‘I’m just having trouble imagining any of the guys selling out like that.’
‘You can trust them if you want, Masaharu, but one thing’s for certain: there is a traitor in our midst.’
‘I don’t know. What if it was leaked by accident? Somebody could’ve stolen the program from somebody when they weren’t watching.’
‘So, the thief wasn’t one of us, but someone close to one of us?’
‘That would make sense,’ Masaharu agreed, though he objected to the word ‘thief’. It wasn’t like they’d taken a wallet. This felt different, somehow.
‘Anyway, we’ll have to talk to the group,’ Minobe said, folding his arms.
Six people, Minobe included, had been involved in Submarine’s creation. All of them gathered during lunch break that day at Laboratory No 6. Minobe explained the situation, but no one had a clue how it could have happened.
One of the seniors in the group was talking. ‘I mean, no one in our group would have leaked it. If any of us wanted to sell it, wouldn’t they have gone to the rest of us first? You know, talk to the other guys, sell it together?’
Minobe asked if anyone had loaned the program to anyone. Three of the students said they’d let friends play it but none of them had left their friends alone with the tape long enough to copy it.
‘That leaves only one other option, then,’ Minobe said. ‘Somebody’s program was stolen without them knowing it. Think back, think hard. If it wasn’t one of us, then somebody we know gave or sold it to these jokers.’
The meeting ended and Masaharu returned to his seat to mull things over. There wasn’t even a chance anyone else had taken his tape. He always kept his copy of Submarine along with his other data tapes in his desk at home. On the rare occasions he took them out, he never let them leave his sight, not even at the laboratory.
More than the mystery, however, the situation intrigued him for an entirely different reason. Submarine was a program they had made as a lark, a game entirely for their own amusement, until someone out there had the idea that it could be sold and people would pay good money for it. What had started as a program had become a product. It was an entirely novel idea and maybe, he thought, it was a very good one.
Two weeks after his chat with Reiko, Masaharu was at the public library with his friend Kakiuchi, who was researching a paper. Kakiuchi was in the same hockey team at school. He was looking through old newspapers – archival editions with condensed print – when he started to chuckle.
‘Check this out,’ he said, pointing at an article. ‘I remember this. My parents had me standing in line every morning to get toilet paper.’
The article was from November 2, 1973. The photo showed at least three hundred people crowding into a supermarket north of Osaka for toilet paper during the peak of the oil shock. Kakiuchi’s research was on electrical power demand.
‘They lined up in Tokyo, too?’ Kakiuchi asked.
‘Yeah, though I think it was more about detergent there. My cousin said he used to get sent out on shopping missions.’
‘Yeah, look at this: a housewife bought forty thousand yen worth of detergent in a western Tokyo supermarket. Not your mom, I presume?’ Kakiuchi said with a grin.
Masaharu laughed. ‘Nah, we’d already moved by then.’ He’d been in the first year of high school that year, too busy adjusting to his new life in Osaka to pay much attention to the news.
He wondered suddenly what grade Yukiho had been in. He guessed she’d have been in fifth grade. He had trouble picturing her at that age.
Then he remembered what Reiko had said about Yukiho’s mother dying when she was in sixth grade. That would make it 1974. Pulling the May 1974 paper out of the stack, he spread it out on the table. He scanned the headlines: DIET ASSEMBLY IN SESSION, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION LAWS AMENDED, ADVOCATES FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS PROTEST THE EUGENIC PROTECTION ACT. There was a little bit about the Japan Consumer Alliance having paved the way for the first Seven Eleven to open in Tokyo’s Koto ward.
Masaharu turned to the society pages, his eye travelling down the tightly packed text until he found a small article with the headline GAS POISONING DUE TO EXTINGUISHED FLAME?
‘The body of Fumiyo Nishimoto (age 36) was found in her Yoshida Heights apartment in Ōe, a district in Osaka’s Ikuno ward. Mrs Nishimoto was discovered by an employee of the real estate agency responsible for her building, who called an ambulance to the scene. According to a report by Ikuno ward police, the apartment was filled with gas at the time of discovery, leading them to conclude that Mrs Nishimoto’s death was due to gas poisoning. It is thought that a pot of soup on the stove had boiled over, extinguishing the flame and filling the apartment with gas without alerting Mrs Nishimoto.’
The story matched exactly what he’d heard from Reiko, except the paper didn’t mention Yukiho being there, probably out of consideration for her age at the time.
‘Find something interesting?’ Kakiuchi asked.
‘Yeah, kind of,’ Masaharu said, pointing to the article and telling him about his student.
‘Wow.’ Kakiuchi pulled the paper closer and read through the article himself. ‘Ōe, huh? That’s Naito’s hood.’
‘Really? He’s from over there?’
‘Yeah, pretty sure.’
Naito was a younger kid on their ice hockey team, one year behind them.
‘Maybe I’ll ask him about it,’ Masaharu said, taking down the apartment building name he found listed in the article.
It was another two weeks before he got around to talking to Naito, a short, skinny fellow with great skating skills, even though his weight made his body checks kind of a joke. Still, he was a nice guy who was always willing to lend a hand, which secured him a place of authority on the team.
By contrast, Masaharu had hardly come to practice since senior year began. And he had only started hockey in the first place because he was afraid he’d get fat sitting around programming all day and track didn’t appeal to him.
He caught Naito while the team was out training on the athletics field.
‘Yeah, the lady who gassed herself? I remember that. It was a while ago, though,’ Naito said. ‘It happened next to my house, actually. Well, not right next to it, but walking distance.’
‘So it was, like, the talk of the town?’
‘People knew about it, sure. Though what really got everyone’s attention were the rumours that it wasn’t an accident.’
‘You mean she did it on purpose? Suicide?’
‘Yep,’ Naito said, looking at him. ‘So what’s it got to do with you?’
‘It’s less me, and more a friend.’ He explained the situation to Naito.
Naito’s eyes went wide. ‘Wow. You’re teaching her daughter, then? That’s a coincidence.’
‘But what about these rumours? Why’d they think it was a suicide?’
‘I don’t know all the details. I was just in high school.’ Naito scratched his head, then his eyes lit up. ‘Wait, maybe that guy’d know something about it.’
‘What guy?’
‘The guy at the real estate agency I’m renting my parking space from. I remember him talking about the gas thing once. He was one of the ones who said it was a suicide.’
‘The article said it was a real estate agent who found the body. Think it might have been him?’
‘Hey, could be!’
‘Think you could find out?’ Masaharu said. He knew it was asking a lot of a guy he barely knew, but he was an upperclassman compared to Naito and the school sports teams took seniority very seriously.
Naito scratched his head again. ‘Sure, no problem,’ he said, giving Masaharu a nervous smile.