Edge

Chapter 2: Rift

In mid-December, almost three weeks after Saeko had returned to Tokyo, there were frequent reports of earthquakes in the Ina area, where Saeko had been hospitalized.

Ina City was built right on top of an active fault and had always been prone to earthquakes, but recently especially so. In the past there had often been minor tremors, but the earthquake that had struck while Saeko was at the Fujimura residence seemed to have triggered the recent rash of temblors. The newscaster explained that they were caused by a shift in the active fault.

Whenever there was a news story about an earthquake, the events of the night Saeko had passed in the hospital in Ina came flooding back.

Her body still retained a vivid memory of being paralyzed while a man standing next to her bed fingered her breast.

The terror had lasted for only one night thanks to a visit from Hashiba the following afternoon.

Hashiba’s visit instantly inspired an assortment of conflicting emotions in Saeko. The nurse she’d called for solace that night hadn’t taken her seriously and left her alone to tremble at shadows. Too terrified of the same thing happening again to sleep, she’d lain awake for the rest of the night, counting the minutes until dawn.

The only person who could possibly understand, and might even be able to help, was Hashiba. Just as she had hoped, he came to see her the next day during a break in filming. He listened to everything she had to say and then inquired with the registration desk as to whether a Seiji Fujimura had been admitted to the hospital. There was nobody in the hospital by that name, deepening the mystery, but the mere fact that Hashiba had taken her seriously meant a great deal to Saeko. He could have just dismissed her story as a dream or hallucination, but the way he sincerely tried to understand what she had been through was a tremendous comfort to Saeko.

When he left that day, he told her, “I have to return to Tokyo this evening, but please let me know when you’re ready to go home and I’ll come and get you.” He’d jotted down his cell number on a piece of paper, and sure enough, the day Saeko was released, he’d driven all the way from Tokyo to pick her up.

On the highway heading back towards Tokyo from Ina, Hashiba had spoken excitedly about his plans for the project. If the program got good ratings, Hashiba was confident that the station would grant him another similar project. If they did, would Saeko consider collaborating again?

She was thrilled that Hashiba had kept his promise, driving all the way out to the hospital in Ina to give her a ride home, even though she knew he had his hands full editing the footage from the project. It was pretty common for men to make all sorts of sweet promises and never follow through on them, but Hashiba was different. He appeared to be the type who kept his word. Saeko knew right away that if he were given a follow-up project, she’d agree to work with him again, unconditionally.

Since getting out of the hospital in Ina and returning to Tokyo, she had been swamped with work. The tests they ran at the hospital had shown no abnormalities in her brain, and they had let her go after four days of observation. Still, she found herself scrambling day and night to make up for lost time.

She’d had someone else cover the interview in Gifu, but she wrote the article, sending it in by e-mail from her assignment in Hokkaido. It was touch and go, but she’d pulled it off in the end. That was a week ago.

The day before yesterday, Hashiba had called. When they met, he informed her jubilantly that the program had garnered stellar ratings and that the station was likely to give him another assignment dealing with a missing persons case. “Thanks to you!” he’d added. Hashiba’s words of appreciation made Saeko all the more glad to have been involved.

When he was appointed chief director of the next project, Hashiba extended an official request that Saeko collaborate once again.

Bolstered by a series in a monthly magazine put out by a major publisher and a highly successful pilot, the project would have a generous budget at its disposal.

When she heard the news, Saeko informed Hashiba and Maezono that there was a limit to what she could unearth alone and proposed that they bring on board a highly skilled professional to make the investigations that much more efficient and accurate.

Both clients consented, agreeing that they would split the cost and jointly reap the benefits of the additional information.

Saeko had a file open in her lap and was just using the remote control to turn off the TV when the phone rang in the living room. She picked up the receiver. The voice on the other end belonged to the exact person she had been thinking of calling: Kitazawa.

“Oh, god. I was just going to call you,” she told him.

“Synchronicity. Which is what I’m calling about, actually. The other day you brought in a file about some missing persons in Itoigawa, right? Well, our office got a request to investigate a disappearance from Itoigawa right around the same time.”

“The same case?” Saeko had copied the documents in the file from editor-in-chief Maezono and left them with Kitazawa.

“No. A different one.”

“You mean, three separate people vanished from Itoigawa right around the same time? By pure coincidence?”

“We should assume they’re connected. The young lady who disappeared was a Mizuho Takayama, age 27, single. She lived with her parents in Musashino, Tokyo. She was the editor of a trade journal. She disappeared in the middle of September of last year. Her parents are the ones who came to us. Mizuho Takayama was visiting Itoigawa to do a report on jade handicrafts when she went missing. Her family’s pretty well off. Her parents had a criminal investigation done, but it didn’t turn up a single clue. They came to us as a last resort. ’Course, there’s only so much we can do, a year after the disappearance.”

Saeko understood painfully well how Mizuho Takayama’s parents must feel. After all, she hadn’t given up on finding her father after all this time. They would probably still be looking for her ten, even twenty years later.

“So, we’re a team. Same target.”

“Yeah. What do you know?” Kitazawa chuckled.

“This changes our approach, of course, since there are multiple disappearances.”

“Exactly. The first thing we need to find is where their paths crossed. I’m going to Itoigawa tomorrow to see what I can find.”

Even if they didn’t find the connection between the three cases, the development was bound to draw a lot more interest to the articles and the TV series.

In the end, they had never solved the Fujimura family’s disappearance. Sadly, Shigeko Torii’s insights hadn’t led to any final resolution. Instead, it seemed the number of unsolved disappearances was only increasing.

If the string of cases were united by some sort of cause, it might help Saeko find her father. After all, she had discovered his day planner at the Fujimuras’ home. It had to be more than a coincidence.

Saeko had a flash of awareness of some sort of superhuman force. The instincts she’d developed investigating missing persons cases told her that something eerie was afoot. Some unknowable presence was sending a message, but was it a missive of malevolence or of goodwill? There was no way of knowing yet.

In any case, people were disappearing. Here and there, without any warning …

Kitazawa had taken the Toyama Chitestu Main Line to Kurobe, transferring to the Japan Railway Hokuriku Main Line about thirty minutes earlier.

After passing through Ichiburi, they’d entered what seemed like an endless tunnel, but Kitazawa knew they would emerge from it soon. He pressed his face against the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sheer Oyashirazu-Koshirazu cliffs by the water’s edge. The Japan Sea was known for its turbulence during the winter, but the view of it he’d caught before they’d entered the tunnel had been placid. Just beyond Oyashirazu was Itoigawa. The train would arrive at 11:50 a.m.

There were only a few other passengers. When they finally emerged from the tunnel, sunlight flooded the car. It was overwhelmingly bright after the long passage through the darkness. Kitazawa turned his face away from the window, reached into his shoulder bag on the seat next to him, and pulled out a file.

He scanned his to-do list for when he arrived in Itoigawa. His first priority was to investigate the case from his client, which meant visiting the business hotel where Mizuho Takayama had stayed to see if he could find any clues. Another detective had already gone over her trail, but Kitazawa’s client felt that a specialist might find something the first investigator had overlooked. Even though the trail was more than a year old, the fact that Kitazawa was also looking into two related disappearances gave him an advantage.

The train entered another tunnel and emerged once more in an entirely different landscape. Oumi Station. The next station would be Itoigawa. Kitazawa stood up and pulled his travel bag and coat down from the overhead rack.

It was perfect weather for a walk. Even though it was a winter day in the Hokuriku region, it was sunny and there was no wind, and the cold was hardly biting. Kitazawa ate lunch near the station before meeting the public relations officer for the jade handicrafts exhibit that Mizuho Takayama had interviewed. When he got back to the area near the train station, it was after four in the afternoon.

The business hotel was near the mouth of the Hime River on Prefectural Highway 222. The last time anyone had seen Mizuho Takayama was when she had checked into her room here.

Kitazawa sat down on a sofa in the lobby, warming his hands with a hot can of oolong tea from a vending machine and losing himself in contemplation, once more mentally retracing Mizuho Takayama’s steps.

On September 13, 2011, Mizuho Takayama had left her home in Musashino at seven in the morning. She’d boarded the 7:30 a.m. Azusa 3 at Shinjuku Station. She’d gotten off at Minami Otori and transferred to the Oito Line, arriving at Itoigawa Station at 12:44 p.m. After stopping in the tourism section at city hall, she’d met with Fujio Kamitani, the public relations officer for the jade handicrafts exhibition. After photographing the exhibition, she had checked into her hotel at 6:20 that evening. Kitazawa had already verified her exact check-in time.

The next morning, check-out time came and went without Mizuho Takayama appearing at the front desk. The receptionist had called her room, but nobody had answered. Concerned, the hotel staff had entered the room, only to find no one inside. Mizuho Takayama’s bag sat on her bedside table, and a light jacket hung in the wardrobe. When she’d left her house the previous day, she had been wearing the same jacket with a sleeveless top, so it wasn’t hard to deduce what she was wearing at the time of her disappearance. Denim pants with a beige sleeveless top. The bathtub was full of water, but it appeared not to have been used; there were no hairs, no residue of dirt or dead skin, and the bath towel remained folded and pristine. The bed, too, had not been slept in, and there were no signs of an intruder having entered the room.

What possibilities did that leave? With very little effort, one plausible scenario came to mind.

After checking into the hotel, Mizuho Takayama had taken off her jacket and hung it up. They’d had an intense Indian summer that fall, and she was probably bathed in sweat. Eager to bathe, she’d filled up the tub, but something had interrupted her.

Someone had knocked on the door, for example.

Kitazawa considered a myriad of possibilities. Perhaps an unexpected visitor had come to the door, prompting Mizuho Takayama to turn off the faucet and leave with just her wallet and room key.

And then she was abducted.

Given the fact that there had been no commotion at the hotel, perhaps the visitor had been someone she knew. It was possible that they had planned to meet even before she left Tokyo.

A secret lover, maybe.

It was entirely possible. Perhaps she was seeing a married man, and both had arranged business trips that allowed them an overnight rendezvous. But something had gone wrong when they were out together that evening. The young lady had announced that she was pregnant and insisted that he leave his wife … Driven into a corner, the man had panicked, lost control, and …

Kitazawa could picture the whole scenario. It sounded like the stuff of talk shows, but he knew better than to rule out the possibility. Crimes of passion were one of the leading causes of missing persons cases, second only to debt troubles.

He would definitely follow up on Mizuho Takayama’s social life, but he had his doubts about whether she’d planned a rendezvous at the business hotel. She’d checked into a single room, he reminded himself.

But even the singles have semi-double beds. It might have been just the thing for a pair of lovebirds on a budget.

Still uncertain, Kitazawa decided to check into his room. He got up from the sofa and made his way over to the counter to fill out the paperwork, requesting a single room like the one Mizuho Takayama had stayed in.

As he opened the door to his room, Kitazawa did his best to put himself in the mindset of a young woman.

Last year, on September 13th just after six in the evening, Mizuho Takayama had checked into a room just like this one.

Kitazawa took off his jacket and hung it up in the wardrobe. Then he went into the bathroom and began to draw a bath, gazing at the water as it filled up the tub. When the staff had entered the room the next morning, the water had been completely cold, and the tub had been only half full.

Something occurred to her, and she shut off the water before the bath was full.

Kitazawa looked around the bathroom. It was a small, utilitarian affair, done in cream. There was a shelf in front of the mirror, but it was empty. The shampoo and body soap dispensers were mounted directly to the wall. Only the most basic amenities were provided.

Maybe she was about to take her bath when she realized she was missing something. Something that she couldn’t get from the front desk. Like makeup remover, skin lotion, or sanitary products …

Without thinking about it, Kitazawa found himself shutting off the taps. He remembered that a convenience store featured in the file Saeko had given him. Drying his hands with a towel as he left the bathroom, he opened the file on the bed. Of the two men who had disappeared, Tomoaki Nishimura had worked at a convenience store.

Perhaps Mizuho Takayama realized she’d forgotten something and decided to run out to a convenience store.

The shop where Nishimura had worked was less than a five-minute walk from the hotel.

Kitazawa quickly checked his map for the convenience store’s location and left the room with the bathtub less than half full. He took only his wallet and map, leaving his travel bag in the room — much the way Mizuho Takayama had left the room. Their destination was probably the same, too.

Saeko made her way up to the fourth floor of the library and found a seat in a reading room, hanging her jacket over the back of the chair. She opened her notebook on the table, set her pen down next to it, and cradled her chin in her hand.

She was recalling something her father had once said. Whenever he was excited, her father had a tendency to talk with his hands, making sweeping gestures.

“Think of what the world was like in the seventeenth century. Society was just emerging from the dark ages, which lasted nearly a thousand years. The Renaissance was beginning, and Europe was just starting to reawaken to its ancient cultural heritage. At the time, everyone took it completely for granted that if you dropped an object, it would fall to the ground. But one day, it occurred to one man to question why. Why did an apple fall downwards? His name was Newton. The fact that he questioned something everyone simply accepted as the way things were is what led him to the theory of universal gravitation.”

Saeko had only been in junior high school at the time. It was a balmy morning at the beginning of summer vacation, and she was seated at the dining table wearing a white sleeveless blouse. She was just about to eat breakfast when her father challenged her to question even the most commonplace phenomena.

As she listened to her father, Saeko sat with her chin propped in her hand. He prodded her elbow.

“Take how you’re leaning your elbow against the table. Why do you suppose your elbow doesn’t travel right through it?”

“What do you mean? That’s just how things are,” Saeko blurted, and then immediately regretted her response. She had walked right into her father’s trap. “Wait, no. Um, let me see …” Saeko wracked her brain, hemming and hawing. “Because it’s made up of matter,” she finally concluded, knocking on the tabletop with her fist for emphasis.

“Because it’s made up of matter? But Saeko, the fact that objects exist is actually much more difficult to explain. The real mystery is, why does the universe have any structure at all? And yet you take physical objects completely for granted.”

As he zeroed in on the point he wanted to make, Saeko’s father’s eyes sparkled. She had always enjoyed watching the changes in her father’s eyes.

“The fact that objects exist is a mystery?” she asked back.

Saeko still didn’t see what her father was getting at. He sensed her confusion and broke the idea down into simpler terms.

“The elements that make up this table and the elements that make up your body are different. Right now, there are 111 elements that we know of. How do we classify them? Basically, we distinguish them based on the number of protons and neutrons that make up their core, and the number of electrons that orbit that core. The element with the least mass is hydrogen, with one proton and one electron. The heaviest element is uranium, with 92 protons, 146 neutrons, and 92 electrons. I’ve already told you that the number of protons and electrons is always the same. Each proton is made up of two up quarks and one down quark, and each neutron has two down quarks and one up quark. You said that your elbow doesn’t go through the table because it’s made of matter, right? When you said that, what sort of configuration of electrons did you imagine?”

Until her father had posed the question, Saeko had never imagined how anything’s electrons were configured. After all, she’d never before thought to question why a part of her body didn’t pass through solid matter.

“You were probably envisioning something like this, weren’t you? The electrons orbiting the nucleus of the atom, forming a sort of sphere. A ball, if you will. And these balls are all packed together to make up a three-dimensional object. So let’s say the table is made up of black balls, and your elbow is made up of white balls. Both types of balls are packed together so tightly, there’s no way one could pass through the other.”

Saeko nodded decisively. It wasn’t exactly what she had imagined, but it wasn’t very far off. It was a pretty good description of how she conceived of matter.

“But the reality of the situation is totally different. If we had a microscope that could enlarge an atom to the size of a baseball, you’d be surprised by what it looks like. There wouldn’t be much to see. Basically, matter is made up of a whole lot of nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Empty space.”

Saeko’s father opened the rice-seasoning container on the table and extracted a single sesame seed, holding it up on his index finger for Saeko to see.

“Say the nucleus of our atom was the size of this sesame seed — about a millimeter in diameter. The electrons would orbit it at a distance of fifty meters, and they would be so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye.”

From where Saeko’s father was sitting, the living room wall was easily ten meters away. But the electrons’ orbit would be much further away.

“That’s all there is?” Saeko asked.

Her father nodded, grinning. “That’s it. Nothing more.”

If the sesame seed on her father’s finger was the nucleus, and the electrons were orbiting it at a distance of fifty meters, the atom really was mostly empty space.

If the outer shell of the atom were large enough to hold our whole apartment, there would be a nucleus in the middle the size of a sesame seed and nothing else!

As she came to terms with that concrete image, Saeko was seized by a wave of fear. Here she sat at the dining table, but if the atoms that made up the chair she was sitting on were mostly empty space, what was keeping her from falling through the chair and the floor, and straight through the earth’s crust?

Finally understanding her father’s question, a doubt resonated deep in Saeko’s mind. “Why, then? If matter is mostly nothing, why don’t we fall? Why don’t we pass through things?”

“Who knows? Maybe if everything shifted just a millimeter, we’d be in an entirely different universe,” her father teased. “But don’t worry. At the moment, the chances that you’re going to fall through the table and into an endless void are … null. But why? If matter is mostly empty space, why can’t objects pass through each other? Now, I want you to think about it and come up with the answer on your own. Why doesn’t one type of matter slip right through another?”

Until that day, whenever Saeko had watched scenes where people walked through walls on TV or in movies, she’d assumed they were ghosts. But now that she understood more about the structure of matter, she found herself wondering about things from a different angle. It seemed to make more sense for people to be able to pass through matter, and the real mystery was the fact that they didn’t.

Saeko had spent the entire rest of the day pondering the question her father had posed. None of the books she picked up offered an answer; they didn’t even go so far as to ask the question. She would have to come up with the answer for herself.

First, she reviewed what she knew about the structure of atoms in her mind. Compared to protons and neutrons, electrons were so tiny as to be almost irrelevant, and the mass of the atom was computed solely based on the protons and neutrons. The electrons whizzed wildly and unpredictably around the nucleus. If their orbits were neatly contained the way an eggshell contained an egg, they would be easier to picture. But that wasn’t how it worked. And yet, no electron ever encroached on another electron’s territory.

The first idea that popped into Saeko’s mind was that of a force field. In science fiction movies set in outer space, sometimes the heroes had an invisible force field around their space ships that blocked the attack beams of enemy ships. Perhaps there was a sort of force field that prevented electrons from entering each other’s shells. An invisible force field just like in sci-fi movies.

When Saeko ran the idea by her father at dinner that night, his response was encouraging. “A force field, hmm? You’re on the right track. But what do you think creates that force field? I’ll give you a hint: think about the four interactive forces of the natural world.”

Now she was getting somewhere. Saeko looked up the forces that governed sub-atomic particles. With a more specific area of focus, it was easy to find what she was looking for. Almost any physics book contained information about the four interactive forces of the natural world: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Saeko wasn’t entirely clear on the differences between the four, but she understood that electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force functioned on an atomic and quantum level, while gravity applied to large expanses of space, like the solar system and the universe. In other words, the former three forces were the ones that were relevant to the question at hand.

As she continued to read, she came across a passage that stated, “The strong nuclear force binds together protons and neutrons and causes a powerful electric force between the nucleus and the electrons.” That’s it! Saeko was jubilant. “While the atom itself carries no electric charge, it contains strong electric fields and charges within. These electric fields and charges are what give structure to matter.”

So that was what created the force fields! Even though atoms contained almost nothing but empty space, these electric charges caused a repulsive force between neighboring atoms, just the way the poles of two magnets repelled each other. At the same time, they created an electric force of attraction to bind atoms together and to pull multiple atoms together to form a molecule. The strength of the bond between atoms determined whether the matter was solid, liquid, or gas. Liquids and solids could move freely through gases, but solids couldn’t encroach on the space occupied by other solids. The electric fields produced structure from mostly empty space, and these structures combined to form larger structures. These fields were the glue that bonded solids tightly together. Saeko’s elbow didn’t pass through the table thanks to the powerful electromagnetic forces at work in the quantum world.

Saeko’s father was delighted by Saeko’s explanation.

“Very good. That’s basically it. There’s just one other thing. The elementary particles that make up matter, like quarks and electrons, are classified as fermions. They’re characterized by the fact that no two fermions can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. It’s called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and it serves to maintain the structure of matter.”

Saeko wasn’t sure she understood, but she made a mental note to look up the term “fermion” later.

“The universe works much the same way. Let’s say the sun is a ball measuring ten centimeters in diameter. The earth would orbit at a distance of ten meters, and it would be about a millimeter in diameter, like a sesame seed. About 400 meters from the ball you’d find Pluto, the planet with the outermost orbit. And that gives you a basic idea of the size of the solar system. See? Just imagine a circle with a radius of 400 meters with a ten-centimeter ball in the center. From there, the closest star would be Proxima, of the Centaurus Constellation, approximately 2,500 kilometers away. Between our solar system and that star, there’s nothing but emptiness.”

Saeko’s father paused, giving his daughter time to grasp the scale of the universe surrounding the sun.

“What do you think? Both the universe and our little world are pretty empty, huh?”

Saeko felt a wave of uneasiness. The structure of the world seemed surprisingly tenuous when she considered how riddled it was with empty space.

Saeko’s father was always trying to show her how important it was to understand the mechanisms governing her world. He reasoned that knowing those mechanisms would enable her to overcome obstacles and make better decisions in challenging situations.

Saeko reflected on these lessons from her father as she pored over physics texts, taking notes. She was so absorbed that she didn’t notice the passage of time or realize that she was hungry. A satisfying feeling of exhaustion alerted her to the fact that her brain needed nourishment. Time for a break. Saeko headed downstairs for a snack.

She took the elevator to the first floor and had a sandwich and cup of coffee in the library cafeteria. Cutting across the lobby on her way back to the reading room, Saeko noticed the newspaper and magazine racks that occupied more than half of the shelf space.

Condensed editions of each month’s news lined the walls, twelve per year, an archive of incidents past. Saeko’s gaze gravitated naturally towards the volume marked August 1994. Telling herself it would be a good break from the technical tomes she had been scouring, Saeko pulled down the volume and sat down on a sofa to rifle through its pages. Almost unconsciously, her fingers turned to August 22, 1994—the day her father had disappeared. The local news section had run a major story about the arrest of a kidnapper who had abducted a five-year-old girl. Saeko remembered the incident clearly — the place where the ransom was to have been exchanged had been close to their apartment. It had been all over the TV news as well, and Saeko recalled half-listening to the coverage that day while eating the boxed lunch she’d picked up on the way home from cram school. Skimming the local section of the newspaper was the perfect way to jog her memory as to what sort of day it had been, and what incidents had taken place. Apart from the kidnapping, there had been a food poisoning scandal at a luxury hotel, and tidings from a provincial city where the residents were having problems with an organized crime syndicate. When the news ended, Saeko had continued watching television. It was easy to find the name of the program she’d watched in the TV listings. The names of all the old programs from that era brought a wave of nostalgia. A pop music program called “Music Parade” occupied the eight o’clock slot of the station where Hashiba worked.

Saeko remembered how hungrily she had watched the program, taking notes to learn the names and songs of popular artists. As she skimmed the list of artists appearing on the show that night, their hit songs began to come back to her. She remembered the melodies, but only bits and pieces of the lyrics.

She had been so ensconced in the program, she hadn’t noticed the time. Eight o’clock came and went. Only when the program ended and the clock read nine did Saeko realize that something was amiss. When her father was away on business, he called her every evening at eight o’clock without fail. But that night, the phone hadn’t rung.

“Hey, Sae! How’s everything going?”

As Saeko now imagined her father’s voice on the line, she felt a stab of longing and hopelessness, and her eyes welled with tears.

She looked up from the newspaper, changing her posture and her train of thought, and waited for the rush of sadness to pass. Given that her father hadn’t called at eight o’clock that night, something must have had already happened to him.

She scanned the rest of the local news pages for anything that might relate to her father’s disappearance but didn’t find anything of promise.

She turned to the morning newspaper from the next day — August 23rd. The first thing that met her eye was an article about a plane crash over the North Atlantic Ocean. “On August 22nd at 4:15 p.m., after departing from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, United Airlines Flight 323 crashed in the North Atlantic Ocean. All 515 passengers and crew members are thought to have been killed …”

It came as a shock to Saeko that the fact that a major plane crash had taken place on the same day as her father’s disappearance had slipped by her. She had been so caught up in her concern for her father that she’d been completely oblivious to anything else.

Of course, there was nothing in the paper about her father’s disappearance.

Saeko closed the heavy volume in her lap and laid her head against the back of the sofa, in the same pose she’d assumed a moment ago to fight back tears.

Even with her mind flooded with memories of her father, a certain word kept nagging at her brain, as if it had become imprinted on her mind.

Though the blinds were closed, the afternoon sun was strong, and it was much warmer inside today than it had been the night before. The rays of sunlight that streamed through the slats made thin stripes on the wall, like a spectrogram.

Sun.

That was the word that caught in Saeko’s brain. Perhaps she’d seen it printed in the bound newspaper collection just before she’d snapped it closed, or maybe it was because she’d spent the entire morning reading about the universe and solar system. In any case, the word “sun” loomed large in Saeko’s mind.

She reopened the volume to the same page as before, scanning the local news pages of the day after her father’s disappearance from beginning to end. Finally, she spotted what she was looking for. Just below the list of winning lottery numbers was a chart that gave the high and low temperatures of the previous day in various parts of Japan. Just to the left of that spot was a tiny article, only about the quarter of the size of a standard piece. No wonder she had almost missed it.

The headline read, “Highest Incidence of Sunspots This Year.”

There. Somehow, Saeko’s subconscious had zeroed in on the word “sun” on this page.

She read the brief article: “Yesterday, a group of sunspots suddenly appeared on the sun’s surface. They were large enough to be visible to the naked eye via a filter — a highly rare phenomenon. The unusual flare-up of solar activity caused low-latitude auroras to be visible in areas of northern Japan, including Hokkaido.”

Saeko looked up from the article.

There was unusual solar activity the day my father disappeared …

A rash of sunspots, the appearance of auroras, geomagnetism — each of these phenomena were linked by causal relationships. That said, it seemed impossible to identify even a theoretical link between unusual sunspot activity and such an immediate and raw phenomenon as a human disappearance.

Saeko closed the volume and made her way back to her seat in the reading room. She opened up her notebook, but no matter how much she tried to focus, she found her mind fixated on the image of a blazing sun. Again and again, her thoughts were disturbed by the grotesque black shades flickering across its imaginary surface.

Night came quickly. It had still been light when Kitazawa had checked into his room, but now half of the cars on the prefectural highway already had their headlights on. Through the chinks in the breakwater, Kitazawa could see the bi-colored lights of the fishing boats coming in to the Himekawa Port bobbing up and down rhythmically with the waves. The lights of various cities bordering the Japan Sea had begun to twinkle on the horizon. Already, the temperature had dropped quite a bit.

Kitazawa turned up the lapels of his coat, hunched his back, and thrust both hands in his pockets as he made his way down the sidewalk alongside the highway towards the Hime River. As he passed the window of a barbershop that was closed for the evening, he peeked at his reflection in the glass. Illuminated by the streetlights, the shop window functioned as a mirror, affording a clear view of the style Kitazawa had cultivated after the American hard-boiled detective novels he’d loved so much in his youth.

Philip Marlowe, the detective in Raymond Chandler’s novels, always wore a beat-up old trench coat with the lapels turned up. When he entered a bar, he always ordered a double gimlet. In college, Kitazawa had spent nearly all of his time steeped in hard-boiled detective novels. He’d made every effort to be like Philip Marlowe, but he hadn’t pulled it off very well. The woman he’d dated before marrying Chieko had kidded him about it. “You might as well give it up,” she’d laughed.

After working at the nonbank and the real estate company, when Kitazawa felt like his career was at a dead end, his decision to become a detective was much more than a whim. It was something he’d fantasized about since his youth. He wanted to live like the hero of a novel: strong, cool, sharp, popular with the ladies. The boyish yearning coursed through Kitazawa’s veins.

Even now, whenever he tasted a hint of drama in his life, Kitazawa basked in the satisfaction of his chosen career. So what if he was really just a doddering old pot-bellied, balding detective putting on airs? When his motivation flagged, Kitazawa felt that it was important to go through the motions anyway. Kitazawa gave his Philip Marlowe-esque reflection a nod. The convenience store was just two blocks ahead.

The Rendaiji branch of S Mart — Kitazawa checked the name of the shop as he entered through its automatic sliding doors, glancing quickly around the store as he posed with his collar turned up and his hands in his pockets. Aside from him, there were four other customers in the shop. Two of them were over by the magazine racks, catching up on their reading.

As he approached the young female clerk behind the counter, Kitazawa softened his expression. Young women, in particular, were often alarmed by his menacing hard-boiled detective face.

“Excuse me. Is the manager of this establishment available?” Kitazawa inquired in honeyed tones, bowing deeply.

“Um, yes …” the clerk hesitated, shooting a glance towards the back of the store, where a man squatted to arrange a display of ready-made packaged foods. The man seemed to have overheard and looked up at Kitazawa.

“May I help you?” he said.

Kitazawa moved away from the counter and flashed the man an excessively friendly smile. “Are you the manager?” he asked, approaching the man.

“Er, yes …” the man rose to his feet and took a shaky step backwards. He had a pale complexion and a medium build. Behind his wire-framed glasses, his narrow eyes darted about nervously, no doubt alarmed by Kitazawa’s threatening build and features.

Quickly, Kitazawa whipped out his business card and handed it to the man, explaining that he was investigating a missing persons case. “It took place last September. Do you remember it?”

The man’s pupils wandered for a moment, as if searching his memory.

“Nishimura, you mean?”

“That’s right. When Tomoaki Nishimura went missing, you were at the scene, weren’t you?”

“The scene? I was in the warehouse, stowing some cardboard boxes we were finished with.”

That was exactly what the file said, too. Nishimura had been manning the register while the manager carried some cardboard boxes to the store’s warehouse around the corner to the right.

When the manager returned to the store, Nishimura had vanished.

“Would you mind telling me a bit more about what happened?”

“Er …” the manager glanced at his watch, hinting that he couldn’t spare the time.

“It won’t take long. Just five minutes,” Kitazawa urged.

“I’m afraid I don’t think I can be of much help.” The manager was starting to look antsy. Perhaps he really couldn’t afford to stand around talking in the middle of his workday. Kitazawa didn’t want to waste the manager’s time by asking him the same questions he’d already answered multiple times. He had to cut right to the chase and ask the manager something nobody else had …

Kitazawa opened his file and pulled out two documents with photographs. One was the flier from the criminal investigation of Mizuho Takayama’s disappearance. The investigators had already distributed close to two thousand copies.

The words “Please Find Me!” were emblazoned across the top in elegant lettering. There was a headshot of Mizuho Takayama and a shot of her whole body, as well as information on her height, weight, name, age, personal effects, and the circumstances of her disappearance. In the photographs, Mizuho Takayama’s delicate features were visible behind frameless glasses, her head cocked at a subtle angle. The strap of her shoulder bag dug into her thin, waifish shoulder. What had she carried in that bag? Her style and appearance were that of a serious, hard-working career girl.

The other document was from the dossier the publisher of Sea Bird magazine had provided Saeko on Nobuhisa Igarashi. Along with two color photographs, it bore Igarashi’s full name, height, weight, and age, plus other details about his hairstyle and appearance. One of the editors at Sea Bird had put it together. There had been no criminal investigation of Nobuhisa Igarashi’s disappearance. His family preferred to believe that he would find his way back on his own. Not that they had any clue as to what had happened to him, but they had been reluctant to jeopardize the family’s reputation by involving the police.

“Do you recognize either of these people?” Kitazawa asked the store manager, holding up both documents.

The manager examined the pictures closely. “No. Afraid not.” He shook his head.

“Take a good look. Weren’t they customers of yours?” Kitazawa prompted.

“Sorry — I’m afraid I don’t recognize them.” The manager bit his lip with his upper front teeth.

Mizuho Takayama lived in Tokyo. If she’d visited the shop, it was just once, and more than a year ago. Of course he doesn’t remember. Kitazawa was on the verge of giving up when his gaze wandered overhead and suddenly came to rest on a small object on the ceiling, directly above the cash register. He froze.

A security camera!

The human memory was unreliable. Footage from a video camera, on the other hand …

Immediately, Kitazawa changed tack. “That security camera records everything that happens in here, right?”

Kitazawa had a basic understanding of how it worked. There was probably a monitor installed behind the counter so that the person working the cash register had a full view of the interior. It helped prevent shoplifting by eliminating blind spots in the clerk’s field of vision. Generally, it was also connected to a computer that stored the footage so that it could later be reviewed.

The manager turned, following Kitazawa’s gaze. “Yes,” he nodded.

But security camera footage wasn’t stored forever, or it would end up consuming massive amounts of memory. Most stores recorded over their stored footage every two or three weeks, or every month at most.

“How long do you store the footage?” Kitazawa inquired.

“If nothing out of the ordinary happens, we overwrite it every two weeks.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary, eh?”

“Yes. When there’s some kind of incident, the footage might contain clues that might be useful to the police. So when that happens, we hold onto it.”

Kitazawa reflected on the information in Saeko’s missing persons files. When Tomoaki Nishimura was working at the cash register and the manager left to take some cardboard boxes to the warehouse, there was an earthquake.

It was right there in the file.

“What about in the case of an earthquake?”

“Huh, an earthquake?”

“Yes. Would you save the footage then?”

“Ah, I get it. You mean the day Nishimura disappeared.” There had been an earthquake that day — the manager remembered it now.

“We might still have it. It’s a good idea to hold onto footage when something like that happens.”

Kitazawa paused for breath as he made some mental calculations. Detectives often bought information from members of the general public, and the minimum price they paid was 50,000 yen. The more critical the information, the more they were willing to pay. It wasn’t worth pinching pennies if it meant missing out on something you needed to know.

Kitazawa lowered his voice but spoke with emphasis. “I’ll buy it for 100,000 yen. Can you get me a copy of the footage from September 13th of last year, around the time of the earthquake?”

“Huh?” The manager seemed momentarily stunned by the mention of 100,000 yen. It was a pretty hefty reward for the simple task of locating some stored footage and making a copy of it.

Kitazawa was convinced that there was crucial information to be found in that footage. He would bill the TV station and publishing house for the expense later; it wouldn’t put any strain on his own wallet.

“Do this for me. When you have the footage, call me at this number and I’ll come and get it.” Kitazawa pointed out his cell phone number on the business card in the manager’s hand.

“I’ll be returning to Tokyo tomorrow, so I’d like it if you could get it ready for me tonight,” he stressed, making sure the manager realized that he’d better get cracking if he wanted to get his hands on that 100,000 yen.

The manager made an “okay, okay” motion, waving his hand close to his body and twisting away. Kitazawa understood; the man didn’t want his employees to overhear. There wasn’t anything illegal about what they were doing, but given that the manager stood to make what was probably a month’s wages for his staff for a few minutes of labor, his employees might hope for a taste of the pot.

If Kitazawa’s hunch about the footage were right, where would that leave him?

It’ll probably just raise more questions, he realized. But he didn’t care. Bringing mysteries to light was what being a detective was all about. His professional instinct to seek out the truth behind bizarre enigmas spurred him on.

Kitazawa bought a yogurt and a can of tomato juice and exited the shop. The two youngsters over in the magazine corner were leafing through comics anthologies, completely entranced.

“Thank you!” the shrill voice of the girl behind the counter called out from behind him.

Kitazawa was late getting back. He’d planned to fly into Haneda Airport from Toyama, but the flight was sold out. At the last minute, he changed course and took a train from Itoigawa to Nagano, where he hopped a bullet train back to Tokyo. That was what Toshiya told Saeko when she showed up at the office. She had to wait another half-hour for Kitazawa’s return.

“My dad did say he was bringing back a surprise, though,” Toshiya promised as if in apology. They both knew what that meant; Kitazawa had found a lead of some sort in Itoigawa.

“What is it?” Saeko asked.

“He wouldn’t say. He was being coy.”

“I guess we’ll have to wait and see, then.”

“Well, make yourself at home, anyway.” Toshiya gestured vaguely towards the sofa.

Saeko looked away, her gaze flitting nervously around the office. It was well past closing time. There were two coffee cups on the table in the waiting room where the detectives met with clients during business hours. They hadn’t been set out for Saeko’s visit and were just left over from the last client who had visited the office. The computer in the corner of the office had been left on. The standby screen displayed a photograph of a pop singer posing in a bikini.

Hurriedly, Toshiya keyed in a command to change the picture and began babbling incoherently about the events of the day. His comments seemed to be directed at Saeko, but they sounded more like he was talking to himself. It was a bit awkward being alone with Toshiya waiting for Kitazawa’s return. Their relationship was still somewhat strained.

“Hey, Toshiya? Why do you think the universe has structure?” Saeko asked suddenly, cutting off Toshiya’s rambling monologue.

“Where did that come from?” Toshiya widened his eyes in his patent expression of exaggerated surprise.

The real mystery is the fact that anything exists at all.

It had been a favorite contention of Saeko’s father. The fact that there was matter hinged on the existence of structure. There were two main categories of naturally occurring structure. One comprised the regular movements of heavenly bodies and their groupings, like the solar system or Milky Way. The other was the organic life that occurred on a planet’s surface. These organisms in turn created constructs of their own, spanning everything from simple nests built by birds and honeybees to huge skyscrapers. Saeko and her father had discussed in detail the evolution of manmade creations.

“Why do the natural structures around us exist?” she reprised. “Because various physical constants dictate their existence. Countless parameters all have to line up for a star to form. A certain physicist once estimated the number of parameters to be 10 to the power of 229, while another physicist came up with the number ‘10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123.’ There’s a huge difference between those numbers, but both of them are mind-numbingly large. Far larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Basically, the fact that the universe as we know it exists is nothing short of a miracle.”

For the structure of our universe to be maintained, countless dials, more numerous than all of the atoms in the universe, had to be all tuned to precisely the right values. Saeko and Toshiya discussed various examples of matter and life and the conditions that had to be met for them to exist.

“The question is, who fine-tuned all of those dials in the first place?”

“The gods? I suppose that’s the easy answer,” Toshiya offered. The chances of life spontaneously occurring on Earth were so slim as to be almost zero. It seemed in fact reasonable to try to attribute it to a divine creator.

“But most physicists don’t attribute the universe to the work of a supreme being,” Saeko contended.

“Of course not. That would be an admission of defeat. It would mean acknowledging that we have no idea.”

“Okay — here’s another question for you, Toshiya. What do you think would happen if just one of those dials that maintains the structure of the universe got knocked out of tune?”

Toshiya pretended to fall sideways off of the desk where he was sitting. “That would be the end, I guess. If even one of those 10 to the power of 229 dials got misaligned, our universe would fall apart. It would probably disintegrate instantaneously.”

Even the forces that governed the orbits of the planets around the sun were governed by intricate relationships. If even one parameter were off, it could act like a crack in the system that sent the Earth hurling into the Sun, causing it to explode, or careening out of orbit into the pitch black reaches of space. If a parameter pertaining to the micro world went out of whack it could wreak havoc on the relationships between protons, neutrons, and electrons and cause atoms and molecules to disintegrate, instantly turning our bodies into vapor. In either case, existence hinged on maintaining a very delicate balance.

“You know what I think, Toshiya? It might sound funny to you, but I think the universe didn’t just set those dials. I think they were fine-tuned by its interrelationship with the cognitive abilities of genetic life. The same is true of men and women, isn’t it? Slavery aside, there’s no such thing as a relationship where one completely dominates the other. The rules of their relationship evolve naturally, as a function of their interaction. They both have to … meet in the middle …” Saeko trailed off, embarrassed suddenly by her brazenness in opining on such topics when her own marriage had failed.

“The anthropic principle, you mean?”

“I guess I mean the interaction between the observer and the observed.”

“If you put it in those terms, it saves us from having a purely passive role, anyway. It also answers the enigma of why the universe can be described in mathematical terms even though math is a man-made construct.”

“Yes. Exactly. The fact that the universe can be described in mathematical terms is a real mystery.”

Why was it possible to consider the universe in terms of mathematics, which was a sort of language devised by human beings? It was another question Saeko’s father had posed to her.

She found herself starting to really enjoy this conversation with Toshiya. There was so much more to talk about, but their time was up. Kitazawa had returned.

“Welcome back!” Saeko and Toshiya chorused, looking up in unison as Kitazawa entered the office.

“Thanks,” Kitazawa replied. His face was drawn with fatigue, but as he twisted with a grunt to pull a memory stick out of his shoulder bag, an expression of satisfaction and excitement flooded his visage.

“Is that the surprise?” Toshiya asked.

Kitazawa gave them a quick rundown on how he’d obtained the memory stick. “It may be totally worthless. We won’t know until we have a look.” His warning belied the look on his face.

Toshiya accepted the memory stick, plugged it into the computer, and played the footage.

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.

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.

The Nazca Lines were discovered in the 1930s, when the first airplanes flew over the area. The ones spanning fifty kilometers were better observed through the advent of manmade satellites.

While nobody was sure exactly when the figures were created, they were thought to date back to the Nazca civilization, more than 1,400 years ago. Although the motifs had survived over the centuries, they were so large that the local inhabitants had been unaware of them.

Why on earth had the ancient Nazca people created pictures that were impossible to view except from far above?

There were countless theories explaining the geoglyphs as nature worship, irrigation design, religious ruins, an astronomic calendar, aircraft runways, and UFO landing strips, but to this day no one had come up with a truly plausible explanation.

Saeko had seen a picture of one of the Nazca geoglyphs in the frontispiece of a book in her father’s study. There was one that looked like a gigantic arrow, ending in a long straight groove that stretched across the desert. The fifty-meter-long vector extending from the arrow’s tip pointed straight towards the south pole according to the caption.

The sideways t-shape running through the middle of the Japanese archipelago on Kitazawa’s map easily spanned a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers. But what did it signify? Was it an arrow designating a certain location? Or some sort of sign?

Without speaking, Kitazawa stared intently at Saeko and Hashiba’s faces. His gaze was impatient, as if waiting for them to notice something else. On the other hand, he didn’t seem eager to clue them in.

“Of course, it could just be a coincidence …” he paused, turning the monitor of his computer towards them. Immediately, Kitazawa and Saeko found themselves peering into the screen.

“This afternoon, I was dozing off in front of the computer when it came to me all of a sudden. A vertical line through the middle of Japan, and a horizontal line that runs through Shikoku and Kyushu … In high school, I took a geography class as a science elective, and I remembered seeing an illustration like this one in our textbooks.”

For Kitazawa, the image hadn’t brought to mind the Nazca Lines, but a high school textbook. He used the mouse to bring up a relief map of Japan. It depicted all of the geographic features of the Japanese archipelago in a three-dimensional format so that the characteristics of the terrain were easily distinguishable at a glance.

Hashiba’s response was immediate. “The Fossa Magna? It can’t be!”

Kitazawa turned towards Hashiba for a moment and nodded before turning back to the screen. “It can’t be … That was my response, too. But what do you make of this?”

Two curved lines appeared over the detailed, full-color relief map. The one that ran vertically from the western edge of Niigata Prefecture down through Shizuoka City was marked “Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line.” The horizontal line that ran from Suwa Lake and extended through Shikoku and Kyushu was marked “Median Tectonic Line.” Both were major fault lines — the intersection of adjoining tectonic plates — along which the epicenters of frequent earthquakes lay.

Technically, the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line wasn’t the same as the Fossa Magna. The Fossa Magna was a u-shaped rift, over six thousand meters deep and fairly wide, that cut vertically across the Japanese archipelago. The Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line was in fact its western border. As the name suggested, it ran north-south from Itoigawa City through Hakuba, Omachi, Ina, Okaya, Kobuchisawa, Kushigata, and Minobu all the way to Shizuoka City.

There was no need to juxtapose the two maps. At a single glance, it was obvious that the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line and the Median Tectonic Line coincided perfectly with the distribution of black dots.

For the first time, Saeko realized that the Takato area was located right on top of an active fault. In fact, there were several more black dots clustered just ten kilometers south of the Fujimuras’ home in Takato. It was the only place on the map where so many disappearances were clustered together.

Only Hashiba realized the enormity of the situation.

“I don’t believe it …”

As he leaned in towards the screen, his pupils moved rapidly this way and that and he licked his lips as if lost in thought.

The cause, the mechanism … Hashiba’s face was tense with concentration, his cheeks slightly flushed. Or perhaps he was simply quivering with innocuous excitement at the thought of breaking the story of the relationship between fault lines and mysterious disappearances on his television program.

Saeko drew towards the window and pressed her cheek against the blinds. Chilled by the outside air, the glass drew the heat from her skin but did little to quell her agitation.

Peering through the slanting blinds, Saeko could see the workers in an office building across the street. There were no curtains on the windows, and the brightly lit interior of the office was clearly visible.

The women at their desks were all in uniform — a rare phenomenon in this day and age. The men wore suits, presumably from their own wardrobes as they were all different. The women outnumbered the men by a ratio of around six to four.

I wonder what sort of company it is? Saeko wondered, using her fingers to push the blinds apart for a better view. As she did, she lost her balance momentarily and reached out towards the window to keep herself from falling. The crunching sound the vinyl blinds made under her hand coincided with Hashiba’s voice.

“Perhaps the disappearances are signaling some sort of change in the earth’s crust.”

Saeko pulled her hand back from the blinds and straightened up. After her recent earthquake injury, the threat of changes to the earth’s crust held very real connotations for her. But where did he get the idea that the disappearances were a signal?

Kitazawa too seemed startled by the pronouncement. His coffee cup hovered in space on its way to his mouth.

“You know how animals vanish in flocks right before some unusual natural phenomenon occurs? Like lemmings leaping into the sea before an avalanche.”

Hashiba seemed to be drawing a connection between the predictive abilities of animals and the group disappearances of human beings.

Saeko remembered clearly how a flock of crows on the power lines outside had taken wing all at once just before the earthquake in Takato, and how all of the dogs in the neighborhood had begun howling in chorus.

Kitazawa showed no indication of laughing off Hashiba’s idea. Instead, he quietly moved his mouse again, bringing up a different map on his computer monitor. It was another relief map, complete with geological and tectonic markings, this time of the West Coast of the United States, with San Francisco and Los Angeles positioned towards the center.

“Everything I’ve told you so far pertained to just Japan. I don’t know how he did it, but Toshiya also gathered some information on disappearances overseas. After all, we need more examples to solve the question of whether our findings in Japan were pure coincidence. He entered data from a few dozen overseas missing persons cases into the computer. I’m sure you could read through all of it pretty quickly if you wanted to. Of those cases, there was one that I found particularly interesting.” Kitazawa looked down at the document in his hand and continued slowly. “The disappearance is thought to have taken place on September 25th of last year. Twelve days after the incident in Itoigawa, another group of people vanished in California. From their cars, not their homes. Two cars, right out in the middle of the desert. The vehicles were discovered near the bed of a small lake called Soda Lake, due west of Bakersfield, northwest of Los Angeles, California.

“The cars were discovered empty on September 26th, but it was evident that their inhabitants had disappeared the previous evening. The vehicles were pulled over on opposite sides of Seven Mile Road, an unpaved highway. The Ford was a rental car taken out by Hans and Claudia Ziemssen, a young couple from Frankfurt who had come to the U.S. on vacation. That day, they had landed at the Los Angeles International Airport, rented the Ford, and set out on a desert excursion. The other car was a Pontiac belonging to the Simpson family from Taft, California, comprising Mr. and Mrs. Simpson and their young child. The Simpsons had left home that day at around 1 p.m., supposedly to travel to San Luis Obispo. Now, at what time did the two cars cross paths? Based on the record of when Hans Ziemssen left the car rental lot, we can assume it was early evening. But the next day, when the two cars were found, they were both empty. The passengers had vanished, leaving behind only the vehicles and their belongings. This was in the middle of the desert, remember. Naturally, the authorities conducted an exhaustive search of the area within walking distance but found no sign of the missing people. Of course, they could have been abducted in a separate vehicle, but there were no indications of any kind of struggle.”

It was just like the domestic case, except for the fact that cars took the place of a home. A total of five people had vanished from the two vehicles. Perhaps they had suffered the same fate as the missing persons in Itoigawa and Takato.

Saeko, Hashiba, and Kitazawa slowly digested this new information.

“We know the exact location where the vehicles were found.” As Kitazawa spoke, he zoomed in on the map on his screen. The ocean disappeared from view as he zeroed in on an area roughly 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, an empty wasteland between Route 58 and Route 166. The relief map afforded an excellent 3D view of the terrain. “Here,” Kitazawa pointed to a spot just a few miles north of Soda Lake, just after the turnoff onto Seven Mile Road from Route 58.

Saeko and Hashiba peered intently into the monitor. A black line intersected the exact spot where the five people had vanished from the two cars. It was a crooked, meandering line that snaked awkwardly this way and that. It wasn’t a road or a state border, so it had to represent some sort of subterranean geographic feature.

Saeko’s gaze traveled south down the black line until she suddenly encountered some English lettering. San Andreas Fault.

“It’s a fault line,” Kitazawa translated, indicating the jagged black line.

“Not again …” Hashiba murmured.

“The San Andreas Fault is a transform fault that marks the boundary between the Pacific Plate and North American Plate, and the cause of the earthquakes that frequently affect the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. It’s an extremely active fault line. The empty cars were basically right on top of it when their inhabitants disappeared at roughly the same time. ‘Not again’ is right, Hashiba.”

Hashiba pointed at the display and seemed about to speak, but Kitazawa didn’t give him a chance.

“That’s not all. On October 22nd of that same year, just twenty-seven days after the disappearances on Seven Mile Road, another group of people vanished from a site 360 kilometers to the north.”

Kitazawa scrolled north on the map. Now the monitor showed an area just south of San Francisco, with a small lake in the center of the screen. Kitazawa’s account of the disappearances at Merced Lake on October 22, 2011 almost made it sound as if he’d been there himself.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

The first person to feel a stab of concern that evening was Mary, the mother of one of the missing teenagers.

On Saturday morning, Christine had gone out to do some landscape painting with the painting club at her school. As evening approached and Christine still hadn’t returned, Mary didn’t worry initially since the group had been accompanied by an art teacher from the school. But at seven o’clock she began to grow concerned and decided to check in with the chaperone. Christine had never been late coming home before.

The teacher’s husband answered the call. They were newlyweds, and he too had been anxiously awaiting his new bride’s return. The husband began to worry when he heard the concern in Mary’s voice and immediately called his wife’s cell phone number, but no matter how many times he tried, it went straight to voicemail.

Now Mary was really worried. She called the homes of the other two students and spoke with their families, only to learn that none of them had returned home yet.

The three girls had been members of the Richmond Junior High art club and had set out with their art teacher to work on landscape painting. They were all responsible students and had always been home by 6:30 for dinner. The teacher, for her part, had promised her husband that she would return by six that evening to make dinner.

When eight o’clock rolled around, Mary began to call around to other schoolmates of Christine’s to see if anyone knew where she was. Nobody had any answers. As nine o’clock approached, the families began to worry that the group might have been involved in some sort of accident or crime.

Still unable to reach the teacher on her cell phone, Mary decided to call the police and request an investigation. By then, it was ten minutes past nine o’clock.

When the group hadn’t turned up by midnight, the police intensified their search. Unfortunately, however, nobody knew where the group had headed for their painting project, and it wasn’t until close to dawn that they located four abandoned easels clustered at the southern shore of Merced Lake.

Alerted by the police, Mary rushed to the scene. The four easels stood on the shore as if waiting for the morning mist to clear. Catching the first rays of morning sun, they cast long shadows that stretched all the way to the water’s edge. The air was still, as it had been the previous day, and the lake surface was absolutely smooth. In their skewed-diamond formation, the four easels had the air of tombstones.

From the names on the palettes left at the foot of each easel, there was no question that the four canvases belonged to the teacher and students from Richmond Junior High.

It was then that Mary knew for certain that something terrible had happened to her daughter.

It was a strange sight. Each of the easels held paintings of an almost identical composition. As the dawn light slowly illuminated the canvases, Mary felt as if she could almost see the souls of Christine, the teacher, and the other two girls standing in front of the dewy easels.

The young teacher and the teenagers had stood at the same spot and painted the same view in nearly the exact same manner.

They had made use of a stationary windsurfer to emphasize the stillness of the lake, using light and shadow to evoke the strong autumn light. Perhaps all four of them had painted the same subject matter for educational purposes. The teacher might have chosen to have all of the girls undertake the same subject matter so that she could better critique the nuanced differences of each student’s approach.

Not unexpectedly, the teacher’s painting was executed with a finesse of a different caliber, in a style that went beyond photorealism. The branches that framed the lake were arranged almost symmetrically, and the windsurfer loomed larger-than-life in the center of the painting. The air between the leaves of the trees seemed absolutely still.

And yet, there was also a strange tension, as if at any moment something held captive within the canvas might suddenly burst forth. In the foreground, the shore of the lake seemed distorted and lacking a normal sense of perspective. It was unclear what its unnatural undulations were meant to convey. The lake was still and glassy, but pregnant with suspense, as if some unknowable being might at any moment rise up from its depths and shatter its surface.

Seen from a slight distance, the landscape suggested the features of a face. The tree branches hanging down from above suggested eyes, the surfboard a nose, the shoreline a mouth. The face’s expression was serene for the moment but imbued with an ominous air as if rage lurked just beneath the surface. There was only a paper-thin line between the opposing forces of stillness and movement, inspiring a feeling of apprehension in the viewer.

The three students’ paintings seemed to take their cue from the teacher’s. Perhaps the girls had unconsciously imitated the teacher’s style. They had done their best to render the landscape faithfully, resulting in an awkward style that was neither photorealistic nor abstract. Only Christine’s painting had a unique feature that set it apart from the others: she had blacked out the face of the surfer in the lake’s foreground.

The windsurfer had gotten too close to shore and was now having a hard time getting back out into the open water. Apparently he was new to the sport and not yet competent at it. His sail hung shapeless, fluttering uselessly, and he seemed stumped as to what to do next. The art teacher had done a remarkable job of portraying his hapless stance and expression as he waited for the wind to pick up.

By contrast, Christine had painted the young windsurfer’s face as black as his wetsuit. At first glance it seemed as though perhaps she had intended to silhouette his form against the afternoon sun, but that wasn’t it. She had rendered the surfer smaller than her teacher had, cramming him into the left-hand corner of the canvas. Despite his small stature, he seemed as heavy as metal, like he might sink straight to the bottom of the lake were he to fall in. Completely devoid of any hint of an inner life, he seemed more like a robot than a human being.

The teacher’s painting, and Christine’s painting … Both were imbued with a disturbing quality. The teacher had drawn inspiration from the menacing air of the lake’s surface and had chosen to distort the shoreline with surreal undulations, while Christine had rendered the surfer like a dead man.

That afternoon, a surfboard was found washed up to the bank at another area of the lake. Still half in the water, the outhaul line connected to the boom was tangled in the thick brush at the water’s edge. The surfer was nowhere to be seen, but it didn’t take the police long to identify him as a U.C. Berkeley student. The missing boy had shared an apartment with a fellow student, and the roommate reported that the surfer had never returned home the night before. The roommate hadn’t thought much of it at the time since the other boy had frequently stayed out all night without checking in with anyone.

Counting the windsurfer, a total of five people had disappeared. No trace had been found of any of them to this day.

As Kitazawa ended his account, he paused for a moment before adding, “There appears to be a connection between these disappearances in the U.S. and the ones in Japan. Or is it just coincidence? All of these mysterious, unnatural disappearances have taken place directly over a fault line.”

Kitazawa stopped there, waiting for the others to respond as he slowly took a seat on the sofa.

The computer monitor still showed the map of the suburbs of San Francisco, but nobody was looking at it anymore. It was clear that Kitazawa’s story wasn’t a lie or an exaggeration. He had simply presented the facts, pure and simple. But all three of them were at a loss for words. They had no idea how a geological phenomenon like a fault line could play a part in human disappearances.

Before starting grade school, Saeko had spent most of her summers with her paternal grandparents. Built in a traditional Japanese style, their home stood on a large lot, lush with greenery, behind the Atami Kinomiya train station. The garden exuded a heady scent of earth and the wind often brought in gusts of salty sea air, muffling the mountain’s own scent. On the other side of the hedge that enclosed their property, there ran a small brook called Ito Creek whose soft susurrations seemed to cool the air. Whenever Saeko’s father could get time away from his job, he had enjoyed taking Saeko fishing there.

It had been Saeko’s job to find the bait. When she turned over large rocks in the garden to expose the damp earth underneath, the pungent smell of earthworms and mud wafted forth.

Whenever she found a sizeable earthworm, she pinned it down with the toe of her shoe and the edge of a rock to sever it in two. She plopped half of the worm into her bait box and left the other half under the rock.

Even if you cut an earthworm in half, it’ll grow back if you give it enough time.

Saeko’s father had taught her about the regenerative abilities of earthworms. Loath to diminish the precious supply of worms, she made it a practice to always only harvest half of each worm.

When she was finished collecting bait, Saeko’s father would emerge from the house.

“Sae, let’s go!” he would call, affectionately shortening her name. Then he would thump her on the shoulder and start down the path towards the creek. On the way, he made no effort to match his stride to his daughter’s, and she had to scamper to keep up. She kept her gaze locked on her father as she scrambled after him, always lagging behind by a few paces, determined not to be left behind.

As she ducked through the trees, her package of severed earthworms under one arm, sometimes Saeko lost sight of her father for a moment. “Papa!” she would shriek, oddly panicked, even if he’d only disappeared for a second. Her father, for his part, seemed amused by his daughter’s exaggerated reaction and enjoyed making it into a game of hide-and-seek.

The intense heat of summer, the rustle of foliage, the hum of mosquitoes. Perhaps on some level, Saeko already had a premonition then of what was to come. The summer when she was seventeen years old, she would lose her beloved father. Somehow, that fear already loomed large.

With a start, Saeko snapped out of her reverie. What had triggered her memory of the earthworms? At first, she couldn’t draw any connection. Then she realized that the image of a rift in the earth had spawned the idea of a long, thin creature of some sort lurking within. In the back of her mind, a serpentine form slithered along active fault lines. Its tongue darted in and out of its mouth as if to tickle the walls of her brain …

If Saeko were still a child, surely she would have imagined that the missing people had been spirited away deep into the earth by some sort of monster.

Without realizing it, Saeko had drawn both of her feet up away from the floor. She knew there was no fault line under Tokyo, and yet she could almost feel the presence of a long, thin, reptilian creature drawing silently closer and closer.

A deep abyss, a world beyond the reach of the sun’s rays …

The sun. Right. Saeko’s thoughts of darkness reminded her of the corresponding opposite concept. Just two days ago, browsing the newspaper archives at the library, she had learned that there had been unusual sunspot activity the day her father had disappeared.

Saeko leapt towards the computer. “May I?” she asked Kitazawa.

“Please, be my guest.”

Saeko opened the browser and ran a search on “sunspots,” pulling up calendars that went back to March 2011. When she clicked on a date, a picture of sunspot activity for the date in question came up on the screen.

Saeko tried to rein in her anticipation as she clicked on September 13, 2011, the date three people had vanished from Itoigawa. Then she tried September 25th, the date the passengers of two cars had vanished near Soda Lake in the U.S. And October 22nd, the day five people had vanished at Lake Merced near San Francisco.

On most days, only a few specks the size of sesame seeds marred the images of the sun. But on the three dates of the mysterious disappearances, there was a clear difference. Ugly black amoeba-like blobs writhed across the sun’s surface almost like living organisms.

Peering into the monitor over Saeko’s shoulder, Kitazawa and Hashiba still didn’t comprehend what Saeko had discovered.

“What is it?”

When both Hashiba and Kitazawa thumped Saeko’s shoulders at the same time, she finally turned away from the screen.

“On all three dates of these missing persons cases, unusual sunspot activity was recorded.”

Saeko manipulated the pointer once again to illustrate the incredible correlation between the incidences of human disappearances and sunspot activity.

Under any normal circumstances, she would have expected her colleagues to instantly reject the notion of a connection between human disappearances and sunspots. But just moments ago, Hashiba and Kitazawa had come to the realization that a string of such cases was occurring directly over active fault lines.

“Active fault lines and sunspots. What do the two phenomena have in common?” Hashiba asked.

Saeko swiveled her chair to face the other two. “The magnetic fields that cause sunspots break through the surface and assault the Earth in the form of magnetic storms. It’s also possible that active fault lines have a powerful influence on the magnetic fields in the spaces above them. Magnetic fields — they’re the connection between the two.”

Saeko chewed her lower lip as Hashiba and Kitazawa sat motionlessly mulling this over, their lips pressed together tightly. Nobody argued with her contention — in their silence, they were tacitly acknowledging the connection. The unusual geophysical conditions of the locations and the timing of the disappearances suggested a causal relationship. It had to be more than just coincidence.