Birthday (5 page)

Onstage, his favorite actress was performing, with great earnestness, the part she'd at long last landed. It was her debut—her career as an actress depended on each one of these precious moments, and she was savoring them.

He liked her personally, which only made him more determined to get the sound cues exactly right. His every thought was concentrated on the finger that would press play. He could feel sweat beading on his fingertip.

The music would play, and she'd sing a snippet of song: that was how the scene went. He'd push the play button, and from the speaker in front of the stage would come the sound, a snippet that he'd recorded and edited himself. That was what was supposed to happen.

He pressed play.

But what came from the speaker was no sound he'd ever heard before. Not only was it not music, it was too creepy even for one of their sound effects. Though he could hardly make it out, he thought it sounded like someone moaning—when the scene called for a cheerful little song. It was more than enough to destroy the play.

He watched the tape reel spin. It was his tape, the one he'd put together: no doubt about that. And he knew exactly what sounds were on it, and where. This keening wail was totally unforeseen.

Who the hell put this on here!

There was no time to think of a solution. Doubt as-sailed him from every side, and in his panic he allowed an effect scheduled for the next scene to play now. The ringing of a telephone echoed through the theater. The situation was beyond salvaging now.

The actress was young and inexperienced, and she couldn't improvise her way out of the situation. She simply stopped and looked up at the sound booth. With the house lights down and the booth's work light on, she'd be able to see him from the stage.

She looked up at him with a weapon-like clarity of gaze, and an accusatory gleam began to come into her eyes.

How dare you ruin my debut like this!

He gave up. He had no explanation for how those moans had gotten there. There was no way he was to blame—if anything, he was the victim. But he couldn't even voice his excuses: his body had stiffened, and he couldn't move. It felt like sleep paralysis.

Now all the actors onstage had stopped performing and were looking up at the sound booth. Audience members, too, following the actors' gazes, were beginning to turn around in their seats, half standing up to stare at him. His whole body felt the force of their recrimina-tions.

It's not my fault! It's not my fault!

He didn't speak the words aloud, but somehow the microphone picked up the voice in his head and ampli-fied it until it resounded throughout the theater.

"It's not my fault! It's not my fault!"

This attempt at self-vindication, more like a desperate cry, only poured oil on the flames. The crowd's reproach reached an even higher pitch, engulfing the hall.

But the sharpest gaze of all belonged to the young actress making her first appearance on a stage. The woman who had joined the troupe at the same time as him, with whom he'd done odd jobs together when they were interns, the woman with whom he'd exchanged encouraging words, the woman who had gradually become the object of his affections... He wanted to help her. He couldn't. Far from it: he was dragging her down. All he wanted, and he wanted it from the bottom of his heart, was for her to succeed as an actress, and now he was stealing that future from her, and all he could do was gnash his teeth... He could say he loved her all he wanted, but in reality it all came down to this.

Clutching at his chest, drowning in sweat, Toyama awoke from his dream.

For the first few minutes after waking up from the dream, he didn't know where he was. Then, as he got his breathing under control and looked around, Toyama began to grasp the situation. Mirrored ceiling, a circular bed that wasn't his, a woman in a towel sitting next to that oversized bed...

He tried to look up at her, and suddenly his chest hurt like it was being squeezed. He shivered; he could feel a cold sweat break out on his back. His chest and back had been giving him a lot of pain lately; this time, too, it made him uneasy.
Not again,
he thought; maybe he ought to see a doctor after all.

"You were having a nightmare."

She flashed him a playful smile, as if he'd shown her something really amusing.

Toyama groaned and lay there supine and motion-less for a time. He was afraid that if he made the wrong move now he'd get dizzy and fall over. He waited for his breathing to relax.

At length he gingerly rolled over on the bed. He might be alright.

He quietly separated himself from the woman, weighing what he'd dreamed against what he knew to be real; he heaved a sigh. How many times had he dreamed terrifying things, knowing all the while that it was a dream? And each time, even knowing it for what it was, he cowered before the same dream, and then felt relief when he was able to confirm it wasn't real.

He looked at his watch and asked the woman, "Hey, how long have I been asleep?"

"Fifteen minutes, maybe? I saw you were asleep and went to take a shower. When I got back, you were having a nightmare. You're being punished for all the bad stuff you do, don't you think?"

Toyama gave a bitter smile and buried his face in the pillow. He had more than an inkling of what she was talking about. Here he was, forty-seven, married, a father, and he was still fooling around. No doubt the woman assumed his wife must've found out and confronted him, and thus the cold sweat.

He wasn't drunk. It wasn't even night. It was two in the afternoon. Once they left the hotel they'd be under the clear blue skies of late November. He'd had a little lull at work, so he'd called up an old flame under the pre-tense of doing lunch; they'd gone to a hotel; sated from food and sex, and tired from accumulated fatigue, he'd suddenly been overcome by sleep; and in those few minutes, that fragmentary dream... It wasn't hard to assign it meaning. The same dream had tormented him over and over as a twenty-three-year-old college student. That was twenty-four years ago.

The dream came in lots of variations. Sometimes, he'd be sitting in the sound booth cuing the tape, which he'd mended with adhesive tape, and it would break, with an audible snap. Sometimes the tape would produce a strange noise unconnected with the scene onstage. What all the variants had in common was the fact that his actions produced some sound that ruined the performance of the woman he loved just as she was going to make her stage debut.

He'd had that nightmare twenty-four years ago. At the time he'd been manning the sound booth for Theater Group Soaring: it had been an all-too-plausible scenario then, and in fact something along those lines had actually happened to him.

But he hadn't had the dream for twenty-four years—

why was it back now? He thought he knew the answer to that.

The guy's business card was still in his card-case.

Kenzo Yoshino, Daily News, Yokosuka Branch Office.

It was a month now since this Yoshino guy had called him up out of the blue. A weekday afternoon.

Toyama had just come back from lunch and sat down at his desk. He answered the phone himself. The caller, this Yoshino, had first confirmed Toyama's name and the fact that in 1965 he had been a member of Theater Group Soaring, and then he'd taken a deep breath and said,
I'd 
like to ask you a few questions about Sadako Yama
mura, if I may.

Toyama remembered Yoshino's voice distinctly: it was that of a man struggling against panic, grasping at straw. And it was no wonder the man's voice had left such an impression, considering what he'd said. Toyama had never met the man, but he was talking about Sadako Yamamura, a woman whose name Toyama hadn't heard anyone utter for twenty-four years, as often as he might recall it in secret to himself. Every time he thought of her face his chest tightened and his pulse quickened. Obviously, he wasn't over her yet, even all these years later.

Yoshino said he wanted to get together and talk with him about Sadako. Toyama agreed to meet him once. He couldn't pass up the chance, considering how much the subject interested him, too. He arranged to meet Yoshino in a coffee shop in Akasaka, near his office.

Yoshino looked every inch the old-time reporter as, stroking his beard, he tried to coax forth Toyama's distant memories. He concentrated on the time immediately surrounding Sadako's disappearance.

Sadako Yamamura went missing in 1966, right after a Soaring performance, correct?

Yoshino was very persistent about wanting to know her movements after leaving the troupe. He didn't rush, and he paused between each question, but his vocal and facial expressions betrayed the depth of his interest in Sadako.

What happened to Sadako twenty-four years ago?

How was Toyama to know? He'd searched for her himself, desperately. If ever he'd found out where Sadako had disappeared to, his life now would be very different.

And so he knew exactly why the nightmare was back. It was all due to Yoshino, his mention of Sadako's name. It was the only thing that could have brought back those dreams, and all the suffering they had caused him.

They emerged from the hotel into glaring sunlight.

The harsh light bothered him—or was it his conscience, after what he'd done in that room? Quite a contrast to the mild signs of late autumn all around them.

They walked quickly up the sidewalk to a place where the crowd thinned out. Toyama clasped the woman's hand and muttered, "Well, gotta go."

"Back to the office?" she replied, with an untroubled smile. She took one hand from her hip and waved.

Goodbye.

"I've got a ton of work to catch up on."

"But in spite of that, you just couldn't control this," she said, gesturing as if to grab his crotch. "You never could."

It suddenly occurred to Toyama that it might be time to quit this. He wasn't young anymore, and there was no telling when one of his attacks might turn life-threatening.

"I'll give you a call," he said, blowing her a little kiss and turning away. After walking a bit, he turned to look back: she was still watching him. He waved, then hurried through the Nogizaka neighborhood toward Hitotsugi Street. When he'd said he had a ton of work to catch up on, it was no lie.

In his junior year of college he'd suddenly taken it into his head to become a playwright. That was how he'd come to join Theater Group Soaring's production department. So far so good, but it turned out that there were so many good writers and directors in the group who were senior to him that he knew he'd never get a chance to show what he was capable of. Placed in charge of music, he learned the job and then went back to school, graduating a year late. He lucked into a job at a record company, where he became a project director; he'd been doing it for twenty-three years now. The job was just something that had allowed him to utilize his experience with theater sound, but once he'd gotten into it he found it a fas-cinating line of work—he came to look at it as a calling.

It was a fun job, as long as he was in the studio involved with recording. He'd never once found that part of the job unpleasant. Sometimes he hated attending planning meetings with executives, but dealing with musicians gave him virtually no stress at all. All in all he felt it was a job worth doing, and he was glad he'd found it. Not only that, but the industry as a whole was healthy, and things looked like they were only going to get better. Things were bullish in every respect, his salary was all he could wish for, and he never lacked for female company. Toyama had no complaints about the situation he found himself in. Even the work that now awaited him back at the office was fundamentally something he enjoyed. He had no worries, other than, lately, some physical problems.

But he had to admit that hearing Yoshino mention Sadako Yamamura, and now dreaming about her again, unsettled him in ways he couldn't quite pin down.

Sadako, it was fair to say, was the only woman in the world for him. He'd botched his first marriage. The second one was more stable, and they had kids. Surrounded by children and a wife too young for him, he had a satisfying life now—but he often wondered "what if."

What would have happened if Sadako and I had gotten married?

That wasn't the only "if" that occurred to him.

If the end of the world came, who would I want to be with!

If I could do it all over, who would I spend my hfe with?

If I could only make love to a woman once in my life, who would it be?

The answer to all these questions, for Toyama, was Sadako. If she appeared before him this very instant and offered to accept him, he'd be prepared to give up anything and everything. He even thought he'd be willing to die, if he could only touch her skin once more.

I've got to call.

If he could catch up on his work today, he'd have quite a bit of free time tomorrow, November 27th. It wouldn't be too much trouble to go down to Yokosuka if he was asked to.

He decided it would be better to call from a pay phone than from the office, so he walked to the edge of the sidewalk and took out a telephone card and the man's business card. He punched the number for the Yokosuka Branch Office of the
Daily News.
Kenzo Yoshino himself answered.

Their last conversation had been pretty one-sided, with Yoshino asking all the questions. He'd seemed to be in a hurry, and had given only the most rudimentary replies to Toyama's inquiries. As soon as he'd learned what he wanted to know, or realized that he could get no further information from Toyama, Yoshino had cut their meeting short, getting up and walking out. It had left Toyama with a myriad of questions, and the feeling that Yoshino's be-havior had been inconsiderate, to say the least.

Why was a reporter sniffing around after Sadako anyway?

That was the most obvious question, and now it was whirling around in his head. Toyama briefly explained to Yoshino what he wanted to know and asked, politely, if they could get together and talk.

He added that if he needed to he'd be willing to go down to Yokosuka, but Yoshino said that wouldn't be necessary, and he explained his schedule for tomorrow.