“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.