S, Page 3

  “We’re here,” said the driver.

  Takanori raised his head and saw the familiar vehicle drop-off area. The high-rise condominium, among the most famous in all of Tokyo, boasted a magnificent entrance like a grand hotel’s. It wasn’t anywhere he could afford to live on his salary. From among the several properties that his parents owned, he’d simply chosen the one here due to its proximity to his workplace.

  After paying the fare and exiting the taxi, he passed through the auto-locking entryway and took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. The unit he lived in, No. 1214, faced westward.

  It was a 700-square-feet one bedroom, too luxurious for a person living alone. Even after they got married and their child was born, he figured, they could live there for a little while. If they wanted, it would even be possible to convert the space into a two-bedroom unit. His parents did own larger condominium units in central Tokyo, but this place was to his liking. The evening view from his spacious balcony at day’s end brought comfort to him.

  There was still plenty of time for the sun to come in through the west-facing windows.

  Wanting to finish up his work while it was still bright out, Takanori turned on the desktop in one corner of his living room and set his coffee maker.

  Though there was no need to wrap up the work Yoneda had requested of him before it got dark, Takanori just had a vague fear about watching the video alone after nightfall. Perhaps he should have conducted the analysis at Studio Oz, but the office was so cramped and had frequent visitors, and he’d have gotten distracted.

  Takanori removed the USB stick with its creepy vibe from the inside pocket of his bag and set it atop his table.

  Apparently, what was saved on this totally ordinary little plastic vessel was a video of a suicide. The fact that he had just been informed of Akane’s pregnancy made a dark premonition come over him. A life newly conceived, and another one cut short by the deceased’s own hand…having the two of them mingle together so near him gave Takanori an unpleasant feeling.

  What he needed to do first was to determine whether or not this live-streamed video of an unidentified man in his forties hanging himself was authentic. Judging from the fact that the body in question had never been discovered, he supposed it must have been some nasty prank.

  These days, even a novice with a modest bit of equipment could easily craft a video that could be confused with the real thing.

  Hoping it really was a prank, Takanori brought the coffee that he’d put beside his computer to his lips and started playing the video on his monitor.

  What appeared on screen was a studio apartment. Compared to Takanori’s place, it was a small unit of a considerably lower grade, with the wallpaper peeling away in spots and an overall shabby impression.

  At first, all he saw was a shot of the room. He got a brief glimpse of the hallway outside through the front door, but then it closed and the camera turned back to the interior; then, for a moment, the outdoor scenery flashed by. Not a single person had appeared.

  This didn’t seem to have been recorded by a computer camera. Someone was walking around the room and filming with a handheld video cam, which made the images shaky. As Takanori watched, he started to feel queasy like he was getting seasick.

  The man put the camera down on the desk, and it seemed that he was connecting some cords. One of the buttons of his shirt wasn’t fastened, so part of his body from his chest to his belly was peeking out from the gap. A mole stood out on his pallid, unhealthy skin; strands of hair that had grown unusually long, as if it had fed on some dark nourishment, nestled on it. His chest was so close to the lens that even his moles and blotches were visible.

  At last the man adjusted the focus of the lens and gradually stepped away, showing his back to the camera. Then he turned and faced it, and as he continued to step backwards, the sections of his body below his hips and above his chest came into view.

  When the man’s chin became visible, for some reason he walked forward and tried to adjust the lens again. The mole from before was captured vividly in the center of the monitor, as though that were the point.

  Overcome by an oppressive feeling, Takanori arched his upper body backward and turned his face away from the monitor. It felt so real that it seemed to exude the man’s body odor, and the video professional instinctively shouted out in his mind.

  This can’t be fake.

  He was certain. The unmistakable, raw presence of a human being came across through the computer screen.

  The man turned around, facing away, and stepped back from the video camera he’d placed on the desk. His shirt was short, revealing a horizontal strip of skin in the gap between it and his cotton pants, with the waistband of his underwear running parallel underneath. The long sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to around his elbows, and he was opening and closing the palms of his rugged hands.

  His back still turned to the camera, the man raised one leg onto a chair in the middle of the room, then stood his whole body on it. At this point, the monitor showed his back, his hips, and his legs from thigh to heel. Since his cotton pants were also rolled up, his Achilles’ tendons were exposed.

  A subtle wobble traveling upward from his heels seemed to climb from his buttocks to his back. It was a round rotating chair, and he appeared to be struggling to balance himself on it.

  The man put his arms up in the air. Though it was unclear what he was doing since his body was out of view from the shoulders up, Takanori already knew that this was a suicide film and assumed the man was putting a rope around his neck.

  The man’s struggle was palpable from his shaking body parts. Then Takanori suddenly noticed something—he didn’t hear the chair making any creaking sounds, though it surely had to be.

  Usually in these cases, people wanted to utter something like a last will and testament in front of the camera. Had this man no final words as he prepared to leave this world behind? Every last sound had been erased from the video.

  In total silence, the man’s arms dropped down around his hips. He seemed to have finished putting the rope around his neck. If so, all that remained to do was to kick out the chair and fall.

  Using his toes skillfully, almost like a ballerina, he rotated the chair to the left and stopped when his body was facing the camera.

  Though not as intensely as before, he was weakly closing and opening both his hands, so Takanori couldn’t help focusing on them. The man wasn’t holding anything.

  Then, abruptly, the chair was kicked out to the front, and the man’s body fell across the center of the monitor—first his legs, then his thighs, hips, belly, chest, shoulders, neck, face, and head disappearing downward. After a pause, his body fell again, from the direction of the ceiling, starting with his toes, then his knees, hips, belly, and chest, and was momentarily pulled up in recoil. After that it stopped about a foot off the floor and began to spin rightward.

  The man’s body from his chest up was still hidden from view, and so from start to finish, his face remained unclear.

  For a few minutes the body slowly turned left and right, but besides that there were no changes. It was just hanging loosely from the ceiling.

  As Takanori scrutinized the video, trying not to miss anything, he saw the man’s hands and toes twitching. Every time the body swerved from left to right, a black stain forming around its crotch gradually spread.

  Time seemed to flow very slowly around the body as it hung from the ceiling, the face still invisible. If any meaning could be given to this phenomenon, the only interpretation Takanori could think of was that it recorded the process by which vital reactions ceased. Death was a transitory phenomenon, not an instantaneous change. If the sound had been streaming, he might have noticed the breaths escaping from the man’s throat getting lower and the intervals getting longer. No air was being inhaled; it would simply keep leaking. Soon it would die down, and the heart would stop beating.

  Takanori could imagine the changes occurring in the man’s body. Think
ing about how it no longer breathed, he felt a pain in his own chest—he’d been holding his breath, in fact. He couldn’t turn away from the display even for a second, as if the scruff of his neck was being pressed from behind and his eyes were being sucked into the screen.

  He didn’t fail to notice something rising ever so slightly. It was oozing out from the gap of the man’s shirt—a mist wafting toward the ceiling, like steam. Was it coming from his incontinent urine, or was it an optical illusion? A pale pink cloud, shrouding the body, gradually rose from the feet and was now coalescing around the neck. Takanori couldn’t see because it was off screen, but the cloud seemed to be rising yet higher after enveloping the man’s face.

  Watching, Takanori began to believe in the soul’s existence. Beset by a mixture of awe, amazement, and solemnity, he didn’t even notice that the video had ended.

  He stood up from the chair as if he’d been flipped out of it. Then, approaching the balcony door, he opened the shutters and drank in the outside air.

  Cold sweat had broken out over his whole body, and his T-shirt was drenched.

  4

  When Akane got off the bus, she saw the school gate about a hundred yards up ahead. Although a year had passed since she’d become a teacher, this distance still felt long to her. The closer she got to the gate, the gloomier she felt. When will I get used to it? she wondered, detesting her own timidity.

  Going out into the world had made her acutely aware that your achievements in high school and college and your capabilities as a teacher were completely different things. And yet her former teachers and her senior instructors had told her the same thing at every turn.

  “You’re going to make a great teacher, Akane.”

  Reality, however, wasn’t as forgiving. She found herself being toyed with by bratty young girls some seventeen years old, and she couldn’t quite understand what they were thinking. With each passing day, she lost more of her confidence and didn’t know how she could get it back.

  On a typical morning, the road leading from the bus stop to the school gate was full of female students making their way to school in small groups. Whenever they greeted her, Akane tried her best to muster a cheerful smile, but if she failed to conceal the slightest unease or irritation, the girls would openly start whispering in front of her. Miss Maruyama’s kind of weird today, they’d say. Encountered individually, they were always the picture of the honest, adorable student. Yet the moment they formed a group, they had a power far beyond their numbers. That was also what made a girls’ high school so frightening.

  If this were the morning, and I ran into a pack of those girls around here on their way to school, they’d know in an instant I was pregnant. With a nervous gaze, Akane scanned the area.

  Not a soul could be seen on the street.

  Good thing it’s ten minutes to noon, she thought, breathing a sigh of relief. At this time of day, no students or teachers would be on the road from the bus stop to the school gate. It was because she’d been absent from her morning lessons to visit the hospital for her exam that she was arriving this late.

  There was usually one more obstacle on the way to the school gate from the bus stop, but it wasn’t in sight now.

  Every morning, this person would overtake Akane with a leisurely stride and torment any girl who wasn’t following school regulations. She was Miss Yoshiko Ohashi, also known as “Hardass.” She would say things like Your hair’s tied the wrong way, or Your sock color is inappropriate…always pointing out such little things, with almost amazing powers of observation, that the students would shrink away and try to flee from Hardass’s gaze.

  Why can’t she let these violations go and try to be more cheerful in the morning, Akane would think. It’s the beginning of the day. Both sides would feel a lot better if she did. She couldn’t understand why Miss Ohashi became such a slave to her job the moment she got off the bus, when she wasn’t even on the premises yet.

  If Akane didn’t keep her wits about her, then despite being a teacher, she could become a target too. Overlooking a student’s breach of the school rules could bring down Hardass’s wrath upon her.

  “What are you doing? If you find any students breaking the rules, you need to scold them.”

  When a veteran teacher gave you such advice, the only thing you could do was to say yes and lower your head. But unable to be strict with the offenders, Akane could only shrink in fear, stuck in a dilemma.

  In the small community that was the school, the power structure was obvious. At the bottom was Akane, forced to accept her lowly position, looked down upon by the students, while feared Hardass was at the top…

  Today, in her unusual situation, Akane grew more and more depressed as she walked. She didn’t know how she ought to inform the school that she was pregnant.

  She had finally made it to her second year as a teacher. Fortunately, she wasn’t in charge of any class, but she was an assistant homeroom teacher and an assistant advisor for a club, and also had to lead the mountain climbing class, for instance; it was obvious that certain changes in school duties would be forced on the other teachers. The baby was due around the end of next February, and Akane would need to take a total of four months’ maternity leave, for two months before and after that date. That worked out to a leave of absence lasting from winter vacation that year until the new school term began next April. The school would have to take Akane’s delivery date into consideration in planning the yearly schedule. Thus, she needed to report her pregnancy sooner or later.

  The problems were the order and the timing of the things she had to do. She couldn’t afford to screw up when to tell the school about these matters.

  We’re getting married soon, so maybe afterwards I should tell them about my marriage and pregnancy at the same time? No, no, not at the same time—I should tell them first that I got married, and a little while later let them know about my pregnancy…

  The teachers are all adults, so they’ll understand without my telling them everything, but with the students, it isn’t going to be so easy. At least one girl will count the days from when I got married to my delivery date and realize I became pregnant before I got married. And as soon as she’s figured it out, she’ll tell everybody in the school, bragging like she’s some genius for putting it all together.

  “Hey, c’mere, c’mere. You do know, right?”

  It wouldn’t take even half a day before everybody knew the truth.

  Akane decided to say nothing for today. She’d already told the head teacher that she hadn’t been feeling well and had visited a clinic, but she thought it best to pretend she’d caught a cold and to hold off on reporting the exam results. In any case, it would be reckless for her to say anything before talking things over with Takanori that night and clarifying their future plans.

  She’d put these matters aside for now…

  Having decided how she should behave that day, Akane stepped inside the school.

  The info you obtain through your five senses alter as you move: the wind caressing your face, the sound of car motors passing by, or the sight of a train running on overhead tracks in the distance enter your awareness through your tactile, auditory, and visual senses. The small change that beset her at that moment related to her sense of smell, but she didn’t notice it right away.

  Akane felt as if she’d crossed beyond an invisible boundary. A metallic sound echoed in her ears, and her field of vision became mushy and distorted. It was too early in the year for cicadas. There’d been no rain for a few days, but the moisture in the eighty-five-degree air clung viscously to her neck.

  Unable to remain standing, she suddenly sank down right where she was, holding up her body with both hands on the ground.

  She’d felt nauseated when she was waiting in the hospital, but that was from her pregnancy. This time, that wasn’t the only cause. It was more remote: a horrifying experience she’d gone through more than a decade ago. The smell had awoken her memory.

  Akane s
earched for its source, moving only her eyes. Immediately beside her was a freshly dug flowerbed. The surface had been tilled, and new flowers had been planted. The smell of soil that greeted her nostrils nearly made her choke. A worm crawling out from one of the bulges of soil added a special accent to the scent.

  Even when Akane closed her eyes, the worm—stretching itself toward the sky—crawled on her retinas. Her heart was beating fast and hard, and her field of vision was growing narrower and narrower. Recalling the snake that the boy in the hospital waiting room had drawn, she felt a cold sweat dripping from her forehead.

  She put her hands to her mouth and endured the nausea welling up from the back of her throat.

  The long shadow of her body on the ground overlapped with a larger one coming from behind her.

  “Are you all right?”

  Reacting to the male voice, Akane turned around. Hands covered in a pair of muddy rubber gloves hung down in front of her. One was holding a scoop shovel, and the other a bundle of seedlings.

  Still stooping, Akane raised just her eyes. The man’s face appeared before her, blacked out and featureless due to the sun behind him.

  When you’re about to faint, it feels as if the world is shutting down. A lace curtain rolled down from the roof to the first floor of the school building that Akane knew so well, rapidly shrinking her vision.

  As her consciousness was enveloped in darkness, a sequence of images long sealed away in a distant memory surfaced instead. She had experienced something similar once before. She could watch objectively at her own body collapsing. Although the man was there, trying to catch her, she couldn’t make out his face because it was blurred out by the darkness.

  “You’re all right. You’re gonna be okay.”

  Back then, too, a man had whispered those words to her. The memory was coming back to her in patches, and the more she tried to push it away, the nearer it drew to her in response.