Birthday (6 page)

A colleague from the
Daily News
had died the day before in a Shinagawa hospital, and Yoshino was planning to go up to Shinagawa for the funeral. He said he could meet him for an hour or so after the funeral.

Let's meet at four o'clock at Shinbaba Station on the Keihin Express line, at the ticket gate.

Toyama repeated the time and place, wrote them in his schedule book, and hung up.

The sun was quick in setting today. Toward late afternoon the sky darkened as if shrouded in mist and the sun sank with violent rapidity. The air grew markedly chill, and it felt like winter as he stood by the ticket gate, which opened into a shopping street.

Toyama and Yoshino were both there five minutes early.

Yoshino looked more careworn and forlorn than he had a month before. Of course, he'd just come from a junior colleague's funeral—that probably had something to do with it. When someone younger dies, it's always depressing.

Toyama had never gotten out at this station before.

He knew that if he walked east he'd eventually run into a canal, and before that he'd hit the Shore Road, running north and south. On the water side of that was a quiet warehouse district, where overhead one could hear the horns of shipping in Tokyo Bay.

Toyama and Yoshino walked together to a coffee shop just this side of the Shore Road. They went inside and ordered coffee, but before they'd had time to exchange more than a few words, Yoshino's pager went off.

He left the table and went to the pink pay phone in the back of the shop. Toyama watched him from behind.

Yoshino looked every inch the reporter as he cradled the receiver on his shoulder and dialed.

Toyama had no difficulty overhearing Yoshino's end of the conversation.

"What? Mai Takano's been found dead?"

Mai Takano...
Of course Toyama had never heard the name before. All he was interested in was what happened to Sadako. He couldn't muster any interest in this woman whose name he didn't recognize. He tried to ignore the rest of the conversation.

Yoshino made no effort to muffle his voice as he bent over the receiver and barked out questions. The somewhat sad expression of a moment before was gone now, and Yoshino was once again the reporter sniffing out a story. He looked reenergized.

"Three days ago... Where? ...East Shinagawa—wait a minute, that's not far from where I am now. I could swing by if I have time... Which was it? You know, was it a forensic autopsy or an administrative one? I see...

Hmm, ninety hours after time of death.... Huh? Signs that she gave birth just prior to death? ...the umbilical cord? Are you kidding me? And what about the baby?

...Gone? You mean...hide nor hair?"

It was enough for Toyama to piece together the situation. Three days ago a woman named Mai Takano had been found dead in this vicinity. An autopsy had been performed, revealing that she'd given birth immediately before her death. And the child was now missing.

A shocking incident, to be sure. But after all, it had nothing to do with him. It didn't matter to him who had died and how, or what she'd given birth to—or even if that newborn baby had, totally under its own power (strange though that would be), disappeared...

Toyama thought—was determined to think—that the incident had no connection with him, and yet his nerves were tingling.

Mai Takano.

He'd never heard the name before. So why did he now feel like it was engraved somewhere deep in his heart?

He found himself imagining her body, already enter-ing rigor mortis, with something squirming beside it.

Imagining an infant climbing over its mother's corpse and walking away.

A chill came over him. He had a powerful intuition regarding what Mai Takano had given birth to, and it wouldn't let him tell himself anymore that he wasn't interested. As he watched Yoshino hunched over the phone and listened to the unguarded fragments of his conversation, the facts, or pieces of them, began to form definite images in his brain and play themselves out. It was like when he took segments of music and edited them together into a single, smoothly flowing track.

Toyama closed his eyes and turned his face to the ceiling. The voice at the phone stopped and there was a moment of silence. When he opened his eyes again, Yoshino was seated opposite him—when had he returned?

The last few minutes, the duration of the phone call, felt distorted to Toyama—forcefully so, like he'd been twisted up and tossed abruptly into another dimension.

"Is there something wrong?" Yoshino sounded concerned by the look of enervated astonishment on Toyama's face.

Toyama straightened up in his seat—he'd sunk into a slouch—and took a deep breath before saying, "No...

But it sounds like you've got quite a sensational incident on your hands."

"I don't know about that yet. A young female was found dead on a rooftop, is all."

"Nearby?"

"Yeah, East Shinagawa. An office building. She was found in the exhaust shaft on the roof—a hole, basically.

Odd, right?"

"Was it murder?"

"It doesn't sound like it. Probably an accident."

"I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but, um, I heard you say that there were signs she'd given birth just before dying."

Yoshino gave Toyama an indecipherable grin and a questioning glance.
Why are you so interested in this!

"Well, I don't know anything yet—I just heard the report. A pity it had to happen to someone so young, though. She was a smart girl. Pretty, too."

Yoshino looked away and stroked his beard. There seemed to be something more bothering him. Toyama had a hunch.

"This Mai Takano—she didn't happen to be an acquaintance of yours?"

Yoshino immediately shook his head. "No, I didn't know her personally. But a colleague of mine did, Asakawa. It was his funeral I was at: we were pretty close. He knew her."

A look of anxiety crossed Yoshino's face, and Toyama observed it. Anxiety—but more than that, dread.

"Their deaths—were they just a coincidence?"

At the question, Yoshino's dread deepened, and Toyama saw that too.

First his friend Asakawa dies, and now a girl Asakawa knew. Neither death in itself terribly suspi-cious, but precisely because there was so little information, it was natural for an outsider to want to connect them.

Yoshino's eyes began darting around the room, as if he were desperately coming up with ideas and rejecting them.

"Yeah, right... Now, about Sadako Yamamura."

Yoshino changed the subject, but the way he said it made it seem almost as if Sadako had something to do with Asakawa's and Mai's deaths.

The last time Toyama and Yoshino had met, Toyama had simply answered the questions put to him.

That had been his role, and he'd played it to the hilt, but he had no intention of reprising it. This time he was determined to take the initiative and find out why a reporter was so interested in ascertaining what had happened to Sadako.

So he came right out and said it. "Don't you think it's about time you told me why you want to know what she was doing twenty-four years ago?"

Yoshino hung his head and looked beaten—it was the same look he'd had the last time they'd met.

"See, the thing is...I don't really know myself."

That was what he'd said last time, too. Toyama couldn't accept it. A reporter for a major news organiza-tion follows a woman's quarter-century-old trail through the nooks and crannies of the city, and he doesn't even know why?

"Don't give me that." Toyama's expression began to change.

Yoshino raised his hands and said, "Okay. I'll be honest with you. Kazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter in the main office, was investigating something, and Sadako Yamamura's name came up. He needed information. But he was tied up elsewhere at the time, so he asked me to help him out. He told me to find out whatever I could about what Sadako Yamamura was doing twenty-four years ago."

Toyama leaned forward. "What was he investigating?"

"That's the thing. He never told me. And then he got in a traffic accident and went into a coma. He died without ever regaining consciousness. I don't know why he was so insistent about finding out about her. I guess the truth is lost in a grove—like in that movie, you know?"

Toyama peered deep into Yoshino's eyes, trying to tell if he was lying. He didn't seem to be, at least about the big stuff. But he might be lying about the details.

Toyama deduced how Yoshino had been led to him.

First he would have gone to Theater Group Soaring's rehearsal space, where he would have found out who else had joined the troupe as an intern in February of 1965.

The resumes they'd all submitted together with their entrance exams were still stored in the troupe's offices. As far as Toyama could recall, there had been eight of them that year. No doubt Yoshino had thought he could trace Sadako's steps by speaking to all of them.

"Did you talk to the others?"

Toyama could only remember the names of two or three others, besides Sadako. He had no contact with any of them now—no idea where they were or what they were doing.

"Of the people who joined Soaring in 1965, I was able to track down four, including yourself."

"So you were able to contact the other three as well?"

Yoshino nodded. "I talked to them on the phone."

"Who?"

"Iino, Kitajima, and Kato."

As Yoshino said the names, Toyama was able to recall the faces. They'd been slumbering in the recesses of his memory; now he could feel them coming back to him, more clearly by the moment. Of course, in his mind, everyone still looked twenty.

Iino: he'd completely forgotten about Iino. Didn't speak much; a skilled mime. The older girls had liked him: they'd kind of adopted him.

Kitajima: small, not much stage presence, but he was good with his lines. He'd been used as a narrator, impressive for an intern. Toyama thought he'd had a slight crush on Sadako, too.

Kato: her first name was Keiko, he remembered now. Her name had been so ordinary that Shigemori, their director and head of the troupe, had given her a flashy stage name. "Yurako Tatsunomiya." She was quite beautiful, and she certainly wasn't aiming for comic roles, which was what such an overwrought name might have steered her toward. Still, the name was a direct gift from the troupe's founder-director, and she couldn't very well turn it down. Toyama remembered how hard a time she'd had hiding her mixed feelings.

They'd all be out drinking, and people would start mock-ing the name, which would leave her near tears as she tried to defend it.

In fact, it was Sadako who probably wanted a stage name most. Her real name was too old-fashioned for a modern beauty like hers. She should have received a stage name when she first went on stage, last-minute though it was. But Shigemori had sent her on under her real name.

All these things about people Toyama thought he'd forgotten came vividly back as Yoshino said their names.

He began to wax nostalgic. But just as he was on the point of losing himself in the feelings of his youth, he dug in his heels. He had another question to ask.

"So you only talked to Iino, Kitajima, and Kato on the phone?"
Why was I the only one you met face-to-
face?

"I called you first, too, you know."

"I know that. What I mean is, you let it go at a phone call for the other three, but you wanted to meet me in person. Why?"

Yoshino studied Toyama with a surprised look. His expression said,
Do you even have to ask?

"I thought you knew. The other three all said the same thing, that you and Sadako had a special relationship back then."

A special relationship.

He felt his strength leave him, and he sank down into his seat again. From this position he could see stains on the ceiling.

"Is that it..."

It made sense now. No wonder Yoshino had wanted to meet him in person, instead of just talking on the phone like with the other three.

He'd always meant to hide his closeness to Sadako from the other interns, not to mention the troupe as a whole. But it now seemed that his fellow interns had seen right through him. So much so that they still remembered it twenty-four years later. He and Sadako must have made quite an impression. But Toyama couldn't believe there was anything all that memorable about himself, which meant it must have been Sadako's striking character that they remembered. Unless they'd really all been that in-trigued by their relationship.

"Would you be willing to tell me what happened?"

Toyama lowered his gaze to find Yoshino staring at him with eyes brimming with curiosity.

"What do you mean?"

"Sadako Yamamura disappeared all of a sudden after the spring production in 1966 finished its run. I think you know why."

Toyama realized what Yoshino was thinking: if anybody would know why Sadako had left, he would, even if he didn't know where she'd gone. Yoshino had a hungry-wolf glint in his eyes.

"You've got to be kidding."

Toyama had nothing to give this predator. If he'd known why she left him, without telling him where she was going, his life since age twenty-three wouldn't have been so dark and cheerless.

"Oh, right. Shall I show you something?"

Yoshino rummaged in his briefcase and came up with a script. The battered cover read: 

THEATER GROUP SOARING

ELEVENTH PRODUCTION

GIRL IN BLACK

(TWO ACTS, FOUR SCENES)

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY

YUSAKU SHIGEMORI

It was a copy of the bound galley of the script.

Toyama reached for it in spite of himself. He opened it. It smelled like twenty-four years ago.

"Where did you get this?" He asked without thinking.

"I borrowed it from the troupe's office, after swear-ing I'd return it. In March of 1966, Sadako Yamamura snagged a part as an understudy in this. Her disappearance was more or less simultaneous with the end of the run. What happened? It has to have had something to do with the play..."

"Have you read it?"

"Of course I have. But it's just the script: it doesn't tell me much."