Yoshino gave his card to a twenty-something intern standing at the entrance to the rehearsal hall and asked him to call Uchimura.
“You have a visitor from the Daily News, sir.” The intern spoke in a resonant, actorly voice, calling to the director, who sat by the wall watching over everyone’s performances. Uchimura turned around in surprise. Realizing his visitor was from the press, he was all smiles as he approached Yoshino. Theater companies all treated the press with great politeness. Even the smallest mention in a newspaper’s arts column could make a big difference in ticket sales. With only a week left until opening night, he assumed the reporter had come to take a peek at the rehearsals. The Daily News had never paid much attention to him before, so Uchimura poured on the charm, determined to make the most of the chance. But the minute he learned the real reason for Yoshino’s visit, Uchimura abruptly seemed to lose all interest in him. Suddenly he was extremely busy. He looked around the hall until he spied a smallish actor in his fifties, seated on a chair. “Over here, Shin,” he said in a shrill voice, summoning the man. Something in the overly familiar tone he used when addressing the middle-aged actor—or maybe it was his womanish voice itself, combined with his ungainly long arms and legs—gave the brawny Yoshino the creeps. This guy is different, he thought.
“Shin baby, you don’t go on until the second act. Be a dear and talk to this man about Sadako Yamamura. You remember that creepy girl, don’t you?”
Shin’s voice was one Yoshino had heard before, dubbing Japanese dialogue onto Western movies shown on TV. Shin Arima was better known as a voice actor than for his work onstage. He was one of the other original members still in the troupe.
“Sadako Yamamura?” Arima scratched his balding head as he tried to reel in quarter-century-old memories. “Oh, that Sadako Yamamura.” He grimaced. Evidently the woman had left a deep impression on him.
“You remember? Well, then, I’m rehearsing here, so take him up to my room, won’t you?” Uchimura bowed slightly and walked back toward the assembled players; by the time he reached the place where he’d been sitting, he was once more every inch the lordly director.
Opening a door marked President, Arima pointed to a leather sofa set and said, “Have a seat.” If this was the President’s office, it meant that the troupe was organized like a business. No doubt the director doubled as CEO.
“So what brings you out in the middle of a storm like this?” Arima’s face glistened red with sweat from rehearsing, but a kindly smile lurked in the depths of his eyes. The director looked like the type of person who was always weighing the other’s motives while conversing, but Arima was the kind of guy who answered everything you asked him honestly, without covering anything up. Interviews could either be easy or painful, depending on the subject’s personality.
“I’m sorry to bother you when you’re so busy like this.” Yoshino sat down and took out his notepad. He assumed his usual pose, pen clutched in his right hand.
“I never expected to hear the name Sadako Yamamura, not now. That was ages ago.”
Arima was recalling his youth. He missed the youthful energy he’d had then, running away from the commercial theater company he’d originally belonged to and founding a new troupe with his friends.
“Mr Arima, when you placed her name a few minutes ago you said, ‘that Sadako Yamamura.’ What exactly did you mean by that?”
“That girl—let me see, when was it she joined, anyway? I believe we’d only been around a few years. The company was really taking off then, and we had more kids wanting to join every year. Anyway, that Sadako, she was a strange one.”
“In what way was she strange?”
“Hmm.” Arima put his hand to his jaw and thought for a while. Come to think of it, why do I have the impression that she was strange?
“Was there something in particular about her, something that stood out?”
“No, to look at her, she was just an ordinary girl. A little tall, but quiet. She was always alone.”
“Alone?”
“Well, usually the interns become quite close to each other. But she never tried to get involved with the others.”
There was always someone like that in any group. It was hard for Yoshino to imagine that this alone had made her stand out.
“How would you describe her, say, in a word?”
“In a word? Hmm. Eerie, I’d have to say.” Without hesitating, he called her “eerie.” And Uchimura had called her “that creepy girl”. Yoshino couldn’t help but feel sorry for a young woman of eighteen whom everybody characterized as eerie. He began to imagine some grotesque figure of a woman.
“What was it about her that made her seem eerie?”
Now that he stopped to think about it, it seemed odd to Arima that his impressions of an intern who’d been around for no longer than a year, and twenty-five years ago at that, should still seem so fresh. There was something tugging at the back of his mind. Something had happened, something that had served to fix her name in his memory.
“Oh, yes, now I remember. It was right in this room.” Arima looked around the president’s office. Thinking back on the incident, he could vividly recall even how the furniture had been arranged in those days, when this room was still being used as the main office.
“You see, we’ve rehearsed in this space since the beginning, but it used to be a lot smaller. This room we’re in now used to be our main office. There were lockers over there, and we had a frosted-glass divider standing right about here … Right, and there used to be a TV right there—well, we have a different one there now.” Arima pointed as he spoke.
“A TV?” Yoshino narrowed his eyes and adjusted his grip on his pen.
“Right. One of those old black and white jobs.”
“Okay. So what happened?” Yoshino urged him to go on.
“Rehearsal had just ended and nearly everybody had gone home. I wasn’t happy with one of my lines, and I came up here to go over my part one more time. I was right over there, see …” Arima pointed to the door. “I was standing there, looking into the room, and through the frosted glass I could see the TV screen flickering. I thought, well, someone’s watching TV. Mind you, I wasn’t mistaken. It was on the other side of the divider, so I couldn’t actually see what was on the screen, but I could see the quavering black and white light. There was no sound. The room was dim, and as I came around the divider, I wondered who was in front of the TV, and I peered at the person’s face. It was Sadako Yamamura. But when I came around to the other side of the divider and stood beside her, there was nothing on the screen. Of course, I automatically assumed that she’d just switched it off. At that point, I had no doubts yet. But …”
Arima seemed reluctant to continue.
“Please, go on.”
“I spoke to her. I said, ‘You’d better hurry home before the trains stop running.’ And I turned on the desk lamp. But it wouldn’t turn on. I looked and saw that it wasn’t plugged in. I crouched down to plug it in, and that’s when I noticed it: the television wasn’t plugged in, either.”
Arima vividly recalled the chill that had run up his spine when he saw the plug lying there on the floor.
Yoshino wanted to confirm what he’d just heard. “So even though it wasn’t plugged in, the television was definitely on?”
“That’s right. It made me shudder, let me tell you. I raised my head without thinking and looked at Sadako. What