various missing persons incidents, beginning with a detailed investigative report on the disappearance of the Fujimura family from their home near Takato.

Saeko went home that day without explicitly committing to the project, but she took the file home. It mainly contained clippings from previous articles about the incident. There were no new leads. Saeko would need to begin by acquiring accurate information on every aspect of the case.

She needed to know when, where, and how the Fujimura family had disappeared, who the members of the family were, their ages and occupations, what problems they did and didn’t have, and whether or not there was any discord within the family. When Saeko had an almost complete understanding of the circumstances, she came up with a few theories, which she tested through trial and error.

The number of missing persons cases in Japan each year was close to 100,000, but roughly one half to two thirds of those people eventually came home of their own accord. The remaining 30,000 or so remained missing, but the majority of these owed large sums of money and were probably fleeing their debtors. The number of cases in which the reason for the disappearance remained mysterious was approximately 10,000.

When a person ran away to wipe the ledger clean and make a fresh start, the disappearance could be categorized as voluntary. But when a person was abducted or coerced in some way, in the worst-case scenarios they often wound up murdered. Taking into account recent examples, there was even the possibility of involvement of religious cults or the intelligence agency of a despotic nation.

If Saeko were to write this article, she would focus on investigating the cause of the family’s disappearance. The police had determined that there was no sign of criminal activity. After searching the nearby mountains, rivers, lakes, and marshes, the investigation was dropped. The only further inquiries were conducted by various media outlets and freelance reporters. Despite detailed investigations by all of these parties, none of them had made any headway towards solving the case. The family had no debt, and none of its members had any serious problems. Their neighbors all testified that they couldn’t imagine anyone having any sort of grudge against the Fujimura family. Needless to say, none of the neighbors had any bad blood with the Fujimuras. As if to corroborate those statements, there was no sign of a struggle in the house, and Luminol tests revealed no traces of blood in the residence.

Based on these reports, Saeko didn’t have the slightest clue why the Fujimuras had disappeared.
How could it be?
she wondered. By the time Saeko had read through every page of the dossier, she was incredulous.
I must be overlooking something
, she concluded. There was no way a family of four could simply vanish overnight for no reason whatsoever.

Once, in elementary school, Saeko had read a book about the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries. One of the stories was about the
Marie Celeste
incident, a bizarre group disappearance that took place in the
Northern Atlantic Ocean. The incident was presented as a true story reported by sailors aboard another vessel that had discovered the abandoned ship.

On December 4, 1872, on a voyage across the Atlantic, the
Dei Gratia
brigantine discovered the
Marie Celeste
seemingly adrift at sea. The seamen’s code of ethics required that they assist fellow seamen in peril, so they signaled the
Marie Celeste
but received no response. They drew alongside the vessel, and the captain of the
Dei Gratia
and several of his men boarded the
Marie Celeste
, only to find it abandoned. The ship was unmanned, its cargo intact but its crew missing.

Further investigation of the vessel only uncovered more mysteries as if to prove the
Marie Celeste
a true ghost ship.

The
Marie Celeste
had set sail from New York with a crew of nine on November 7th and was discovered adrift on the morning of December 4th. The description of its condition when discovered was as follows:

The captain’s breakfast was found on the table in his quarters, half eaten. There was bread and coffee, and even a baby’s milk pot on a corner of the table. The captain’s logbook was found abandoned nearby, with the words “December 4th, my wife, Marie” inscribed in a scrawling hand.

There was a pot over the fire in the kitchen, and in the crew’s quarters a roasted chicken stew had been left unfinished.

In the ship’s washroom, there was evidence that someone had been shaving, and in the next cabin over they found a knife with blood on it.

The ship’s cargo was found untouched, so there was no possibility of a pirate attack. The ship was undamaged, and there were no indications that the crew had deliberately fled the ship due to the outbreak of a contagious disease or similar reason. Food and water remained in abundance, and the lifeboat was still tethered securely to the deck.

What on earth had happened to the crew? To this day, that question remained unanswered.

The story had sent chills up Saeko’s spine when she’d read it as a child. It was the first incident that always came to mind whenever she heard of a group disappearance.

But at the age of thirty-five, Saeko no longer harbored a child’s innocent acceptance of the world’s mysteries. She was sure there was an explanation, and she was determined to figure it out through rational analysis. The cause of the crew’s disappearance could be surprisingly mundane.

For example, perhaps one of the sailors had fallen overboard during
breakfast. The other members might have jumped in to save him, one after another, until none remained. Perhaps it was as simple as that. But with all of the relevant parties gone, the incident remained a mystery.

In investigating the Fujimura family’s disappearance, Saeko resolved to ignore outlandish possibilities and focus on the simplest possible scenarios. She took out a memo pad and drew a chart, dividing the page into two main categories, voluntary causes and coercive causes such as abduction. The former category included fleeing from debtors or group suicide. There was also the possibility that the entire family had fallen into a river or lake and drowned.

For the latter category to apply, there had to be some sort of impetus for the abduction. Compared to cases in the former category, this type of incident was likely to be fairly obvious. It would require meticulous planning and professional involvement to abduct a family of four without leaving any discernible traces.

It just doesn’t seem possible
, she concluded.

Saeko decided to scratch abduction off her list for the time being. That left the possibility that the family had disappeared either by their collective will or by the will of one of the family members. Perhaps there had been an accident. To involve the entire family required it to be a car accident. But other investigators had already determined that the Fujimuras’ car was parked in their garage even now.

How else could all four of them disappear simultaneously? Back to the basics. The most important thing to consider was the Fujimuras’ personal affairs. Saeko would need to thoroughly investigate any and all of their relationships. A lot of reporters had already looked into the matter, but Saeko was sure they had missed something.

Having determined her general course of action, she discussed the matter in detail with Kikuchi, the editor assigned to the project. She made two week-long visits to the Fujimuras’ neighborhood and put together a thirty-page article.

But even after all of that, Saeko was unable to crack the case. She still didn’t know what had happened to the Fujimuras. If they had been the victims of a crime, there was no solid evidence as to who had committed it.

More and more, it seemed to Saeko as if the Fujimura family had simply vanished into thin air.

2
Saeko turned off the TV, crawled out of bed, and opened her planner to check the time of her meeting today with the TV station. One p.m., in a meeting room at the station. There was still plenty of time.

She had breakfast and took a leisurely shower. As she stepped into a tight skirt and zipped it up—she hadn’t worn one of these in a while—she felt her body tense slightly in anticipation. This was the first time Saeko had ever been involved in a television show. She relished the idea of undertaking a job far more grueling than anything she’d ever done. She wanted to lose herself in work that would exhaust her mentally and physically, without sacrificing pride or self-respect.

She knew that by pursuing novel experiences she could maintain a certain degree of tension in her life that would help her forget the pain. At the same time, she had a tendency to imagine failure around every corner and was often afraid to take the initiative. Instead, she found herself always passively going with the flow, letting herself get caught up in whatever work happened to come her way.

Even though her father had advised her to do just the opposite.

Whenever Saeko struggled with her schoolwork, her father never simply gave her the answers. Instead, he offered subtle hints, guiding Saeko to find the answers on her own.

When Saeko was in sixth grade, her science teacher assigned a difficult problem as homework, and the answer was nowhere to be found in her books. It required a spatial understanding of astronomical bodies to work out the answer, and the teacher hadn’t expected any of the students to actually solve it. He had simply intended for the assignment to stimulate deep inquiry in the students by way of forcing them to think about a difficult problem.

Saeko had thought about the problem to the best of her abilities, but the answer was beyond her. Eventually, she consulted her father.

Her father began by drawing an illustration and explaining how the planets orbited the sun. With gestures and humor, he offered an animated account of the resulting interplay of light and darkness, the waxing and waning of the moon, lunar and solar eclipses, the relationship between the positions of Venus and Mars, the directionality and volume of light received from the sun, and so forth. By helping Saeko visualize the relationships between the sun, the planets, and the moon and how we perceive them from the Earth’s surface, he gave her an important hint as to how to solve the difficult assignment.

“Close your eyes and picture it …”

Her father’s gentle guidance worked like a charm. Saeko thought long and hard, and suddenly found herself able to visualize the planets orbiting the sun. The light that radiated out from the Sun in every direction and the resulting shadows made the Moon and Venus and Mars sparkle all the more fantastically in her imagination. She grasped the planets’ orbits perfectly and absorbed with ease the principles behind the phenomena. It was the moment that gave rise to Saeko’s passion for science and her ability to close her eyes at any time and witness the incredible astronomical spectacle wrought by the play of light on the objects of the solar system.

When Saeko’s father disappeared during Saeko’s second year of high school, her ability to visualize celestial motion also departed. When she did manage to conjure up lifeless, mineral objects revolving in a dark vacuum, there was no beauty in the image. At the same time, she lost interest in physics, mathematics, the ability to grasp spatial relationships—and the courage to explore new territory.

Saeko’s thoughts shifted back to the present. The memory of receiving hints from her father had brought to mind his postcard.

Where did I put it?
she wondered. With the sudden realization that she’d forgotten something important for many years, her movements quickened. She pulled open drawers all over the apartment, hunting for the lost item.

She finally found the postcard in the file of records pertaining to her father’s disappearance. The card’s edges were tattered and frayed; after it had arrived, she had carried it with her at all times, touching it frequently and staring at it with intense longing. She had probably tucked it away in the file a few years before getting married. Now, more than ten years had passed since she’d last handled it.

It was a run-of-the-mill picture postcard, but the postmark was somewhat unusual. It had been sent from La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. The picture was of the ruins of Tiwanaku, which were not far from La Paz.

On the back of the postcard was Saeko’s father’s familiar handwriting. His letters and postcards were always written horizontally in Western style since he made frequent use of numbers and English words in his correspondence.

The postcard was dated August 19, 1994, and the postmark bore the same date. He must have written it the morning of the nineteenth and posted it just after checking out of his hotel. After leaving the hotel he had
flown from the El Alto International Airport in La Paz to Houston, and the next day to Narita. He’d arrived at Narita on August 21st, checked in at a hotel near the airport, and called Saeko to let her know that he would be heading for Shikoku the next day.

She never heard from him again.

The postcard had arrived on August 25th, when Saeko’s father’s disappearance had already robbed her of all vitality, leaving her dazed and lost. Even though she knew it had been written a week earlier, when the postcard arrived it convinced Saeko somehow that she would see her father again one day. It had given her the strength to go on living.