The Complete Ring Trilogy: Ring, Spiral, Loop

8

“Investigate? What is it exactly I should investigate about this woman?”

She joined the troupe in ’65? You’ve got to be kidding—that’s twenty-five years ago. Yoshino was ranting to himself. It’s hard enough to trace a criminal’s steps a year after the fact. But twenty-five?

“We need anything and everything you can find out. We want to know what kind of life this woman’s led, what she’s doing right now, what she wants.”

Yoshino could only sigh. He wedged the receiver between his ear and his shoulder and pulled a notepad over from the edge of the desk.

“… And how old was she at the time?”

“Eighteen. She graduated from high school on Oshima and went straight to Tokyo, where she joined a theater group called Theater Group Soaring.”

“Oshima?” Yoshino stopped writing and frowned. “Hey, where are you calling from, anyway?”

“From a place called Sashikiji, on Izu Oshima Island.”

“And when do you plan on coming back?”

“As soon as I can.”

“You realize there’s a typhoon heading your way?”

Of course there was no way Asakawa could be ignorant of it, being right there in the middle of it, but to Yoshino the whole thing had taken on an unreal quality that he had begun to find amusing. The “deadline” was the night after next, and yet Asakawa himself was holed up on Oshima, possibly unable to escape.

“Have you heard any travel advisories?” Asakawa still didn’t know many details.

“Well, I’m not sure, but the way it looks now, I imagine they’ll be grounding all flights and suspending ocean transport.”

Asakawa had been too busy chasing down Sadako Yamamura to pick up any reliable information about the typhoon. He’d had a bad feeling ever since stepping onto the Oshima pier, but now that the possibility of being stranded here had been voiced, he suddenly felt a sense of urgency. Receiver still in hand, he fell silent.

“Hey, hey, don’t worry. They haven’t cancelled anything yet.” Yoshino tried to sound positive. Then he changed the subject. “So, this woman … Sadako Yamamura. You’ve checked her history out up to the age of eighteen?”

“More or less,” Asakawa answered, conscious of the sound of the wind and waves outside the phone booth.

“This isn’t your only lead, right? You’ve got to have something besides this Theater Group Soaring.”

“Nope, that’s it. Sadako Yamamura, born in Sashikiji on Izu Oshima Island in 1947 to Shizuko Yamamura … hey, make a note of that name. Shizuko Yamamura. She was twenty-two in ’47. She left her new baby, Sadako, with her grandmother and ran off to Tokyo.”

“Why did she leave the baby on the island?”

“There was a man. Make a note of this, too: Heihachiro Ikuma. At the time he was Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. He was Shizuko Yamamura’s lover.”

“So does that mean Sadako is Shizuko and Ikuma’s child?”

“I haven’t been able to find proof, but I think it’s safe to assume that.”

“And they weren’t married, right?”

“Exactly. Heihachiro Ikuma already had a family.”

So it had been an illicit affair. Yoshino licked the tip of his pencil.

“Okay, I’m with you. Go on.”

“Early in 1950 Shizuko suddenly revisits her hometown for the first time in three years. She’s reunited with her daughter Sadako, and lives here for a while. But by the end of the year she’s absconded again, this time taking Sadako with her. For the next five years, nobody knows where Shizuko and Sadako are or what they’re doing. But in the mid ’50s, Shizuko’s cousin, still living here on the island, hears a rumor that Shizuko has become famous doing something or other.”

“Was she involved in some sort of incident?”

“It’s unclear. The cousin just says that he started hearing things about Shizuko, through the grapevine. But when I gave him my card, he saw I work for a newspaper and said, ‘If you’re a reporter you probably know more about it than me.’ From the way he was talking it sounds like from about 1950 to 1955 Shizuko and Sadako were involved in something that caused a stir in the media. But news from the mainland was hard to come by on the island …”

“And so you’d like me to check and see what it was that got them in the news?”

“You read my mind.”

“Idiot. It was obvious.”

“There’s more. In ’56, Shizuko comes back to the island, dragging Sadako with her. The mother’s so worn down that she looks like a different person, and she won’t answer any of her cousin’s questions. She just closes up, mumbling incoherently. And then one day she throws herself into Mt Mihara, the volcano, and kills herself. She was thirty-one.”

“So I’m also finding out why Shizuko committed suicide.”

“If you would.” Still holding the receiver, Asakawa bowed. If he ended up stranded on this island, then Yoshino would be his only hope. Asakawa regretted that both he and Ryuji had so blithely come here. Ryuji could have easily investigated a little hamlet like Sashikiji all by himself. It would have been more efficient for Asakawa to stay in Tokyo and wait for Ryuji to contact him, and then team up with Yoshino to check things out on that end.

“Alright, I’ll do what I can. But I think I’m a little understaffed here.”

“I’ll call Oguri and ask him to send some people your way.”

“That’d be great.”

It was one thing to say it, of course, but Asakawa didn’t have much confidence in the idea. His editor was always complaining about being short-handed. Asakawa seriously doubted he’d spare valuable manpower for something like this.

“So, her mother kills herself, and Sadako stays on in Sashikiji, taken care of by her mother’s cousin. That cousin has turned his house into a bed-and-breakfast now.” He was about to say that he and Ryuji were now staying in that very house, but decided it was an unnecessary detail.

“The following year, Sadako, who’s a fourth-grader now, makes a name for herself at school by predicting the eruption of Mt Mihara. Did you get that? Mt Mihara erupted in 1957, on the very day and time Sadako had predicted.”

“Now that’s impressive. If we had a woman like that we wouldn’t need the Coordinating Committee for Earthquake Prediction.”

As a result of her prediction’s coming true, her fame had spread throughout the island, and was picked up by Professor Miura’s network. But Asakawa figured he didn’t need to explain all that. What was important now was …

“After that, islanders kept coming to Sadako asking her to predict their futures. But she turned down every single request. She just kept saying she didn’t have that kind of power.”

“Out of modesty?”

“Who knows? Then, when she finishes high school, she takes off for Tokyo like she just couldn’t wait to get away. The relatives who’d been taking care of her got exactly one postcard from her. It said she’d passed the test and had been accepted into Theater Group Soaring. They haven’t heard from her again to this day. There’s not a soul on the island who knows where she is or what she’s up to.”

“In other words, the only clue we have, the only trace she left, is this Theater Group Soaring.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Okay, let me make sure I have this straight. What I’m supposed to find out is: what Shizuko Yamamura was in the news for, why she jumped into a volcano, and where her daughter went and what she did after joining a theater troupe at age eighteen. In other words, all about the mother and all about the daughter. Just those two things.”

“Right.”

“Which first?”

“Huh?”

“I’m asking you whether you want me to start with the mother or the daughter. You don’t have much time left, you know.”

The most pressing issue, clearly, was what had become of Sadako.

“Could you start with the daughter?”

“Gotcha. I guess first thing tomorrow I’ll pop in to the office of Theater Group Soaring.”

Asakawa looked at his watch. It was only a little past six in the evening. Still plenty of time before a rehearsal space would be closing.

“Hey, Yoshino. Not tomorrow. Say you’ll do it tonight.”

Yoshino heaved a sigh and shook his head slightly. “Now look, Asakawa. I have my own work to do, you know—did you ever think of that? I’ve got a mountain of things I’ve got to write up before morning. Even tomorrow’s a little …” Yoshino trailed off. If he said any more it would look like he was trying to make Asakawa feel too much in his debt. He always took the greatest care to appear manly in situations like this.

“Please, I’m begging you. I mean, my deadline is the day after tomorrow.” He knew how things worked in their business, and he was afraid to put it any more strongly. All he could do was to wait quietly for Yoshino’s decision.

“But … Ah, what the hell. I’ll try to get to it tonight. I’m not making any promises, mind you.”

“Thanks. I owe you.” Asakawa bowed and started to hang up.

“Hey, hang on a second. There’s something important I haven’t asked you yet.”

“What’s that?”

“What possible relationship could there be between what you saw on that video and this Sadako Yamamura?”

Asakawa paused. “You wouldn’t believe it even if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“No video camera recorded those images.” Asakawa paused for a good long moment to allow his meaning to sink into Yoshino’s brain. “Those images are things that Sadako saw with her eyes and things she imagined in her head, fragments presented one after another with nothing to contextualize them.”

“Huh?” Yoshino was momentarily at a loss for words.

“See. I told you you wouldn’t believe it.”

“You mean they’re like psychic photos?”

“The phrase doesn’t even begin to cover it. She actually caused these images to appear on a TV tube. She’s projecting moving images onto a TV.”

“So, what, she’s a production agency?” Yoshino laughed at his own joke. Asakawa didn’t get angry. He understood why Yoshino had to joke. He listened silently to his friend’s carefree laughter.

9:40 p.m. As he climbed the stairs out of Yotsuya Sanchome Station on the Marunouchi subway line, a gust of wind threatened to blow Yoshino’s hat off, and he had to hold it down onto his head with both hands. He looked around him for the fire station he was supposed to use as a landmark. It was right there on the corner. A minute’s walk down the street took him to his destination.

A sign stood on the sidewalk, reading Theater Group Soaring; next to it a flight of stairs led down to a basement, from the depths of which came the voices of young men and women, raised in mingled singing and recitation. They probably had a performance coming up and were planning to rehearse until the trains stopped running. He didn’t have to be an arts reporter to figure that out. But he spent most of his time chasing after crime stories. He had to admit it felt a little weird visiting the rehearsal space of a repertory theater company.

The stairs to the basement were made of steel and every step clanged. If the founding members of the company had no recollection of Sadako Yamamura, then the thread would snap, and that psychic’s life, on which all their hopes rested, would sink back into the darkness. Theater Group Soaring had been founded in 1957, and Sadako had joined in 1965. There were only four founding members still around today, including a guy named Uchimura, a playwright and director who spoke for the group.

Yoshino gave his card to a twenty-something intern standing at the entrance to the rehearsal hall and asked him to call Uchimura.

“You have a visitor from the Daily News, sir.” The intern spoke in a resonant, actorly voice, calling to the director, who sat by the wall watching over everyone’s performances. Uchimura turned around in surprise. Realizing his visitor was from the press, he was all smiles as he approached Yoshino. Theater companies all treated the press with great politeness. Even the smallest mention in a newspaper’s arts column could make a big difference in ticket sales. With only a week left until opening night, he assumed the reporter had come to take a peek at the rehearsals. The Daily News had never paid much attention to him before, so Uchimura poured on the charm, determined to make the most of the chance. But the minute he learned the real reason for Yoshino’s visit, Uchimura abruptly seemed to lose all interest in him. Suddenly he was extremely busy. He looked around the hall until he spied a smallish actor in his fifties, seated on a chair. “Over here, Shin,” he said in a shrill voice, summoning the man. Something in the overly familiar tone he used when addressing the middle-aged actor—or maybe it was his womanish voice itself, combined with his ungainly long arms and legs—gave the brawny Yoshino the creeps. This guy is different, he thought.

“Shin baby, you don’t go on until the second act. Be a dear and talk to this man about Sadako Yamamura. You remember that creepy girl, don’t you?”

Shin’s voice was one Yoshino had heard before, dubbing Japanese dialogue onto Western movies shown on TV. Shin Arima was better known as a voice actor than for his work onstage. He was one of the other original members still in the troupe.

“Sadako Yamamura?” Arima scratched his balding head as he tried to reel in quarter-century-old memories. “Oh, that Sadako Yamamura.” He grimaced. Evidently the woman had left a deep impression on him.

“You remember? Well, then, I’m rehearsing here, so take him up to my room, won’t you?” Uchimura bowed slightly and walked back toward the assembled players; by the time he reached the place where he’d been sitting, he was once more every inch the lordly director.

Opening a door marked President, Arima pointed to a leather sofa set and said, “Have a seat.” If this was the President’s office, it meant that the troupe was organized like a business. No doubt the director doubled as CEO.

“So what brings you out in the middle of a storm like this?” Arima’s face glistened red with sweat from rehearsing, but a kindly smile lurked in the depths of his eyes. The director looked like the type of person who was always weighing the other’s motives while conversing, but Arima was the kind of guy who answered everything you asked him honestly, without covering anything up. Interviews could either be easy or painful, depending on the subject’s personality.

“I’m sorry to bother you when you’re so busy like this.” Yoshino sat down and took out his notepad. He assumed his usual pose, pen clutched in his right hand.

“I never expected to hear the name Sadako Yamamura, not now. That was ages ago.”

Arima was recalling his youth. He missed the youthful energy he’d had then, running away from the commercial theater company he’d originally belonged to and founding a new troupe with his friends.

“Mr Arima, when you placed her name a few minutes ago you said, ‘that Sadako Yamamura.’ What exactly did you mean by that?”

“That girl—let me see, when was it she joined, anyway? I believe we’d only been around a few years. The company was really taking off then, and we had more kids wanting to join every year. Anyway, that Sadako, she was a strange one.”

“In what way was she strange?”

“Hmm.” Arima put his hand to his jaw and thought for a while. Come to think of it, why do I have the impression that she was strange?

“Was there something in particular about her, something that stood out?”

“No, to look at her, she was just an ordinary girl. A little tall, but quiet. She was always alone.”

“Alone?”

“Well, usually the interns become quite close to each other. But she never tried to get involved with the others.”

There was always someone like that in any group. It was hard for Yoshino to imagine that this alone had made her stand out.

“How would you describe her, say, in a word?”

“In a word? Hmm. Eerie, I’d have to say.” Without hesitating, he called her “eerie.” And Uchimura had called her “that creepy girl”. Yoshino couldn’t help but feel sorry for a young woman of eighteen whom everybody characterized as eerie. He began to imagine some grotesque figure of a woman.

“What was it about her that made her seem eerie?”

Now that he stopped to think about it, it seemed odd to Arima that his impressions of an intern who’d been around for no longer than a year, and twenty-five years ago at that, should still seem so fresh. There was something tugging at the back of his mind. Something had happened, something that had served to fix her name in his memory.

“Oh, yes, now I remember. It was right in this room.” Arima looked around the president’s office. Thinking back on the incident, he could vividly recall even how the furniture had been arranged in those days, when this room was still being used as the main office.

“You see, we’ve rehearsed in this space since the beginning, but it used to be a lot smaller. This room we’re in now used to be our main office. There were lockers over there, and we had a frosted-glass divider standing right about here … Right, and there used to be a TV right there—well, we have a different one there now.” Arima pointed as he spoke.

“A TV?” Yoshino narrowed his eyes and adjusted his grip on his pen.

“Right. One of those old black and white jobs.”

“Okay. So what happened?” Yoshino urged him to go on.

“Rehearsal had just ended and nearly everybody had gone home. I wasn’t happy with one of my lines, and I came up here to go over my part one more time. I was right over there, see …” Arima pointed to the door. “I was standing there, looking into the room, and through the frosted glass I could see the TV screen flickering. I thought, well, someone’s watching TV. Mind you, I wasn’t mistaken. It was on the other side of the divider, so I couldn’t actually see what was on the screen, but I could see the quavering black and white light. There was no sound. The room was dim, and as I came around the divider, I wondered who was in front of the TV, and I peered at the person’s face. It was Sadako Yamamura. But when I came around to the other side of the divider and stood beside her, there was nothing on the screen. Of course, I automatically assumed that she’d just switched it off. At that point, I had no doubts yet. But …”

Arima seemed reluctant to continue.

“Please, go on.”

“I spoke to her. I said, ‘You’d better hurry home before the trains stop running.’ And I turned on the desk lamp. But it wouldn’t turn on. I looked and saw that it wasn’t plugged in. I crouched down to plug it in, and that’s when I noticed it: the television wasn’t plugged in, either.”

Arima vividly recalled the chill that had run up his spine when he saw the plug lying there on the floor.

Yoshino wanted to confirm what he’d just heard. “So even though it wasn’t plugged in, the television was definitely on?”

“That’s right. It made me shudder, let me tell you. I raised my head without thinking and looked at Sadako. What was she doing sitting there in front of an unplugged television set? She didn’t meet my gaze, but just kept staring at the screen, with a faint smile on her lips.”

Arima seemed to remember the smallest detail. The episode had obviously made a deep impression on him.

“And did you tell anyone about this?”

“Naturally. I told Uchy—that is, Uchimura, the director, whom you just met—and also Shigemori.”

“Mr Shigemori?”

“He was the real founder of the company. Uchimura is actually our second leader.”

“Ah-ha. So how did Mr Shigemori react to your story?”

“He was playing mah-jongg at the time, but he was fascinated. He always did have a weakness for women, and it seemed he’d had his eye on her for a while, planning to make her his. Then that evening, after he’d had a few, he started talking crazy, saying ‘tonight I’m going to storm Sadako’s apartment’. We didn’t know what to do. It was just drunken babbling—we couldn’t take it too seriously, but we couldn’t go along with it, either. After a while, everybody went home, and Shigemori was left alone. And in the end we never knew if he actually went to Sadako’s apartment that night or not. Because the next day, when Shigemori showed up at the rehearsal space, he looked like a completely different person. He was pale and silent, and he just sat in his chair saying absolutely nothing. Then he died, right there, just like going to sleep.”

Startled, Yoshino looked up. “What was the cause of death?”

“Cardiac paralysis. Today they’d call it ‘sudden heart failure’, I guess. He was pushing himself pretty hard to get ready for a premiere, and I think he just overdid it.”

“So basically, nobody knows if something happened between Sadako and Shigemori.”

Yoshino pressed the point, and Arima gave a definite nod. No wonder she’d left such a strong impression, Yoshino thought.

“What happened to her after that?”

“She quit. I think she was only with us for a year or two.”

“And then what did she do, after she quit?”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there.”

“What do most people do after they quit the troupe?”

“People who are really dedicated try to join another company.”

“Do you think Sadako Yamamura might have done that?”

“She was a bright girl, and her acting instincts weren’t bad at all. But she had such personality defects. I mean, this business is all about personal relationships. I don’t think she was really cut out for it.”

“So you’re saying there’s a possibility she left the theater world altogether?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Isn’t there anybody who might know what happened to her?”

“Maybe one of the other interns who was here at the time.”

“Would you happen to have any of their names and addresses?”

“Hold on.” Arima stood up and walked over to the shelves built into the wall. Bound files were lined up from one end of the shelf to the other; he took one down. It contained the portfolios applicants submitted when they took the entrance exam.

“Including her, there were eight interns who joined in 1965.” He waved their portfolios in the air.

“May I have a look?”

“Go right ahead.”

Each portfolio had two photos attached, a head shot and a full-body shot. Trying to remain calm, Yoshino pulled out Sadako Yamamura’s portfolio. He looked at her photos.

“Hey, didn’t you say she was ‘eerie’ a few minutes ago?” Yoshino was confused. There was too much of a gap between the Sadako he’d imagined from Arima’s description and the Sadako in the photos. “Eerie? You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve never seen such a pretty face.”

Yoshino wondered why he had phrased it that way—why he’d said “pretty face” instead of “pretty girl”. Certainly her facial features were perfectly regular. But she lacked a certain womanly roundness. But looking at the full-body shot, he had to admit that her slender waist and ankles were strikingly feminine. She was beautiful—and yet, the passage of twenty-five years had corroded their impressions of her, until they remembered her as “eerie”, as “that creepy girl”. Normally they should have recalled her as “that wonderfully beautiful young woman”. Yoshino’s interest was piqued by this “eeriness” that seemed to elbow out the salient prettiness of her face.