EDGE (21 page)

The first thing the monitor showed was the inside of the Rendaiji S Mart store, at around 6:30 p.m. on September 13th of the previous year. The memory stick contained approximately thirty minutes of footage, spanning the transition from dusk to complete darkness outside.

The interior of the store was brightly lit, revealing row upon row of useful everyday products but few customers. Whenever anyone entered the shop someone else seemed to leave, so that the number of customers remained fairly stable at around two or three.

The camera afforded a view of nearly the entire store, with just a few exceptions. The right edge of the screen showed the magazine racks positioned along the glass window contiguous with the entrance. The left edge showed the refrigerated shelving containing boxed lunches and other fresh food. On either side, there was a small area of the store that was out of range of the camera.

After several minutes of footage, a dark shadow passed through the center of the monitor. It was the store manager, his arms full to overflowing with a load of cardboard boxes. He was having a hard time exiting the shop. The automatic door was open, but one of the boxes had somehow gotten caught on its edge and he was having trouble breaking free.

When a young clerk emerged from behind the counter and rushed over to help the manager, Kitazawa paused the video.

“That’s Tomoaki Nishimura,” he told them. Then he fast-forwarded the video for a few moments, pressing the play button again when a young woman entered the shop. She came through the front door and slowly past the register towards the area where toiletries were displayed. Her sleeveless blouse revealed delicate shoulders, and she wore an inexpensive-looking bracelet on the wrist of the hand gripping her wallet.

Kitazawa hit the pause button and shot Saeko a glance.

“That’s Mizuho Takayama?” Saeko asked.

Kitazawa nodded. It was her, all right. Only the profile of her face was visible, but her physical characteristics and clothing were a perfect match.

After finding the item she was looking for and dropping it into her basket, Mizuho Takayama disappeared momentarily from the camera’s field of vision. At that same moment, a young man wearing jeans and a denim shirt entered the store. He positioned himself in front of a rack of ramen products and proceeded to compare two items with an intensity that seemed somewhat excessive for selecting instant noodles.

Kitazawa hit the pause button and shot Saeko a meaningful glance. The image of the young man’s face was small and not terribly distinct, but there was no doubt about it. The young man in jeans was Nobuhisa Igarashi.

Just as Kitazawa had suspected, the three disappearances shared
a common location. After checking in at the business hotel, Mizuho Takayama had begun to draw a bath when she realized she’d forgotten to pack something. At the convenience store, Nobuhisa Igarashi and Tomoaki Nishimura had happened to be at the same place at the same time.

When the earthquake struck, Nobuhisa Igarashi was standing in front of the magazine rack, Mizuho Takayama was off to the left, just out of view, and Tomoaki Nishimura was behind the counter, the top of his head under the security camera.

The shock of the earthquake shifted the camera’s view slightly upwards so that less of the store was visible. There was no audio, but it was clear from the video image that the store was shaking. It made Saeko a bit nauseous just watching it. Cups of instant ramen flew into the air and the counter next to the register began to fall inwards towards Nishimura. Nishimura covered his head with both hands and leaned into the counter in a desperate attempt to hold it up.

Over by the magazine rack, Igarashi cowered on the floor, shielding his head with both hands to protect against the toothbrushes, boxes of tissues, and other items that were raining down on his head.

Meanwhile, Mizuho Takayama had fallen to the ground so that just her delicate arm was now within view of the camera. It writhed awkwardly on the floor, attesting to her presence. Even though the rest of her body wasn’t visible, as her thin arm wriggled on the floor like an inchworm, it served as a powerful reminder of her existence.

As a second jolt shook the store, the security camera tilted even further upwards. The ceiling now occupied most of the screen, with only a shelf lined with pornographic magazines visible at the bottom.

The counter read 6:44:30 p.m. The tremor subsided, and the screen showed nothing more than an unchanging view of the ceiling. A small dark speck on the ceiling flew off into the air—it was an insect, not a stain. Other than that, there was no movement on the screen whatsoever.

Absorbed, Saeko had drawn close, perching on the edge of a table in an unladylike pose. Now she stood up and moved in even closer.

The stillness after the earthquake was like a palpable presence. The counter on the screen indicated that the footage was still playing, but to both Saeko and Kitazawa, it felt as if time had stopped. With nothing but the ceiling visible on the screen, the three young people were about to vanish at any moment.

“This is when it happens, right?”

“Right.”

“But the camera didn’t catch it?”

“Unfortunately.”

Saeko stopped the video and turned towards Kitazawa. “What do you make of this?”

“I don’t know. I really can’t say.”

For a full minute, the three of them sat in silence, thinking. Not only did they fail to achieve any flashes of inspiration, it seemed as if they had lost the power to think and were simply staring blankly into space.

The video clearly told them one thing.

The three seemingly unrelated disappearances in Itoigawa had taken place together.

Saeko recalled the footage from the earthquake that had struck while they were filming at the Fujimuras’ home in Takato. Immediately afterwards, the voices of the staff had filled the air, in sharp contrast to the stillness they had just observed. Saeko alone had been plunged into a silent abyss of unconsciousness. Here, at the convenience store in Itoigawa, three people had simultaneously disappeared in the wake of an earthquake.

There was clearly a link that related to the setting.

Kitazawa issued a research assignment to his son. “This is where you come in,” he told Toshiya. “I want you to find as many similar disappearances as you can, not just in Japan but worldwide, and figure out what they have in common.”

Toshiya muttered something about being busy enough already writing his dissertation, but the pleased expression on his face told a different story. He agreed to the task—given his self-proclaimed ability to locate and analyze any kind of information, how could he refuse? But more importantly, Toshiya was starting to become intrigued by the case. When he wasn’t interested in something, heaven and earth couldn’t budge him. But when he did take an interest, he would work all night if he had to, even without pay.

If Saeko knew Toshiya, he would probably pull an all-nighter tonight. She was sure of it.

6
The next evening at seven o’clock, Saeko visited Kitazawa’s office again, this time with Hashiba. They arrived just as Toshiya was leaving; he had been called into office at the university suddenly and had
to go, even though he had been up all night working on the case. Chagrined that he couldn’t discuss his findings with the rest of the group, Toshiya hurried off after a few words of greeting.

The lines of fatigue in Kitazawa’s face were etched even more deeply than the day before. He paced the small room feverishly, turning the computer on and off and pulling books from the shelf only to replace them, as if he himself weren’t sure what he was doing. Saeko had never seen him so distracted.

She cut right to the chase. “What did you find out?”

“Well, how should I put this? I guess the best thing is to show you. All I can say is, Toshiya did his job well.”

Kitazawa reached for a file on his desk but hesitated before picking it up. The file was fat with printed pages.

Hashiba observed Kitazawa’s cryptic, noncommittal movements without comment.

“I suppose you might say we’ve discovered something unexpected. Then again, I might be reading too much into something that’s actually pure coincidence. In any case, I’d be glad to get your opinions on the matter.”

In a roundabout way, Kitazawa seemed to be hinting that they had come across an important lead.

“This computer contains data on missing persons cases all over Japan. Not the 100,000 cases said to occur in Japan each year—just the ones that are potentially relevant. Most missing persons wind up surfacing eventually. Ninety percent of the ones who don’t were usually struggling with serious debts, and such. The other ten percent are the ones Toshiya focused on. In other words, disappearances without any obvious cause. Still, that leaves about 5,000 cases. That’s still too many to really review. So he narrowed the field again, rejecting any cases where there was any kind of likely explanation, keeping just the ones that were total mysterious. Those cases always generate a fair bit of buzz. The police investigate some of those cases if they suspect foul play, but not all of them. Beyond that, he picked up a number of cases from the last few years that seemed similar to the Ina and Itoigawa cases, relying solely on intuition. That brought the number down to 150 cases. Anyway, have a look.”

Kitazawa divided the pile of printed documents into stacks of roughly 50 pages each and handed them to Saeko and Hashiba.

Each page contained the name of a missing person, their age, date of disappearance, and other pertinent information summed up in as few
words as possible.

The three of them went through their stacks page by page, skimming the information. When they’d each finished with their piles, they swapped stacks. It took around fifteen minutes for all three of them to peruse all 150 pages.

Kitazawa waited for the other two to look up from the piles of papers in their laps.

“What do you think? Did you notice anything?”

Hashiba answered immediately. “There seems to be a pattern in terms of the location of the disappearances.”

Each of the profiles included the prefecture and municipality where the disappearance had taken place. Saeko had noticed the same thing. Certain prefectures cropped up quite often—Mie, Yamanashi, Tokushima, Shizuoka, Oita, Nagano, Kagawa, Aichi, Niigata—while there seemed to be very few cases in northeast Japan and Hokkaido. Just as Hashiba had noted, there seemed to be a notable discrepancy in the geographic distribution of the reports.

“Why would that be?” Saeko wasn’t so much asking Kitazawa as wondering aloud.

The prefectures with many disappearances had two to three times as many cases as the ones with fewer cases. It would make sense if they reflected differences in average income from prefecture to prefecture, but even with that in mind the discrepancies were too large. Besides, there were almost no disappearances of the kind in Hokkaido and Okinawa, two prefectures with high levels of unemployment, calling into question whether economic factors were even relevant.

Kitazawa gave Saeko a quick glance of affirmation before continuing. “The same thing occurred to me. The locations of the disappearances are clearly skewed towards certain areas. Just as I suspected, location seems to be relevant to these cases. But what on earth could be causing the cases to be distributed so unevenly? I considered every factor I could think of—income, unemployment rate, homeownership rates—but none of them lined up. I thought that looking at the distribution at a prefectural level might be too broad, so I tried analyzing the data on a more local scale, but I still couldn’t figure out the determining factor. But I knew there had to be some sort of commonality among the locations that have experienced a lot of these disappearances. The results were too skewed for it to be pure coincidence.”

“So, did you figure it out?” Saeko pressed.

“Well, I don’t know how to say this …”

“Don’t keep us in suspense! Come on, out with it!”

“Patience, please. I’m still not sure whether or not I believe it myself.”

“Well, spit it out so we can all discuss it together!” Saeko urged irritably.

“All right, all right!” Kitazawa waved his hands to shush Saeko. Then he pulled out another document and handed a copy to Saeko and another to Hashiba. It was a map of Japan, peppered with clusters of black dots.

Saeko didn’t need to wait for Kitazawa to explain—she already had a pretty good idea what the map signified. With the disappearances represented as black dots on a map, it was much easier to understand exactly how they were distributed geographically. Immediately, she could see that the dots were concentrated mostly in the middle of Japan. There were very few in northeastern Japan, and just a few in the middle of Hokkaido. But that wasn’t all. As she examined the map more carefully, Saeko began to notice an even stranger geographic pattern. The clusters of black dots formed a recognizable symbol.

A cross!

The image came to Saeko in a flash. Actually, it was more like a letter “t” lying on its side than a cross. A dark cluster of black dots occurred right at the intersection of the two lines.

The disappearances were concentrated in two bands, and those bands intersected right in the middle of the Japanese archipelago like a “t.” The slightly bowed vertical band ran right through the center of the country. The horizontal band bisected the vertical one, arcing through Shizuoka and southern Aichi, across the Ise Bay and Kii Peninsula, and crossing through northern Shikoku and central Kyushu.

Saeko glanced at Kitazawa’s face, wondering what he was thinking. All three of them had surely noticed that the disappearances were concentrated along a curved, slightly messy t-shape. The question was why. Why on earth would such a geographic pattern emerge?

The first association that popped into Saeko’s mind were the geoglyphs in the Nazca desert in Peru, otherwise known as the Nazca Lines. These famous motifs were created by carving away the dry topsoil on the ground to a depth of just ten centimeters. Many of them formed pictures of animals such as a monkey, a whale, a hummingbird, a condor, or a spider, and some also incorporated geometric shapes such as triangles, squares, and spirals. They ranged in size from a few dozen meters to several hundred meters in length, with the largest spanning a distance of fifty kilometers.