“What the hell?”
“That’s the inn the guy runs.”
“I know that. But why would I want to stay there with you?”
“You’d rather not?”
“For starters, we haven’t got time to lounge around at an inn.”
“Even if we find her now, there’s no way to get to Izu Oshima right now. We can’t go anywhere today. Don’t you think it’d be better to get a good night’s sleep and marshal our energies for tomorrow?”
Asakawa felt an indescribable aversion to spending the night with Ryuji at an inn. But there was no alternative, so he gave up and went out to buy food and tell Tetsuaki Miura they’d be staying the night. Then he and Ryuji ate their takeout and drank their oolong tea. It was seven in the evening. A brief respite.
His arms were tired and his shoulders stiff. His eyes swam, he took off his glasses. Instead, he held the files close enough to his face that he could lick them if he wanted. He had to use all his concentration or he was afraid he’d miss something, which tired him even more.
Nine o’clock. The silence of the archives was broken by Ryuji’s mad screech. “I’ve found it, finally! So that’s where she was hiding.”
Asakawa felt himself drawn to the file. He sat down next to Ryuji and put his glasses back on to look at it. It said:
Izu Oshima, Sashikiji. Sadako Yamamura. Age 10. The envelope was postmarked August 29, 1958. Subject sent this with a note predicting it would be imprinted with her own name. She’s the real thing, without a doubt. Attached was a photograph showing the character yama, “mountain”, in white against a black background. Asakawa had seen that character somewhere before.
“That’s … that’s it.” His voice trembled. On the video, the scene of the eruption of Mt Mihara had been followed immediately by a shot of the character for “mountain”, identical to this one. Not only that, the screen of the old television in the tenth scene had displayed the character sada. This woman’s name was Sadako Yamamura.
“What do you think?” asked Ryuji.
“No question about it. This is it.”
At long last Asakawa found hope. The thought crossed his mind that maybe, just maybe, they’d beat the deadline.
October 16—Tuesday
10:15 a.m. Ryuji and Asakawa were on a high-speed passenger boat that had just left port at Atami. There was no regular ferry linking Oshima and the mainland, so they’d had to leave the car in the parking lot next to the Atami Korakuen Hotel. Asakawa was still clutching the key in his left hand.
They were scheduled to arrive on Oshima in an hour. A strong wind blew and it looked like rain. Most of the passengers hadn’t ventured out onto the deck, but stayed huddled in their reserved seats. Asakawa and Ryuji had been in too much of a hurry to check before buying their tickets, but it looked like a typhoon was approaching. The waves were large, and the rocking of the boat was worse than usual.
Sipping a can of hot coffee, Asakawa went over the whole chain of events again in his mind. He wasn’t sure if they should congratulate themselves for having come this far, or reproach themselves for not having found out about “Sadako Yamamura” and set out for Oshima Island earlier. Everything had hung on noticing that the black curtain flashing momentarily over the images on the video was eyelids, blinking. The images had been recorded not by machine but by the human sensory apparatus. Essentially, the person had focused her energies on the video deck at cabin B-4 while it was recording, and created not a psychic photo but a psychic video. This surely indicated paranormal powers of immeasurable proportions. Ryuji had assumed that such a person would stand out from the crowd, and gone looking for her, and had ultimately found out her name. Not that they knew for sure that “Sadako Yamamura” was, in fact, the culprit. She was still just a suspect. They were heading to Oshima in order to follow up on their suspicions.
The sea was rough, causing the boat to pitch and roll violently. Asakawa felt an ugly premonition come over him. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea for both of them to go to Oshima. What if they got tied down by the typhoon and couldn’t leave the island? Who’d save his wife and daughter? The deadline was almost at hand. 10:04 p.m., the day after tomorrow.
Asakawa warmed his hands with the coffee can and shrank down into his seat. “I still can’t believe it, you know. That a human being could really do something like that.”
“It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, now, does it?” Ryuji answered without taking his eyes from his map of Oshima. “Anyway, it’s a reality staring you in the face. You know, all we’re seeing is one small part of a continuously changing phenomenon.”
Ryuji set the map down on his knee. “You know about the Big Bang, right? They believe that the universe was born in a tremendous explosion twenty billion years ago. I can mathematically express the form of the universe, from its birth to the present. It’s all about differential equations. Most phenomena in the universe can be expressed with differential equations, you know. Using them, you can figure out what the universe looked like a hundred million years ago, ten billion years ago, even a second or a tenth of a second after that initial explosion. But. But. No matter how far we go back, no matter how we try to express it, we just can’t know what it looked like at zero, at the very moment of the explosion. And there’s another thing. How is our universe going to end? Is the universe expanding or contracting? See, we don’t know the beginning and we don’t know the end; all we can know about is the in-between stuff. And that, my friend, is what life is like.”
Ryuji poked Asakawa in the arm.
“I guess you’re right. I can look at photo albums and get a reasonable idea of what I was like when I was three years old, or when I was a newborn.”
“See what I mean? But what’s before birth, what’s after death—these are things we just don’t know.”
“After death? When you die, that’s the end, you just disappear. That’s all, right?”
“Hey, have you ever died?”
“No, I haven’t.” Asakawa shook his head with utter earnestness.
“Well then you don’t know, do you? You don’t know where you go after you die.”
“Are you saying there’s such a thing as spirits?”
“Look, all I can say is, I just don’t know. But when you’re talking about the birth of life, I think things go a lot smoother when you posit the existence of a soul. None of the claptrap of modern molecular biologists actually sounds real. What are they really saying? ‘Take hundreds each of twenty-odd different amino acids, put them in a bowl, mix them all together, add a little electrical energy, and voilà, protein, the building block of life.’ And they really expect us to believe that? Might as well tell us we’re all children of God—at least that’d be easier to swallow. What I think is that there’s a completely different kind of energy involved at the moment of birth; almost like there’s a certain will at work.”
Ryuji seemed to lean in a little closer to Asakawa, but then he suddenly changed the subject. “By the way, I couldn’t help but notice you were engrossed in the Professor’s oeuvre back at the Memorial Hall. Come across anything interesting?”
Now that he mentioned it, Asakawa remembered that he had started to read something. Thoughts have energy, and that energy …
“I think it said something about thoughts being energy.”
“What else?”
“I