SPIRAL

KOJI SUZUKI

Translation

Glynne Walley

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Koji Suzuki 2004

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005,

First published in the USA by Vertical, Inc 2004,

Originally published in Japan as Rasen by Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 1995

Cover photograph © pierre d’alancaisez/Alamy

Koji Suzuki asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007240142

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007331581

Version: 2015-10-06

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Part One: Dissecting

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part Two: Vanishing

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part Three: Decoding

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Four: Evolving

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part Five: Foreshadowing

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Mitsuo Ando awoke from a dream in which he was sinking into the sea. The trilling of the telephone insinuated itself into the sound of the surf, and the next minute he was jerked into wakefulness, as though the waves had taken him.

He stretched his arm out over the side of the bed and picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

He waited, but no sound came through the line.

“Hello,” he said again, sternly this time, urging the caller to reply. There came a woman’s voice, so morose it made him shudder.

“Did you get it?”

The voice filled Ando with fatigue. He felt as if he were being dragged into a dark ditch. The dream from which he’d just awakened flashed before his eyes. A huge wave had suddenly sucked him up off a beach: as he sank to the bottom of the sea he lost all sense of up or down, right or left, until he was helpless against the current … As always, he’d felt a tiny hand grasping at his shin. Every time he had the dream, he felt on his feet the touch of that little hand, those anemone-like fingers slipping away to vanish into the depths of the ocean. There was absolutely nothing he could do to prevent it, and it tortured him. He stretched out his arms, sure that he should be able to reach the body, but he just couldn’t get a grip on it. It eluded his grasp every time, leaving behind only a few soft, fine strands of hair.

The woman’s voice reminded him with unpleasant vividness of the soft feel of that hair.

“Yes, it arrived,” Ando answered, annoyed.

The form for their divorce. It had arrived two or three days ago, with his wife’s signature and seal already affixed. All Ando had to do was sign it and stamp his own seal on it, and the paper would have fulfilled the purpose of its existence. But he hadn’t done it yet.

“And?” There was weariness in his wife’s voice as she prodded him. How could she be so blasé about putting an end to seven years of married life?

“And what?”

“I want you to sign it, stamp it, and return it to me.”

Ando shook his head. How many times had he tried to make it clear to her? He wanted to start over. But every time he told her so, she would set terms he couldn’t meet, as if to prove to him the strength of her determination. He’d been perfectly willing to give up all self-respect and grovel, but lately, he was getting a bit tired of even that.

“Alright. I’ll do what you want.” Ando surprised himself, giving in so easily.

His wife was silent for a moment, and then rasped, “I think you owe me an explanation.”

“About what?” It was a stupid response.

“About what you did to me.”

Still clutching the receiver, Ando squeezed his eyes shut. Is she going to harangue me every morning even after she gets her divorce? It was a crushing thought.

“It was my fault.” But he said it too easily, without putting feeling into the words, and that set her off.

“You never cared for him.”

“You’re talking nonsense. Listen to yourself!”

“Well, then, why …”

“Don’t ask. You already know the answer.”

“How could you do such a thing?” Her voice trembled, a harbinger of the frenzy she was warming up to. He wanted to tell her never to call again and then slam down the receiver, but he restrained himself. This was the least he could do. The only reparation he could offer was to silently bear his wife’s recriminations, to allow her to vent her grief.

“Say something.” She was in tears now.

“Like what? For a year and three months now, we’ve talked about nothing else. There’s nothing left to say.”

“Give him back to me!”

It was a cry of pain totally devoid of reason. He didn’t need to ask whom she wanted back. Ando wanted him back, too. It was what he’d been praying for every day knowing full well how useless it was. Bring him back, I beg you! Give him back!

“I can’t,” he said simply, trying to calm her down.

“I want him back!”

He couldn’t bear to hear his wife like this, wrapped up in past misery, unwilling to start a new life. Ando was trying, at least, to live a little more constructively. There was no recovering what was lost, and he’d done his utmost to repair their marriage—to convince her to think about the new life they’d have, if they could. He didn’t want to get divorced over this. He was prepared to do anything. It would be worth it, if only they could again be the happy couple they’d once been. But his wife didn’t want to look to the future, and she blamed him for everything.

“Give him back!”

“What more do you want me to do?”

“You don’t know what you’ve done!”

Ando sighed, loudly enough to be heard on the other end of the line. She was repeating the same barren phrases; her nerves were clearly fraying. He wanted to introduce her to a psychiatrist friend of his. But his wife’s father was a doctor, the head of a hospital; she’d just take it as meddling.

“I’m hanging up now.”

“That’s it, run away like you always do.”

“I want you to forget this. To get over it.” He knew it was useless, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Ando started to put down the receiver. As he did so, a cry of desperation came from the earpiece. “I want you to bring Takanori back …”

Even after he’d hung up, the name kept spilling from the receiver until its echo filled the room. Without knowing it, Ando was now muttering it himself.

Takanori, Takanori, Takanori.

Ando lay unmoving on the bed for a while, curled up in the fetal position, head in his hands. Then he glanced at the clock and knew he couldn’t stay that way forever. It was time to leave for work.

Ando unplugged the phone from the socket so she couldn’t call back, then went to stand by the window. When he opened it to get rid of some of the gloom, he heard the cry of a crow. They always flew over from Yoyogi Park to perch on the power lines, but this one sounded closer than usual—it 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.

PART ONE

Dissecting

1

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 for putting you through this,” he said.

Mai, dressed in a plain navy dress, had a white handkerchief clutched in her hands. Ando wondered if proximity to death brought out a woman’s beauty. Her body was slender, her arms and legs delicate, and the subdued simplicity of her dress emphasized the paleness of her skin. Her face was a perfect oval in shape, with smooth, balanced features. Ando could see the beautiful curves of her skull without dissecting her. No doubt, beneath her skin, her organs had a healthy hue and her skeletal frame was perfectly regular. He had a sudden urge to touch them.

The lieutenant introduced them, and they exchanged names. Mai went to sit down in the chair Ando had indicated, but she faltered. She had to steady herself on the desk.

“Are you alright?” Ando peered at her, examining her complexion. She suddenly looked ashen under the surface whiteness of her skin. He wondered if she was anemic.

“I’m quite fine, thank you.” She stared at a point on the floor for a while, her handkerchief pressed to her forehead, until the lieutenant brought her a glass of water. She drank it, and it seemed to calm her somewhat. She raised her head and spoke in a voice so soft Ando could hardly make it out.

“Sorry, it’s just that I’m …”

Ando understood immediately. She was having her period; that, plus the emotional stress, was responsible for her anemic state. If that was all, it was nothing to worry about.

“It so happens that the late Mr Takayama and I were buddies back in college.” He told her this partly to set her at ease.

Mai raised her eyes, downcast until now. “You said your name was Dr Ando?”

“Yes.”

She gazed intently at him. Then, with evident pleasure, she narrowed her eyes and bowed slightly as though she were meeting an old friend. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Ando thought he knew how to interpret her expression: she probably felt she could trust his friendship with Takayama to keep him from treating the body callously. But, in truth, his friendship or lack of it with the deceased had no effect on how he wielded his scalpel.

“Excuse me, Ms Takano,” the lieutenant broke in. “Would you mind telling the doctor exactly what you told us about how you discovered the body?” He seemed determined not to let down his guard on this case just because there were no signs of foul play. There was no time to waste in exchanging fond memories of the dear departed. He’d brought Mai here for the express purpose of having her present her story to Ando. She’d been the first person to see the body, and Ando was the medical examiner in charge of the autopsy. Hopefully between them they could establish the cause of death. That was why they were gathered here today.

In a hushed tone, Mai began to tell Ando more or less the same story she’d told the police the night before.

“I had just gotten out of the bath and was blow-drying my hair when the phone rang. I looked at my watch immediately. I suppose it’s a habit of mine. If I know what time it is when the phone rings, I can usually guess who it is. Professor Takayama rarely called me; usually, I called him. And he hardly ever called after nine o’clock. So, at first, I didn’t think it was him. I picked up the receiver, said ‘Hello,’ and a moment later I heard a scream from the other end of the line. At first I thought it was a prank. I held the phone away from my ear, in surprise, but then the scream faded into a moan, and then it gave out altogether. I felt like I was wrapped in … in a stillness not of this world … I brought the receiver back to my ear and listened for signs of anything, all the while dreading what I might find out. And then, suddenly, like a switch flicking on, Professor Takayama’s face was in my mind. I recognized the scream. It sounded like him. I hung up the phone and then dialed his number, but the line was busy. And so I concluded that it was he who had called, and that something bad had happened to him.”

“So you and Ryuji didn’t have any sort of conversation?” Ando asked.

She shook her head. “No. I just heard that scream.”

Ando scribbled something on a memo pad and urged her to continue. “What happened next?”

“I went to his apartment to see what had happened. It took me about an hour to get there, by train. And when I went in … he was there, by the bed in the room past the kitchen …”

“The front door was unlocked?”

“He’d … given me a key.” She said this with a certain artless bashfulness.

“No, what I mean is—it was locked from the inside, then?”

“Yes, it was.”

“So then, you went in,” Ando prompted her.

“Professor Takayama had his head on the bed, facing up, his arms and legs spread out.” Her voice caught. She shook her head vigorously as if to repel the scene replaying itself before her eyes.

Ando hardly needed her to elaborate. He had the photos before him. They spoke of Ryuji’s lifeless body more eloquently than words could.

Ando used the pictures as a fan to send a breeze over his sweaty brow. “Was there anything different about the room?”

“Nothing that I noticed … Except, the phone was off the hook. I could hear a whining sound coming from it.”

Ando tried to collate the information he’d gleaned from the incident report and Mai’s story to reconstruct the situation. Ryuji had sensed something was wrong with him and had called his lover, Mai Takano. He must have hoped she could help him. But then why hadn’t he called 911? You have a sudden pain in your chest—if you have the time and strength to use the phone, normally your first call would be for an ambulance.

“Who dialed 911?”

“I did.”

“From where?”

“Professor Takayama’s apartment.”

“And he hadn’t done so, correct?” Ando shot a glance at the lieutenant, who nodded. He’d already confirmed that there had been no request for an ambulance from the deceased.

Ando briefly considered the possibility of a suicide. Distraught at his lover’s cruel treatment of him, a man decides to take his own life and swallows poison. He decides to call the woman who’s driven him to it, to accuse and torment her. Instead, all he can manage is a dying scream.

But, according to the report, suicide didn’t seem to be a possibility. There were no signs on the scene of anything that might have contained poison, nor any proof that Mai had taken such an object away from the premises. Besides, one look at the shape she was in dispelled any such suspicions. One had to be quite obtuse to the subtleties of relations between the sexes not to see at a glance how deeply Mai Takano had respected her professor. The moistness that welled up in her eyes now and then was not due to guilt about having driven her lover to take his own life; it came from profound sorrow at the thought of never being able to touch his body again. For Ando, it was like looking in a mirror; he confronted his own grief-stricken face every morning. That kind of devastation couldn’t be faked. Then there was the fact that she’d come down to the M.E.’s office to claim the body after the autopsy. But most important of all, Ando couldn’t imagine a guy as dauntless as Ryuji Takayama killing himself over something like a break-up.

Which left the heart or the head.

Ando had to look for signs of sudden heart failure or cerebral hemorrhaging. Of course, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that an examination of the stomach contents would turn up potassium cyanide. Or signs of food poisoning, or carbon monoxide poisoning, or one of the other unexpected causes that he occasionally came across. But his suspicions had never been far off the mark before. Takayama had sensed something wrong with him all of a sudden, and he’d wanted to hear his girlfriend’s voice one last time. But there hadn’t been enough time to do more than scream before his heart stopped beating. That had to be it more or less.

The technician who was assisting Ando that day poked his head into the office and said, “Doctor, everything’s ready.”

Ando stood and said, to no one in particular, “Well, time to get started.”

One way or another, he’d have the facts once he’d dissected the body. He’d never failed to establish a cause of death before. In no time, he’d figure out what had killed Takayama. The thought that he might not didn’t even cross his mind.

2

The autumn morning sunlight slanted into the hallway leading to the autopsy room. There was something dark and dank about the corridor, nonetheless, and as they walked, their rubber boots made a sickening sound. There were four of them: Ando, the technician, and the two policemen. The rest of the staff—another assistant, the recorder, and the photographer—were already in the autopsy room.

When they opened the door, they could hear the sound of running water. The assistant was standing at the sink next to the dissecting table, washing instruments. The faucet was abnormally large, and water cascaded from it in a thick, white column. The 350-square-foot floor was already covered with water, which was why all eight of them, including the two police witnesses, wore rubber boots. Usually, the water was left running for the duration of the autopsy.

On the dissecting table, Ryuji Takayama awaited them, stark naked, his white belly protruding. He was about five-three, and between the layer of fat around his middle and the muscles on his shoulders and chest, he was built like an oil drum. Ando lifted the body’s right arm. No resistance, other than gravity. Proof that life had indeed left the body. This man had once prided himself on the strength of his arms, and now Ando could move them about as freely as he would a baby’s. Ryuji had been the strongest of any of them in school; nobody was a match for him at arm-wrestling. Anybody who challenged him found his arm slapped flat on the table before he could even flex his biceps. Now, that same arm was powerless. If Ando let go, it’d flop helplessly onto the table.

He turned his gaze to the lower torso, to the exposed genitalia. The penis was shriveled amidst thick black pubic hair, and the glans was almost entirely hidden by the foreskin. The member was incredibly small, almost cute, given the robustness of the body. Ando found himself wondering if Ryuji and Mai had been able to have normal sexual relations at all.

He took up the scalpel and inserted it below the jaw, slicing the thick muscle in a straight line all the way down to the abdomen. The body had been dead for twelve hours and was completely cold. He broke the ribs with bone-cutters, removing them one by one, and then took out both lungs and handed them to his assistant. In med school Ryuji had been a diehard anti-smoker, and from the look of his lungs, he’d remained one to the end. They were a handsome shade of pink. With practiced movements, the assistant weighed and measured the lungs, announcing his findings to the recorder, who wrote them down. All the while, the room was bathed in flashes of light as photos were taken of the lungs from every angle. Everybody knew his job well, and everything went forward without a hitch.

The heart was enveloped in a thin fatty membrane. Depending on the light it looked either whitish or yellowish, and it was a bit larger than average. Eleven ounces. The weight of Ryuji’s heart. Point thirty-six percent of his total body weight. Just looking at the outer surface of the organ, which a mere twelve hours ago had still been pumping life-blood, Ando could tell it had suffered severe necrosis. The left part of the heart, below the fatty membrane, had turned a dark reddish-brown color, darker than the rest of the heart. Part of the coronary artery, branching off the surface of the organ to coil around it, was blocked, probably by a thrombosis. Blood had been unable to flow past that point, and the heart had stopped. Classic indicators of a heart attack.

Based on the extent of the necrosis, Ando had a pretty good idea where the blockage had occurred: in the left coronary artery, just before it branched off. With a blockage there the chance of death was extremely high. The cause of death, then, had pretty well been established, though he’d have to wait for test results, which wouldn’t come in for a day at least, to know what had caused the blockage. Ando pronounced with confidence a case of “myocardial infarction due to blockage of the left coronary artery” and moved on to extracting the liver. After that, he checked for abnormalities in the kidneys, spleen, and intestines, and examined the stomach contents, but nothing caught his eye.

He was about to cut the skull open when his assistant craned his neck suspiciously.

“Doctor, take a look at that throat.”

The assistant pointed to a spot inside the throat where it had been split open. Part of the mucus membrane on the surface of the pharynx had ulcerated. The ulcer wasn’t large, and Ando might have overlooked it had it not been for his assistant’s alertness. Ando had never seen anything like it before. It was probably unrelated to the cause of death, but he cut out a piece of it anyway. He’d have to wait until they ran tests on the tissue sample before he could tell just what it was.

Now, he made incisions in the skin around Ryuji’s head, and peeled back the scalp from the back to the forehead. The man’s wiry hair now covered his face, his eyes, nose, and mouth, and the white inner surface of the scalp was exposed to the overhead light. Anyone who saw it could tell that the human face was constructed out of a single slab of flesh. Ando removed the top of the skull and lifted out the brain.

It was a whitish mass covered with innumerable wrinkles. Even among the elite students who were assembled at their medical school, Ryuji had stood out for his brains. He was good at English, German, and French, and he’d ask questions in class that you couldn’t follow if you weren’t reading the latest foreign bulletins. That managed to intimidate even the lecturers. But the deeper he’d gotten into medicine, the more Ryuji’s interests had shifted toward the pure realm of mathematics. For a while, everyone in their class had been hooked on code games. They’d each take their turn devising a code, and the others competed to see who could break it first. Invariably, it was Ryuji. When it was Ando’s turn and he came up with a code he was sure couldn’t be cracked, Ryuji figured it out with ease. At the time, Ando had been less exasperated by Ryuji’s mathematical genius than chilled by the feeling that his mind had been read. He simply couldn’t believe that his code had been broken. Nobody else was able to solve it. But, in turn, Ando was the only one who ever broke one of Ryuji’s codes. Although he could claim that one triumph, nobody knew better than Ando himself that it had come through sheer luck, not through any logical acumen. He’d gotten tired of wrestling with the code and gazed out the window, where his eyes happened to settle on a sign for a flower shop. The phone number on the sign gave him an idea, and he stumbled on the key to the sequence of characters. It was pure chance that his thoughts had traveled in the same direction as Ryuji’s. Ando was convinced to this day that his moment of triumph had just been a fluke.

Back in those days, Ando had felt something akin to envy toward Ryuji. Several times he’d felt his self-confidence crumble under the burden of kmowing that he’d never dominate Ryuji, that he’d always be under Ryuji’s sway.

And now Ando was staring at that brain that had been so remarkable. It was only slightly heavier than average, and looked no different from any normal person’s brain. What had Ryuji been using these cells to think about when he was alive? Ando could imagine the process that had led Ryuji deeper and deeper into pure mathematics until eventually he’d abandoned numbers altogether and arrived at logic. If he’d lived another ten years, he’d surely have contributed something major to the field. Ando admired, and hated, Ryuji’s rare gifts. His brain’s cerebral fissure looked deep, and the frontal lobe loomed like an unconquerable ridge.

But it was all over now. These cells had ceased functioning. The heart had stopped due to a myocardial infarction, and the brain had died, too. In effect, physically at least, Ryuji was now under Ando’s dominion.

He checked to rule out cerebral hemorrhaging, and then replaced the brain in the skull.

Fifty minutes had elapsed since he had taken his scalpel. Autopsies usually took around an hour. Ando had basically finished the examination, when he paused, as if he’d remembered something. He reached a hand into Ryuji’s now-hollow abdominal area and felt around with his fingertips until he pulled out two round objects the size of a quail’s eggs. The pair of testicles, a grayish flesh-color, looked curiously adorable.

Ando asked himself who was more to be pitied, Ryuji, who’d died without issue, or himself, who’d accidentally let his son die at the age of three years and four months.

Me, of course.

He thought so without hesitation. Ryuji had died in ignorance. To the end, he’d never been tormented by the kind of sorrow that bored into your chest. There were no limits to the joy of having a child. But the sorrow of losing that child just never went away—would never go away, Ando felt, even if he lived another thousand years. His heart full, Ando dropped the testicles onto the dissecting table. They were dead now, without having created anything.

All that was left was to sew the body back up. Ando stuffed the empty chest and abdominal cavity full of rolled-up newsprint, to give it volume, and began stitching. He stitched up the head, too, then washed the body clean and wrapped it in a bathrobe. Stripped of its internal organs, the body looked skinnier.

You’ve lost weight, Ryuji.

Ando couldn’t figure out why he’d addressed the corpse in his head like that. Usually he didn’t. Was there something about Ryuji’s cadaver that made him want to talk to it? Or was it simply because he’d known the guy? Of course, the conversation was one-way—Ryuji didn’t answer. But when the two assistants picked up the body to put it in the casket, Ando thought he could hear Ryuji’s voice from somewhere deep inside his own chest. He got a ticklish feeling around his navel. He scratched himself, but the feeling didn’t go away. Before long it was as if the itch had left his body and was hovering in the air.

Disconcerted, Ando stood next to the coffin and stroked Ryuji’s body from the chest to the belly. He felt something sticking out near the abdomen, and he opened the bathrobe. Looking closely, he saw that the edge of a piece of newspaper was sticking out through the stitches just above the navel. Ando thought he’d sewn up the incision carefully, but somehow there it was, just a corner. The newspaper they’d packed the cavity with must have shifted when they moved the body, and the corner had found its way into an opening. It was lightly blood-stained and had bits of fat clinging to it. Ando wiped away the white membrane until he could see numbers printed on the paper. They were small, hard to read. His face drew closer to them. He read the numbers, six digits arranged in two rows of three:

178

136

He couldn’t tell if this was part of the stock market report, or maybe two telephone numbers that had happened to be in alignment, or perhaps program codes on the television schedule. In any case, what were the chances of the corner of a randomly folded newspaper containing nothing but six digits? For no reason he could think of, Ando etched the numbers into his brain.

178, 136.

Then he poked the newspaper back into the belly and gave it a couple of taps with his latexgloved fingers. After making sure the paper didn’t pop out again, he closed Takayama’s bathrobe and once again ran his hand down the body’s chest. There was nothing anomalous to interrupt the roundness of the torso. Ando took a couple of steps back from the coffin.

Suddenly, inexplicably, he shuddered. He raised his hands to peel off his gloves and found that the hair on his arms stood on end. He leaned on a stepladder standing nearby and stared at Ryuji’s face. The eyelashes trembled as if the eyes, now peacefully shut, would open any minute. The splashing of the water was suddenly very loud. Everybody else in the room was busy with his own tasks, and Ando seemed to be the only one aware of the intense aura rising from the body. Is this guy really dead? … Bah! What an idiotic question. The swatches of newspaper, which occupied the cavity where the guts used to be, shifted, causing the abdomen to rise and fall gently. Ando marveled at how the assistants and the cops could be so detached.

Ando felt the urge to urinate. He imagined the dead Ryuji walking around, complete with the rustle of crumpled sheets of newspaper, and the need to evacuate his bladder became almost unbearable.

3

Having finished the morning’s autopsies, Ando headed toward Otsuka Station on the JR Line to get some lunch. Walking along, he stopped over and over to look behind him. He didn’t know what caused his anguish, or what it meant. It wasn’t that his son was on his mind. And he’d probably performed over a thousand autopsies. So why did this one in particular bother him so? He always performed his work meticulously. He couldn’t remember ever seeing newspaper sticking out from between his sutures. It was a mistake, though a minor one to be sure. But was that what was bothering him? No, that wasn’t it.

He entered the first Chinese restaurant he passed and ordered the lunch special. The place was far emptier than it usually was at five minutes past noon. The only customer aside from Ando was an older man sitting near the register slurping noodles. He wore a leather alpine hat and shot Ando an occasional glance. It bothered Ando. Why doesn’t he take off his hat? Why does he keep looking at me? Ando was looking for significance in the tiniest thing; his nerves, he realized, were on edge.

His mind was like a sheet of photosensitive paper, and on it were imprinted the digits from the newspaper. They flickered against his eyelids, and he couldn’t brush them away. They were like a melody stuck in his head.

Something made him glance at the pay phone that sat behind the alpine-hat man. Maybe he should try dialing the numbers. But only small towns had six-digit phone numbers—there certainly weren’t any in Tokyo. He knew full well that even if he dialed the number, there’d be no connection. But what if someone picked up anyway?

Hey, Ando, that was a hell of a thing to do to a guy. Fulling out my balls—oh, man!

If Ryuji’s voice came on the line to cajole …

“Here you are, sir.” A voice spoke in a monotone, and the lunch set was placed on the table before him: soup, a bowl of rice, and stir-fry. Among the vegetables in the stir-fry there lurked two hard-boiled quail eggs. They were the same size as Ryuji’s testicles.

Ando gulped once, and then drained his glass of lukewarm water. He didn’t categorically deny supernatural phenomena; still, he felt stupid for being so obsessed with the numbers. But obsessed he was. 178,136. Did they mean something? After all, Ryuji had been into codes.

A code.

In between sips of his soup, Ando spread a napkin out on the table, took a ballpoint pen from his pocket, and wrote down the numbers.

178, 136

He tried assigning each letter of the alphabet a number from 0 to 25, so that A equaled 0, B equaled 1, C equaled 2, and so on. This would make it a simple substitution cipher, the most basic kind of code. He decided first to treat each number as a one-digit numeral, substituting the corresponding letter of the alphabet for each.

BHI, BDG

Put it all together: “bhibdg”. Ando didn’t have to go to a dictionary to see that there was no such word in any language. The next step was to break down the numerals into combinations of one- and two-digit numbers. Since there were only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, in terms of a simple substitution cipher this meant that he could, for the time being, rule out numbers larger than twenty-six, such as 78 or 81. He began writing down the possible combinations on the napkin.

17 | R
8 | I
1 | B
3 | D
6 | G

Or:

1 | B
7 | H
8 | I
13 | N
6 | G

Or:

17 | R
8 | I
13 | N
6 | G

Only one of the combinations produced an actual word: R-I-N-G.

Ring.

Ando thought it over, recalling what he knew about the English word. He was most familiar with its use as a noun to mean “circle”. But he also knew that it described the sound a bell or a telephone makes; it could be a verb meaning “to cause a bell or a telephone to sound”, and by extension, could mean calling someone on the phone or summoning someone by means of a bell.

Was it nothing more than a coincidence? A piece of newspaper sticking out of Ryuji’s stomach, six digits on that scrap of newspaper—and Ando had played with them until he came up with the word “ring”. Was this all pure chance?

Somewhere in the distance he heard an alarm. He remembered the fire bell he’d heard once as a child in the small town he’d grown up in. Both his parents worked overtime and never came back until late, so he was home alone with his grandmother. They covered their ears when the clamor of the bell broke the night’s silence. Ando could remember curling up on his grandmother’s knees, trembling. Their town had an old firewatch tower, and the bell meant that fire had broken out somewhere. But he didn’t know that. All he knew was that the sound carried with it an air of terrible dread. It seemed like a harbinger of tragedy to come. And in fact, a year later on the exact same day, his father died unexpectedly.

Ando found that he’d lost his appetite. In fact, he felt nauseated. He pushed aside the food, which had only just arrived, and asked for another glass of water.

Hey, Ryuji, are you trying to tell me something?

When they’d signed over to the family the coffin containing his body, all hollowed out like a tin toy, Ryuji had seemed to relax his white, square-jawed visage a tiny bit, giving the impression, almost, of a smile. Only an hour ago, Mai had seen that face and bowed, to no one in particular. They’d probably hold the wake tonight, and then cremate the body tomorrow. This very moment, the hearse was probably well on its way to the family’s house in Sagami Ohno. Ando wished he could watch Ryuji’s body turn to ash. He had the strange feeling that his old classmate was still alive.

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