Читать книгу Ring - Koji Suzuki - Страница 12

Shizu was seeing her parents for the first time in a month. Ever since their granddaughter Tomoko had died, they came to Tokyo from their home in Ashikaga whenever they could, not only to console their daughter but to be consoled in turn. Shizu only understood this today. Her heart ached when she saw her aged parents’ thin, grief-stricken faces. They had once had three grandchildren: their oldest daughter Yoshimi’s daughter Tomoko, their second daughter Kazuko’s son Kenichi, and Shizu’s daughter Yoko. One grandchild from each of their three daughters—not all that common. Tomoko had been their first grandchild, and their faces had crinkled up every time they had seen her; they had enjoyed spoiling her. Now they were so depressed that it was impossible to say whose grief was deeper, the parents’ or the grandparents’.

I guess grandchildren really mean a lot.

Shizu had just turned thirty this year. It was all she could do to imagine what her sister must be feeling, putting herself in her sister’s place, contemplating how she’d feel if she lost her own child. But really, there was no comparison to be made between her daughter Yoko, only a year and a half old, and Tomoko, who had died at seventeen. She couldn’t fathom how every passing year would deepen her love for her child.

Sometime after three in the afternoon, her parents began to get ready to go home to Ashikaga.

Shizu could hardly contain her surprise. Why had her husband, who always protested that he was too busy, suggested this visit to her sister’s house? This was the same husband who’d skipped the poor girl’s funeral, pleading that he had a deadline to meet. And now here it was almost dinnertime, and he wasn’t showing the slightest inclination of leaving. He’d only met Tomoko a few times, and had probably never talked with her for very long. Surely he wasn’t feeling detained by memories of the deceased.

Shizu tapped Asakawa lightly on the knee and whispered in his ear, “Dear, it’s probably about time …”

“Look at Yoko. She’s sleepy. Maybe we ought to see if we could let her take a nap here.”

They had brought their daughter. Normally, this was nap time. Sure enough, Yoko had started blinking like she did when she was sleepy. But if they let her sleep here, they’d have to stay in this house for at least two more hours. What would they find to talk about with her grieving sister and her husband for two more hours?

“She can sleep on the train, don’t you think?” said Shizu, dropping her voice.

“Last time we tried that she got fussy, and it was awful all the way home. No, thanks.”

Whenever Yoko got sleepy in a crowd, she got unbelievably fidgety. She’d flail her little arms and legs, wail at the top of her lungs, and just generally make life difficult for her parents. Scolding her only made it worse—there was no way to calm her down except to try to get her to sleep. At times like that Asakawa became intensely conscious of the looks of people around him, and he’d start sulking himself, as though he were the prime victim of his daughter’s shrieking. The accusing stares of the other passengers always made him feel like he was choking.

Shizu preferred not to see her husband in that state, with his cheeks twitching nervously and all. “All right, then, if you say so.”

“Great. Let’s see if she’ll take a nap upstairs.”

Yoko lay in her mother’s lap, eyes half closed.

“I’ll go put her down,” he said, caressing his daughter’s cheek with the back of his hand. The words sounded strange coming from Asakawa, who hardly ever helped with the baby. Maybe he’d had a change of heart, now that he’d witnessed the sorrow of parents who’d lost a child.

“What’s come over you today? It’s spooky.”

“Don’t worry. She looks like she’ll go right down. Leave it to me.”

Shizu handed the child over. “Thanks. I just wish you were like this all the time.”

As she was transferred from her mother’s bosom to her father’s, Yoko began to scrunch up her face, but before she had time to follow through she had fallen asleep. Asakawa climbed the stairs, cradling his daughter. The second floor consisted of two Japanese-style rooms and the Western-style room which had been Tomoko’s. He laid Yoko on the futon in the Japanese-style room that faced south. He didn’t even need to stay with her as she fell asleep. She was already out, her breathing regular.

Asakawa slipped out of the room and listened to see what was going on downstairs, and then entered Tomoko’s bedroom. He felt a little guilty about invading a dead girl’s privacy. Wasn’t this the kind of thing he abhorred? But it was for a good cause—defeating evil. There was nothing but to do it. Even as he thought this, he hated the way he was always willing to seize on any reason, no matter how specious, in order to rationalize his actions. But, he protested, it wasn’t like he was writing an article about it: he was just trying to figure out when and where the four had been together. Sorry.

He opened her desk drawers. Just the normal assortment of stationery supplies, like any high school girl would have, rather neatly arranged. Three snapshots, a junk box, letters, a notepad, a sewing kit. Had her parents gone through here after she died? It didn’t look like it. Probably she was just naturally neat. He was hoping to find a diary—it would save him a lot of time. Today I got together with Haruko Tsuji, Takehiko Nomi, and Shuichi Iwata, and we … If he could just find an entry like that. He took a notebook from her bookshelf and flipped through it. He actually came across a very girlish diary in the back of a drawer, but there were only a few desultory entries on the first few pages, all of them dated long ago.

On the shelf beside the desk there were no books, only a red flowered makeup stand. He opened the drawer. A bunch of cheap accessories. A lot of mismatched earrings—it seemed she had a habit of losing one of every pair she owned. A pocket comb with several slender black strands of hair still wrapped around it.

Opening the built-in wardrobe, his nose was assailed by the scent of high school girls. It was packed tight with colorful dresses and skirts on hangers. His sister-in-law and her husband had obviously not figured out what to do with these clothes, which still carried their daughter’s fragrance. Asakawa pricked up his ears at what was going on downstairs. He wasn’t sure what they’d think if they caught him in here. There was no sound. His wife and her sister must still be talking about something. Asakawa searched the pockets of the clothes in the wardrobe one by one. Handkerchiefs, movie ticket stubs, gum wrappers, napkins, commuter pass case. He examined it: a pass for the stretch between Yamate and Tsurumi, a student ID card, and a membership card. There was a name written on the membership card: Something-or-other Nonoyama. He wasn’t sure how to pronounce the characters for the first name—Yuki, maybe? From the characters alone he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Why did she have someone else’s card in her pass case? He heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He slipped the card into his pocket, put the case back where he’d found it, and shut the wardrobe. He stepped into the hall just as his sister-in-law reached the top of the stairs.

“Sorry, is there a bathroom up here?” He made a show of acting antsy.

“It’s there at the end of the hall.” She didn’t seem to suspect anything. “Is Yoko sleeping like a good girl?”

“Yes, thanks. Sorry to put you to such trouble.”

“Oh no, not at all.” The sister-in-law bowed slightly, then stepped into the Japanese-style room, hand on her kimono sash.

In the bathroom, Asakawa took out the card. “Pacific Resorts Club Member’s Card” it read. Underneath this was Nonoyama’s name and membership number and the expiration date. He flipped it over. Five membership conditions, in fine print, plus the name of the company and its address. Pacific Resorts Club, Inc., 3-5 Kojimachi, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo. Phone no. (03) 261-4922. If it wasn’t something she’d found or swiped, Tomoko must have borrowed this card from this Nonoyama person. Why? To use Pacific Resorts facilities, of course. Which one, and when?

He couldn’t call from the house. Saying he was going to go buy cigarettes, he ran to a pay phone. He dialed the number.

“Hello, Pacific Resorts, may I help you?” A young woman’s voice.

“I’d like to know what facilities I can use with a membership card.”

The voice didn’t respond right away. Maybe they had so many facilities available that she couldn’t just list them all.

“That is … I mean … for example, like on an overnight trip from Tokyo,” he added. It would have stood out if the four of them had gone away for two or three nights together. The fact that he hadn’t turned anything up so far meant that they had probably gone for no longer than a single night. She could easily get away for a single night by lying to her parents that she was staying at a friend’s house.

“We have a full range of facilities at our Pacific Land in South Hakone,” she said, in her businesslike manner.

“Specifically, what sorts of leisure activities do you have there?”

“Certainly, sir. We have provisions for golf, tennis, and field sports, as well as a swimming pool.”

“And you have lodging there?”

“Yes, sir. In addition to a hotel, Pacific Land features the Villa Log Cabin community of rental cottages. Shall I send you our brochure?”

“Yes. Please.” He pretended to be a prospective customer, hoping it would make it easier to extract information from her. “The hotel and the cabins, are they open to the general public?”

“Certainly, at non-member rates.”

“I see. Can you give me the phone number? Maybe I’ll go have a look.”

“I can take care of reservations right now, if you wish …”

“No, I, ah, may be going for a drive down there sometime and just decide to have a look … So could I just have the phone number?”

“One moment, please.”

As he waited, Asakawa took out a memo pad and pen.

“Are you ready?” The woman returned and dictated two eleven-digit phone numbers. The area codes were long—they were way out in the sticks. Asakawa scribbled them down.

“Just for future reference, where are your other facilities located?”

“We have the same sort of full-service resorts at Lake Hamana and at Hamajima in Mie Prefecture.”

Much too far! Students wouldn’t have that kind of war chest.

“I see. Sounds like they’re all on the Pacific, just like the name says.”

Then the woman began to detail all the fabulous advantages of becoming a Pacific Resorts Club member; Asakawa listened politely for a while before cutting her off. “Great. The rest I’m sure I can find out from the pamphlet. I’ll give you my address so you can send it.” He told her his address and hung up. Listening to her sales pitch, he’d begun to think it actually wouldn’t be a bad idea to join, if he could afford it.

It had been over an hour since Yoko had gone to sleep, and Shizu’s parents had already returned to Ashikaga. Shizu herself was in the kitchen doing the dishes for her sister, who was still prone to break down at the slightest provocation. Asakawa briskly helped carry dishes in from the living room.

“What’s got into you today? You’re acting weird,” said Shizu, without interrupting her dishwashing. “You put Yoko down, you’re helping in the kitchen. Are you turning over a new leaf? If so, I hope it sticks.”

Asakawa was lost in thought, and didn’t want to be bothered. He wished his wife would act like her name, which meant “quiet”. The best way to seal a woman’s mouth was not to reply.

“Oh, by the way, did you put a disposable on her before putting her to bed? We wouldn’t want her to leak at someone else’s house.”

Asakawa showed no interest, but just looked around at the kitchen walls. Tomoko had died here. There had been shards of glass and a pool of coke next to her when she was found. She must have been attacked by the virus right when she was going to have a drink of coke from the fridge. Asakawa opened the refrigerator, mimicking Tomoko’s movements. He imagined holding a glass, and pretended to drink.

“What in the world are you doing?” Shizu was staring at him, mouth wide open. Asakawa kept going: still pretending to drink, he looked behind him. When he turned around, there was a glass door right in front of him, separating the living room from the kitchen. It reflected the fluorescent light above the sink. Maybe because it was still bright outside and the living room was filled with light, it only reflected the fluorescent light, and not the expressions of the people on this side. If the other side of the glass was dark, and this side light, like it would have been that night when Tomoko was standing here … That glass door would have been a mirror reflecting the scene in the kitchen. It would have reflected Tomoko’s face, contorted with terror. Asakawa could almost start to think of the pane of glass as a witness to everything that had happened. Glass could be transparent or reflective, depending on the interplay of light and darkness. Asakawa was bringing his face nearer the glass, as if drawn there, when his wife tapped him on the back. Just at that moment, they heard Yoko crying upstairs. She was awake.

“Yoko’s up.” Shizu wiped her wet hands on a towel. Their daughter usually didn’t cry so hard upon waking up. Shizu rushed up to the second floor.

As she was going out, Yoshimi came in. Asakawa handed her the card he’d found. “This had fallen under the piano.” He spoke casually and waited for a reaction.

Yoshimi took the card and turned it over. “This is strange. What was this doing there?” She cocked her head, puzzled.

“Could Tomoko have borrowed it from a friend, do you suppose?”

“But I’ve never heard of this person. I don’t think she had a friend by that name.” Yoshimi looked at Asakawa with exaggerated worry. “Darn it. This looks important. I swear, that girl …” Her voice choked up. Even the slightest thing would set the wheels of grief in motion for her. Asakawa hesitated to ask, but did.

“Did, ah … did Tomoko and her friends by any chance go to this resort during summer vacation?”

Yoshimi shook her head. She trusted her daughter. Tomoko hadn’t been the kind of child to lie about staying over at her friends’. Plus, she had been studying for exams. Asakawa could understand how Yoshimi felt. He decided not to ask about Tomoko any further. No high school student with exams looming in front of her was going to tell her parents that she was renting a cottage with her boyfriend. She would have lied and said she was studying at a friend’s house. Her parents would never know.

“I’ll find the owner and return it.”

Yoshimi bowed her head in silence, and then her husband called from the living room and she hurried out of the kitchen. The bereaved father was seated in front of a newly-installed Buddhist altar, speaking to his daughter’s photograph. His voice was shockingly cheerful, and Asakawa became depressed. He was obviously living in denial. Asakawa could only pray that he’d be able to get through.

Asakawa had found out one thing. If this Nonoyama had in fact lent Tomoko the membership card, he or she would have contacted Tomoko’s parents to ask for the card back upon learning of her death. But Tomoko’s mother knew nothing about the card. Nonoyama couldn’t have forgotten about the card. Even if it were part of a family membership deal, dues were expensive enough that Nonoyama wouldn’t just allow the card to stay lost. So what did this mean? This was how Asakawa figured it: Nonoyama had lent the card to one of the other three, either Iwata, Tsuji, or Nomi. Somehow it passed into Tomoko’s possession, and that’s how things had ended. Nonoyama would have contacted the parents of the person he or she had lent it to. The parents would have searched their child’s belongings. They wouldn’t have found the card. The card was here. If Asakawa contacted the families of the other three victims, he might be able to unearth Nonoyama’s address. He should call right away, tonight. If he couldn’t dig up a clue this way, then it would be unlikely that the card would provide a means for finding when and where the four had been together. At any rate, he wanted to meet Nonoyama and hear what he or she had to say. If he had to, he could always find some way to track down Nonoyama’s address based on the membership number. Asking Pacific Resorts directly probably wouldn’t get him anywhere, but he was sure that his newspaper connections could come up with something.

Someone was calling him. A distant voice. “Dear … dear …” His wife’s flustered voice mingled with the baby’s crying.

“Dear, could you come here for a minute?”

Asakawa came to himself again. Suddenly he wasn’t even sure what he’d been thinking about all this time. There was something strange about the way his daughter was crying. That feeling became stronger as he mounted the stairs.

“What’s wrong?” he asked his wife, accusingly.

“Something’s not right with Yoko. I think something’s happened to her. The way she’s crying—it’s different from how it usually sounds. Do you think she’s sick?”

Asakawa placed his hand on Yoko’s forehead. She didn’t have a fever. But her little hands were trembling. The trembling spread to her whole body, and sometimes her back shook. Her face was beet red, her eyes clenched shut.

“How long has she been like this?”

“It’s because she woke up and there was no one here with her.”

The baby often cried if her mother wasn’t there when she woke up. But she always calmed down when her mother ran to her and held her. When a baby cried it was trying to ask for something, but what … ? The baby was trying to tell them something. She wasn’t just being bratty. Her two tiny hands were clasped tightly over her face … cowering. That was it. The child was wailing out of fear. Yoko turned her face away, and then opened her fists slightly: she seemed to be trying to point forward. Asakawa looked in that direction. There was a pillar. He raised his eyes. Hanging about thirty centimeters from the ceiling was a fist-sized mask, of a hannya—a female demon. Was the child afraid of the mask?

“Hey, look,” said Asakawa, pointing with his chin. They looked at the mask simultaneously, then slowly turned their gazes to each other.

“No way … she’s frightened of a demon?”

Asakawa got to his feet. He took down the demon mask from where it hung on the beam and laid it face down on top of the dresser. Yoko couldn’t see it there. She abruptly stopped crying.

“What’s the matter, Yoko? Did that nasty demon scare you?” Shizu seemed relieved now that she understood, and she happily rubbed her cheek against the child’s. Asakawa wasn’t so easily satisfied; for some reason, he didn’t want to be in this room any longer.

“Hey. Let’s go home,” he urged his wife.

That evening, as soon as he got home from the Oishis’, he called the Tsujis, the Nomis, and the Iwatas, in that order. He asked each family whether they hadn’t been contacted by one of their child’s acquaintances regarding a membership card for a resort club. The last person he spoke to, Iwata’s mother, gave him a long, rambling answer: “There was a call, from someone who said he’d gone to the same high school as my son, an older boy, saying he’d lent my son his resort membership card, and could he get it back … But I searched every corner of my son’s room and never could find it. I’ve been worried about it ever since.” He quickly asked for Nonoyama’s phone number, and immediately called it.

Nonoyama had run into Iwata in Shibuya on the last Sunday in August, and lent him his card, just as Asakawa had suspected. Iwata had told him he was going away with this high school girl he’d been hitting on. Summer vacation’s almost over, y’know. I want to really live it up once before it’s over, or else I won’t be able to buckle down and study for the exams.

Nonoyama had laughed when he heard this. You idiot, prep school students aren’t supposed to have summer vacations.

The last Sunday in August had been the 26th: if they’d gone anywhere for the night, it would have to have been the 27th, 28th, 29th, or 30th. Asakawa didn’t know about the college prep school, but for the high school girls at least, fall semester began on the first of September.

Maybe it was because she was tired from being so long in unfamiliar surroundings: Yoko soon fell asleep right next to her mother. When he put his ear to the bedroom door, he could hear both of them breathing regularly, fast asleep. Nine in the evening … this was Asakawa’s time to relax. Until his wife and child were asleep, there was no room in this tiny condo for him to settle down to work.

Asakawa got a beer from the fridge and poured it into a glass. It tasted special tonight. He’d made definite progress, finding that membership card. There was a good chance that sometime between the 27th and the 30th of August, Shuichi Iwata and the other three had stayed at facilities belonging to Pacific Resorts. The most likely place was Villa Log Cabin at Pacific Land in South Hakone. South Hakone was the only Pacific Resorts property close enough to be a viable candidate, and he couldn’t imagine a group of poor students going all out and staying at a hotel. They would probably have used the membership to rent one of the cottages on the cheap. They were only five thousand yen a night for members, which came to a little over a thousand apiece.

He had the phone number for Villa Log Cabin at hand. He put his notes on the table. The quickest thing would be to simply call the front desk and ask if a party of four had stayed there under the name Nonoyama. But they’d never tell him over the phone. Naturally, anybody who had risen within the firm to the position of rental cottage manager would have been well trained to consider it his duty to protect guests’ privacy. Even if he revealed his position as a reporter for a major newspaper and clearly stated his reasons for inquiring, the manager would never tell him over the phone. Asakawa considered contacting the local bureau and getting them to use a lawyer with whom they had connections to ask for a look at the guest register. The only people a manager was legally bound to show the register to were the police and attorneys. Asakawa could try to pose as one or the other, but he’d probably be spotted immediately, and that would mean trouble for the newspaper. It was safer and more effective to go through channels.

But that would take at least three or four days, and he hated to wait that long. He wanted to know now. His passion for the case was such that he couldn’t bear to wait three days. What in the world was going to come of this? If indeed the four of them had stayed the night at Villa Log Cabin at Pacific Land in South Hakone at the end of August, and if indeed that clue allowed him to unravel the riddle of their deaths—well, what could it have been anyway? Virus, virus. He was all too aware that the only reason he was calling it a virus was to keep himself from being overawed by the thought of some mysterious thing being behind it all. It made sense—to a degree—to marshal the power of science in facing down supernatural power. He wasn’t going to get anywhere fighting a thing he didn’t understand with words he didn’t understand. He had to translate the thing he didn’t understand into words he did.

Asakawa recalled Yoko’s cries. Why was she so frightened when she saw the demon mask this afternoon? On the way home on the train, he’d asked his wife, “Hey, have you been teaching Yoko about demons?”

“What?”

“You know, with picture books or something like that. Have you been teaching her to be afraid of demons?”

“No way. Why would I?”

The conversation had ended there. Shizu was unconcerned, but Asakawa worried. That kind of fear only existed on a deep, spiritual level. It was different from fearing something because you had been taught to fear it. Ever since he’d come down out of the trees, man had lived in fear of something or other. Thunder, typhoons, wild beasts, volcanic eruptions, the dark … The first time a child experiences thunder and lightning, he or she feels an instinctive fear—that was understandable. To begin with, thunder was real. It really existed. But what about demons? The dictionary would tell you that demons were imaginary monsters, or the spirits of dead people. If Yoko was going to be afraid of the demon because it looked scary, then she should also have been afraid of models of Godzilla—after all, they were made to look fearsome, too. She’d seen one, once, in a department store show window: a cunningly-made Godzilla replica. Far from being frightened, she had stared at it intently, eyes glowing with curiosity. How did you explain that? The only thing he knew for sure was that Godzilla, no matter how you looked at it, was an imaginary monster. So what about demons … ? And are demons unique to Japan? No, other cultures have the same type of thing. Devils … The second beer wasn’t tasting as good as the first one. Is there anything else Yoko’s afraid of? That’s right, there is. Darkness. She’s terribly afraid of the dark. She absolutely never goes into an unlit room alone. “Yo-ko,” sun-child. But darkness, too, really existed, as light’s opposite pole. Even now, Yoko was asleep in her mother’s embrace, in a dark room.