RING

KOJI SUZUKI

Translation

Robert B. Rohmer

Glynne Walley

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Koji Suzuki 2003

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

First published in the USA by Vertical, Inc 2003

Originally published in Japan as Ringu by Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 1991

Cover photograph/illustration © Ghislain & Marie David de Lossy/Getty Images

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: 9780007240135

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007331574

Version: 2015-10-06

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part One: Autumn

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Two: Highlands

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Part Three: Gusts

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 Four: Ripples

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

1

September 5, 1990, 10:49 pm, Yokohama

A row of condominium buildings, each fourteen stories high, ran along the northern edge of the housing development next to the Sankeien garden. Although built only recently, nearly all the units were occupied. Nearly a hundred dwellings were crammed into each building, but most of the inhabitants had never even seen the faces of their neighbors. The only proof that people lived here came at night, when windows lit up.

Off to the south the oily surface of the ocean reflected the glittering lights of a factory. A maze of pipes and conduits crawled along the factory walls like blood vessels on muscle tissue. Countless lights played over the front wall of the factory like insects that glow in the dark; even this grotesque scene had a certain type of beauty. The factory cast a wordless shadow on the black sea beyond.

A few hundred meters closer, in the housing development, a single new two-story home stood among empty lots spaced at precise intervals. Its front door opened directly onto the street, which ran north and south, and beside it was a one-car garage. The home was ordinary, like those found in any new housing development anywhere, but there were no other houses behind or beside it. Perhaps owing to their inconvenience for transport links, few of the lots had been sold, and For Sale signs could be seen here and there all along the street. Compared to the condos, which were completed at about the same time and which were immediately snapped up by buyers, the housing development looked quite lonely.

A beam of fluorescent light fell from an open window on the second floor of the house onto the dark surface of the street below. The light, the only one in the house, came from the room of Tomoko Oishi. Dressed in shorts and a white T-shirt, she was slouched in a chair reading a book for school; her body was twisted into an impossible position, legs stretched out toward an electric fan on the floor. Fanning herself with the hem of her T-shirt to allow the breeze to hit her bare flesh, she muttered about the heat to no one in particular. A senior at a private girls’ high school, she had let her homework pile up over the summer vacation; she had played too much, and she blamed it on the heat. The summer, however, hadn’t really been all that hot. There hadn’t been many clear days, and she hadn’t been able to spend nearly as much time at the beach as she did most summers. And what’s more, as soon as vacation was over, there were five straight days of perfect summer weather. It irritated Tomoko: she resented the clear sky.

How was she supposed to study in this stupid heat?

With the hand she had been running through her hair Tomoko reached over to turn up the volume of the radio. She saw a moth alight on the window screen beside her, then fly away somewhere, blown by the wind from the fan. The screen trembled slightly for a moment after the bug had vanished into the darkness.

She had a test tomorrow, but she was getting nowhere. Tomoko Oishi wasn’t going to be ready for it even if she pulled an all-nighter.

She looked at the clock. Almost eleven. She thought of watching the day’s baseball wrap-up on TV. Maybe she’d catch a glimpse of her parents in the infield seats. But Tomoko, who desperately wanted to get into college, was worried about the test. All she had to do was get into college. It didn’t matter where, as long as it was a college. Even then, what an unfulfilling summer vacation it had been! The foul weather had kept her from having any real fun, while the oppressive humidity had kept her from getting any work done.

It was my last summer in high school. I wanted to go out with a bang and now it’s all over. The end.

Her mind strayed to a meatier target than the weather to vent her bad mood on.

And what’s with Mom and Dad anyway? Leaving their daughter all alone studying like this, covered in sweat, while they go gallivanting out to a ball game. Why don’t they think about my feelings for a change?

Someone at work had unexpectedly given her father a pair of tickets to the Giants game, and so her parents had gone to Tokyo Dome. By now it was almost time for them to be getting home, unless they’d gone out somewhere after the game. For the moment Tomoko was home alone in their brand-new house.

It was strangely humid, considering that it hadn’t rained in several days. In addition to the perspiration that oozed from her body, a dampness seemed to hang in the air. Tomoko unconsciously slapped at her thigh. But when she moved her hand away she could find no trace of the mosquito. An itch began to develop just above her knee, but maybe it was just her imagination. She heard a buzzing sound. Tomoko waved her hands over her head. A fly. It flew suddenly upwards to escape the draft from the fan and disappeared from view. How had a fly got into the room? The door was closed. Tomoko checked the window screens, but nowhere could she find a hole big enough to admit a fly. She suddenly realized she was thirsty. She also needed to pee.

She felt stifled—not exactly like she was suffocating, but like there was a weight pressing down on her chest. For some time Tomoko had been complaining to herself about how unfair life was, but now she was like a different person as she lapsed into silence. As she started down the stairs her heart began to pound for no reason. Headlights from a passing car grazed across the wall at the foot of the stairs and slipped away. As the sound of the car’s engine faded into the distance, the darkness in the house seemed to grow more intense. Tomoko intentionally made a lot of noise going down the stairs and turned on the light in the downstairs hall.

She remained seated on the toilet, lost in thought, for a long time even after she had finished peeing. The violent beating of her heart still had not subsided. She’d never experienced anything like this before. What was going on? She took several deep breaths to steady herself, then stood up and pulled up her shorts and panties together.

Mom and Dad, please get home soon, she said to herself, suddenly sounding very girlish. Eww, gross. Who am I talking to?

It wasn’t like she was addressing her parents, asking them to come home. She was asking someone else …

Hey. Stop scaring me. Please …

Before she knew it she was even asking politely.

She washed her hands at the kitchen sink. Without drying them she took some ice cubes from the freezer, dropped them in a glass, and filled it with coke. She drained the glass in a single gulp and set it on the counter. The ice cubes swirled in the glass for a moment, then settled. Tomoko shivered. She felt cold. Her throat was still dry. She took the big bottle of coke from the refrigerator and refilled her glass. Her hands were shaking now. She had a feeling there was something behind her. Some thing—definitely not a person. The sour stench of rotting flesh melted into the air around her, enveloping her. It couldn’t be anything corporeal.

“Stop it! Please!” she begged, speaking aloud now.

The fifteen-watt fluorescent bulb over the kitchen sink flickered on and off like ragged breathing. It had to be new, but its light seemed pretty unreliable right now. Suddenly Tomoko wished she had hit the switch that turned on all the lights in the kitchen. But she couldn’t walk over to where the switch was. She couldn’t even turn around. She knew what was behind her: a Japanese-style room of eight tatami mats, with the Buddhist altar dedicated to her grandfather’s memory in the alcove. Through the slightly open curtains she’d be able to see the grass in the empty lots and a thin stripe of light from the condos beyond. There shouldn’t be anything else.

By the time she had drunk half the second glass of cola, Tomoko couldn’t move at all. The feeling was too intense, she couldn’t be just imagining the presence. She was sure that something was reaching out even now to touch her on the neck.

What if it’s … ? She didn’t want to think the rest. If she did, if she went on like that, she’d remember, and she didn’t think she could stand the terror. It had happened a week ago, so long ago she’d forgotten. It was all Shuichi’s fault—he shouldn’t have said that … Later, none of them could stop. But then they’d come back to the city and those scenes, those vivid images, hadn’t seemed quite as believable. The whole thing had just been someone’s idea of a joke. Tomoko tried to think about something more cheerful. Anything besides that. But if it was … If that had been real … after all, the phone did ring, didn’t it?

… Oh, Mom and Dad, what are you doing?

“Come home!” Tomoko cried aloud.

But even after she spoke, the eerie shadow showed no signs of dissipating. It was behind her, keeping still, watching and waiting. Waiting for its chance to arrive.

At seventeen Tomoko didn’t know what true terror was. But she did know that there were fears that grew in the imagination of their own accord. That must be it. Yeah, that’s all it is. When I turn around there won’t be anything there. Nothing at all.

Tomoko was seized by a desire to turn around. She wanted to confirm that there was nothing there and get herself out of the situation. But was that really all there was to it? An evil chill seemed to rise up around her shoulders, spread to her back, and began to slither down her spine, lower and lower. Her T-shirt was soaked with cold sweat. Her physical responses were too strong for it to be just her imagination.

… Didn’t someone say your body is more honest than your mind?

Yet, another voice spoke too: Turn around, there shouldn’t be anything there. If you don’t finish your coke and get back to your studies there’s no telling how you’ll do on the test tomorrow.

In the glass an ice cube cracked. As if spurred by the sound, without stopping to think, Tomoko spun around.

September 5, 10:54 pm

Tokyo, the intersection in front of Shinagawa Station The light turned yellow right in front of him. He could have darted through, but instead Kimura pulled his cab over to the curb. He was hoping to pick up a fare headed for Roppongi Crossing; a lot of customers he picked up here were bound for Akasaka or Roppongi, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to jump in while he was stopped at a light like this.

A motorcycle nosed up between Kimura’s taxi and the curb and came to a stop just at the edge of the crossing. The rider was a young man dressed in jeans. Kimura got annoyed by motorcycles, the way they wove and darted their way through traffic like this. He especially hated it when he was waiting at a light and a bike came up and stopped right by his door, blocking it. And today, he had been hassled by customers all day long and was in a foul mood. Kimura cast a sour look at the biker. His face was hidden by his helmet visor. One leg rested on the curb of the sidewalk, his knees were spread wide, and he rocked his body back and forth in a thoroughly slovenly manner.

A young lady with nice legs walked by on the sidewalk. The biker turned his head to watch her go by. But his gaze didn’t follow her the whole way. His head had swiveled about 90 degrees when he seemed to fix his gaze on the show window behind her. The woman walked on out of his field of vision. The biker was left behind, staring intently at something. The “walk” light began to flash and then went out. Pedestrians caught in the middle of the street began to hurry, crossing right in front of the taxi. Nobody raised a hand or headed for his cab. Kimura revved the engine and waited for the light to turn green.

Just then the biker seemed to be seized by a great spasm, raising both arms and collapsing against Kimura’s taxi. He fell against the door of the cab with a loud thump and disappeared from view.

You asshole.

The kid must’ve lost his balance and fallen over, thought Kimura as he turned on his blinkers and got out of the car. If the door was damaged, he intended to make the kid pay for repairs. The light turned green and the cars behind Kimura’s began to pass by into the intersection. The biker was lying face up on the street, thrashing his legs and struggling with both hands to remove his helmet. Before checking out the kid, though, Kimura first looked at his meal ticket. Just as he had expected, there was a long, angling crease in the door panel.

“Shit!” Kimura clicked his tongue in disgust as he approached the fallen man. Despite the fact that the strap was still securely fastened under his chin, the guy was desperately trying to remove his helmet—he seemed ready to rip his own head off in the process.

Does it hurt that bad?

Kimura realized now that something was seriously wrong with the rider. He finally squatted down next to him and asked, “You all right?” Because of the tinted visor he couldn’t makeout the man’s expression. The biker clutched at Kimura’s hand and seemed to be begging for something. He was almost clinging to Kimura. He said nothing. He didn’t try to raise the visor. Kimura jumped to action.

“Hold on, I’ll call an ambulance.”

Running to a public telephone, Kimura puzzled over how a simple fall from a standing position could have turned into this. He must have hit his head just right.

But don’t be stupid. The idiot was wearing a helmet, right? He doesn’t look like he broke an arm or a leg. I hope this doesn’t turn into a pain in the ass … It wouldn’t be too good for me if he hurt himself running into my car.

Kimura had a bad feeling about this.

So if he really is hurt, does it come out of my insurance? That means an accident report, which means the cops …

When he hung up and went back, the man was lying unmoving with his hands clutching his throat. Several passers-by had stopped and were looking on with concerned expressions. Kimura pushed his way through the people, making sure everybody knew it had been he who had called the ambulance.

“Hey! Hey! Hang in there. The ambulance is on its way.” Kimura unfastened the chin strap of the helmet. It came right off: Kimura couldn’t believe how the guy had been struggling with it earlier. The man’s face was amazingly distorted. The only word that could describe his expression was astonishment. Both eyes were wide open and staring and his bright-red tongue was stuck in the back of his throat, blocking it, while saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth. The ambulance would be arriving too late. When his hands had touched the kid’s throat in removing his helmet, he hadn’t felt a pulse. Kimura shuddered. The scene was losing reality.

One wheel of the fallen motorcycle still spun slowly and oil leaked from the engine, pooling in the street and running into the sewer. There was no breeze. The night sky was clear, while directly over their heads the stoplight turned red again. Kimura rose shakily to his feet, clutching at the guardrail that ran along the sidewalk. From there he looked once more at the man lying in the street. The man’s head, pillowed on his helmet, was bent at nearly a right angle. An unnatural posture no matter how you looked at it.

Did I put it there? Did I put his head on his helmet like that? Like a pillow? For what?

He couldn’t recall the past several seconds. Those wide-open eyes were looking at him. A sinister chill swept over him. Lukewarm air seemed to pass right over his shoulders. It was a tropical evening, but Kimura found himself shivering uncontrollably.

2

The early morning light of autumn reflected off the green surface of the inner moat of the Imperial Palace. September’s stifling heat was finally fading. Kazuyuki Asakawa was halfway down to the subway platform, but suddenly had a change of heart: he wanted a closer look at the water he’d been looking at from the ninth floor. It felt like the filthy air of the editorial offices had filtered down here to the basement levels like dregs settling to the bottom of a bottle: he wanted to breathe outside air. He climbed the stairs to the street. With the green of the palace grounds in front of him, the exhaust fumes generated from the confluence of the No. 5 Expressway and the Ring Road didn’t seem so noxious. The brightening sky shone in the cool of the morning.

Asakawa was physically fatigued from having worked all night, but he wasn’t especially sleepy. The fact that he’d completed his article stimulated him and kept his brain cells active. He hadn’t taken a day off for two weeks, and planned to spend today and tomorrow at home, resting up. He was just going to take it easy—on orders from the editor-in-chief.

He saw an empty taxi coming from the direction of Kudanshita, and he instinctively raised his hand. Two days ago his subway commuter pass from Takebashi to Shinbaba had expired, and he hadn’t bought a new one yet. It cost four hundred yen to get to his condominium in Kita Shinagawa from here by subway, while it cost nearly two thousand yen to go by cab. He hated to waste over fifteen hundred yen, but when he thought of the three transfers he’d have to make on the subway, and the fact that he’d just gotten paid, he decided he could splurge just this once.

Asakawa’s decision to take a taxi on this day and at this spot was nothing more than a whim, the outcome of a series of innocuous impulses. He hadn’t emerged from the subway with the intention of hailing a cab. He’d been seduced by the outside air at the very moment that a taxi had approached with its red “vacant” lamp lit, and in that instant the thought of buying a ticket and transferring through three separate stations seemed like more effort than he could stand. If he had taken the subway home, however, a certain pair of incidents would almost certainly never have been connected. Of course, a story always begins with such a coincidence.

The taxi pulled to a hesitant stop in front of the Palaceside Building. The driver was a small man of about forty, and it looked like he too had been up all night, his eyes were so red. There was a color mug shot on the dashboard with the driver’s name, Mikio Kimura, written beside it.

“Kita Shinagawa, please.”

Hearing the destination, Kimura felt like doing a little dance. Kita Shinagawa was just past his company’s garage in Higashi Gotanda, and since it was the end of his shift, he was planning to go in that direction anyway. Moments like this, when he guessed right and things went his way, reminded him that he liked driving a cab. Suddenly he felt like talking.

“You covering a story?”

His eyes bloodshot with fatigue, Asakawa was looking out the window and letting his mind drift when the driver asked this.

“Eh?” he replied, suddenly alert, wondering how the cabby knew his profession.

“You’re a reporter, right? For a newspaper.”

“Yeah. Their weekly magazine, actually. But how did you know?”

Kimura had been driving a taxi for nearly twenty years and he could pretty much guess a fare’s occupation depending on where he picked him up, what he was wearing, and how he talked. If the person had a glamorous job and was proud of it, he was always ready to talk about it.

“It must be hard having to be at work this early in the morning.”

“No, just the opposite. I’m on my way home to sleep.”

“Well, you’re just like me then.”

Asakawa usually didn’t feel much pride in his work. But this morning he was feeling the same satisfaction he’d felt the first time he’d seen an article of his appear in print. He’d finally finished a series he’d been working on, and it had drawn quite a reaction.

“Is your work interesting?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Asakawa, noncommittally. Sometimes it was interesting and sometimes it wasn’t, but right now he couldn’t be bothered to go into it in detail. He still hadn’t forgotten his disastrous failure of two years ago. He could clearly remember the title of the article he’d been working on:

“The New Gods of Modernity.”

In his mind’s eye he could still picture the wretched figure he had cut as he’d stood quaking before the editor-in-chief to tell him he couldn’t go on as a reporter.

For a while there was silence in the taxi. They took the curve just left of Tokyo Tower at a considerable speed. “Excuse me,” said Kimura, “should I take the canal road or the No. 1 Keihin?” One route or the other would be more convenient depending on where they were going in Kita Shinagawa.

“Take the expressway. Let me out just before Shinbaba.”

A taxi driver can relax a bit once he knows precisely where his fare is going. Kimura turned right at Fuda-no-tsuji.

They were approaching it now, the intersection Kimura had been unable to put out of his mind for the past month. Unlike Asakawa, who was haunted by his failure, Kimura was able to look back at the accident fairly objectively. After all, he hadn’t been responsible for the accident, so he hadn’t had to do any soul-searching because of it. It was entirely the other guy’s fault, and no amount of caution on Kimura’s part could have warded it off. He’d completely overcome the terror he had felt. A month … was that a long time? Asakawa was still in thrall to the terror he’d known two years ago.

Still, Kimura couldn’t explain why, every time he passed this place, he felt compelled to tell people about what had happened. If Kimura glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that his fare was sleeping then he would give up, but if not, then he’d tell every passenger without exception everything that had occurred. It was a compulsion. Every time he’d go through that intersection he was overcome by a compulsion to talk about it.

“The damnedest thing happened right here about a month ago …”

As though it had been waiting for Kimura to begin his story, the light in the intersection changed from yellow to red.

“You know, a lot of strange things happen in this world.”

Kimura tried to catch his passenger’s interest by hinting in this way at the nature of his story. Asakawa had been half-asleep, but now he lifted his head suddenly and looked around him frantically. He had been startled awake by the sound of Kimura’s voice and was now trying to figure out where they were.

“Is sudden death on the increase these days? Among young people, I mean.”

“Eh?” The phrase resonated in Asakawa’s ears. Sudden death … Kimura continued.

“Well, it’s just that … I guess it was about a month ago. I’m right over there, sitting in my cab, waiting for the light to change, and suddenly this motorbike just falls over on me. It wasn’t like he was moving and took a spill—he was standing still, and suddenly, wham! And what do you think happened next? Oh, the driver, he was a prep school kid, 19 years old. He died, the idiot. Surprised the hell out of me, I can tell you that. So there’s an ambulance, and the cops, and then my cab—he’d banged into it, see. Quite a scene, I tell ya.”

Asakawa was listening silently, but as a ten-year veteran reporter he’d developed an intuition about things like this. Instinctively, he made note of the driver’s name and the name of the cab company.

“The way he died was a little weird, too. He was desperately trying to pull off his helmet. I mean, just trying to rip it off. Lying on his back and thrashing around. I went to call the ambulance and by the time I got back, he was stiff.”

“Where did you say this happened?” Asakawa was fully awake now.

“Right over there. See?” Kimura pointed to the crossing in front of the station. Shinagawa Station was located in the Takanawa area of Minato Ward. Asakawa burned this fact into his memory. An accident there would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the Takanawa precinct. In his mind he quickly worked out which of his contacts could give him access to the Takanawa police station. This was when it was nice to work for a major newspaper: they had connections everywhere, and sometimes their ability to gather information was better than the police bureau’s.

“So they called it sudden death?” He wasn’t sure if that was a proper medical term. He asked in a hurry now, not even realizing why this accident was striking such a chord with him …

“It’s ridiculous, right? My cab was totally stopped. He just went and fell on it. It was all him. But I had to file an accident report, and I came this close to having it show up on my insurance record. I tell ya, it was a total disaster, out of the blue.”

“Do you remember exactly what day and time this all happened?”

“Heh, heh, you smell a story? September, lemme see, fourth or fifth must’ve been. Time was just around eleven at night, I think.”

As soon as he said this, Kimura had a flashback. The muggy air, the pitch-black oil leaking from the fallen bike. The oil looked like a living thing as it crept toward the sewer. Headlamps reflected off its surface as it formed viscous droplets and soundlessly oozed into the street drain. That moment when it had seemed like his sensory apparatus had failed him. And then the shocked face of the dead man, head pillowed on his helmet. What had been so astonishing, anyway?

The light turned green. Kimura stepped on the gas. From the back seat came the sound of a ballpoint pen on paper. Asakawa was making notes. Kimura felt nauseated. Why was he recalling it so vividly? He swallowed the bitter bile that had welled up and fought off the nausea.

“Now what did you say the cause of death was?” asked Asakawa.

“Heart attack.”

Heart attack? Was that really the coroner’s diagnosis? He didn’t think they used that term anymore.

“I’ll have to verify that, along with the date and time,” murmured Asakawa as he continued to make notes. “In other words, there were absolutely no external injuries?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely none. It was just the shock. I mean … I’m the one who oughta be shocked, right?”

“Eh?”

“Well, 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?”

3

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 you asked a doctor about it?”

“About what?”

“About whether or not a person having a heart attack would tear at his head?”

Asakawa fell silent. He had, in fact, asked a doctor. The doctor had replied, I couldn’t rule it out. It was a wishy-washy answer. After all, the opposite sometimes happens. Sometimes when a person experiences a cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in the cerebral membrane, they feel stomach discomfort at the same time as a headache.

“So it depends on the individual. When there’s a tough math problem, some people scratch their heads, some people smoke. Some people may even rub their bellies.” Oguri swiveled in his chair as he said this. “The point is, we can’t say anything at this stage, can we? We don’t have space for that stuff. You know, because of what happened two years ago. We won’t touch this kind of thing, not lightly. If we felt fine about speculating in print, then we could, of course.”

Maybe so. Maybe it was just like his editor said, it was a freak coincidence. But still—in the end the doctor had just shaken his head. He’d pressed the doctor—do heart attack victims really pull out their own hair? And the doctor had just frowned and said, Hmmm. His look said it all: none of the patients he’d seen had acted like that.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

At the moment there was nothing to do but retreat meekly. If he couldn’t discover a more objective connection between the two incidents, it would be difficult to convince his editor. Asakawa promised himself that if he couldn’t dig up anything, he’d just shut up and leave it alone.

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