“She chose to perish, like some exalted monk of old?” the detective asked without sarcasm. There was no other possible interpretation; all that was left was to accept the facts as they were presented.
The younger one interrupted the exchange. “In the suicide note she refers to herself as powerless, small. She sounded as though she held herself in contempt. Do you know of anything that would have caused her to lose confidence in herself so suddenly?”
“We were visiting the herb garden to film for a show we were putting together on the group who vanished there the day before yesterday.”
“Ah yes, that one.”
“Have you been to the site?”
The two men nodded. “We went there initially but were called to join the rest of the search parties. We scoured the mountains between the park and the Ito Skyline. Couldn’t find any traces at all.”
Saeko looked hard as if boring through the men’s skulls and let her line of sight trail out the window, along Nishikigaura to a single point on the hillsides. For the first time she realized that the herb gardens’ slope was visible from her room. Come to think of it, she had been able to see the hotel from the park yesterday.
Saeko was more sensitive than not. She was proud of her ability to hear things and see phenomena that others wouldn’t or couldn’t notice. It was perhaps because of that sensitivity that she had felt such a heavy physical and emotional strain at the gardens yesterday. Even now, she wasn’t sure how to describe the experience. In purely physical terms, her body’s natural sense of regulation had been disturbed somehow — that was closest to the mark. She thought back to the almost unbearable pressure she had felt on her bladder, the sudden dryness of her throat, the heaviness of her feet. If she were ever abducted by aliens and spirited away to a different planet, she’d feel much the same way.
If she had felt the change so acutely, though, it must have felt worse for a psychic like Shigeko. To use her own word, she’d felt small, and Saeko could grasp the sense of it. If the world, which had provided them with a secure footing until now, had lost its own supports and begun to crumble, a human being could only feel as powerless as an ant.
It couldn’t have helped that Shigeko had a growing sense that Hashiba didn’t need her. Saeko was beginning to understand the process through which the elderly woman had lost her confidence so.
“I think Ms. Torii grew tired of living,” she summarized her thoughts, deciding against trying to explain the shock Shigeko must have felt at the park. After all, they had been there and felt nothing.
Other than Saeko, the detectives spoke with Kagayama, Kato, and Hosokawa, and after clearing up any possible contradictions between everyone’s stories, left the hotel. With Shigeko dead, it was more than likely that the program would be sent back to the drawing board. Saeko and the others returned to their rooms and began to get ready to check out of the hotel. There was no longer any reason for them to stay in Atami.
The station escalators led Saeko out into the crush of the downtown crowds. It was an evening late in the year, and people walked with fast, narrow steps. The Christmas songs seemed to come from the town as a whole rather than from the shops lining the streets. When it dawned on Saeko that it was Christmas Eve, she stopped next to a high-end jewelry store and found herself looking in through the show windows. At the same time, Hashiba’s face appeared in her mind. In her thirties, Saeko no longer found herself caught up in the frenzy of Christmas, but it still brought to mind the image of couples.
She remembered the last Christmas she had spent with her ex-husband; they might as well have been strangers. When she was young her father had always given her a present, always somehow educationaclass="underline" a backgammon set, a microscope, an electric typewriter, a book binding kit, a telescope, an encyclopedia, a lithograph, a globe … One time he’d come close to setting up a loom in her quarters. She’d often wanted him to get her cute, girlish accessories, but her wish had never been granted.
Coming out of the bustle of the shopping district into a residential area, Saeko saw a house with a display of black flowers.
After the procedural autopsy, Shigeko’s body had been returned to her home in the Oimachi district of Tokyo in preparation for tonight’s wake. Saeko was not particularly surprised when she’d heard that no specific cause of death had been discovered. It was just as she’d expected.
Shigeko’s home was a stand alone that had been built on the land of her old family home with the money she made from her television appearances. The house was too large for just one person, and now its ample spaces only accentuated the sparse mood of a wake where no one seemed truly saddened by the deceased’s passing, driving home just how alone Shigeko had been during her life.
If I were to die now, it would be like this for me.
Just when the thought crossed her mind, she caught a glimpse of Hashiba coming through the front garden gate. She looked around, making sure there was no one else they knew nearby, and ran over and took his hands and nuzzled her head into his chest. Immediately she felt comforted by his warmth, the lingering cold from her walk from the station seeming to just melt away. It may have looked as though she were mourning Shigeko’s death, but in fact she was trying to suppress her joy at seeing Hashiba again. Without such camouflage, her feelings threatened to explode in a manner unbefitting the occasion. Saeko was surprised by how much she had missed Hashiba after only a day apart. Where had her melancholy after her divorce gone?
“I’m sorry, but I have to go straight back to the station after this, then to Atami,” Hashiba whispered, reading Saeko correctly.
Immediately, Saeko’s thawing body turned rigid. Hashiba hadn’t asked her outright, but Saeko had been looking forward to them spending at least Christmas Eve together. Her romantic mood spoilt, she expressed displeasure with a tilt of her head and asked, “Why?”
“To get this program wrapped up,” Hashiba winced and spat out.
He took Saeko aside and began succinctly to explain the changes to the program agreed to in the production meeting the day before. Rather than see Shigeko’s death as a throwback, the producer had actually asked Hashiba to edit together as much as possible of the footage they already had. The film crew had already assembled in Atami.
If Shigeko had died in an accident during the course of filming then the program would have been canceled, but a death from natural causes was deemed not to require such a measure. On the contrary, a well-known psychic’s mysterious death, potentially by suicide, was newsworthy enough for other channels to cover it. They had to get the program out as soon as possible so as to net the highest ratings.
“It’s too soon,” Hashiba let out with a bitter smile.
Hashiba had been the one to ask the elderly Shigeko to come all the way out to Atami for the filming, and Saeko saw that he felt responsible. The ambience at Herb Gardens was weirder than anything before, and even those without any particular psychic powers had registered it and shuddered. How much more of that anomaly did Shigeko, with her honed antenna, sense and ingest? The impact on her body must have been immense.
“But can you finish the program without her?”
They would need to find someone to take Shigeko’s place. At such short notice, however, involving a celebrity was a tall order, and they would likely end up having to book one of the female newsreaders from the station. Even if they managed to book a star, it didn’t really solve matters. The other idea was to get a scientist, and names had been suggested.