As he savored the satisfaction of having her all to himself at last, Toyama's frustration and jealousy melted away.
He lost track of time. He forgot himself completely as they touched each other's bodies, as he stroked her hair, as he lifted her head and ran his lips over her neck; naturally, his desire progressed to the next level. But every time he started to reach a hand between her legs, she would stop his hand—sometimes gently, and sometimes brusquely. Finally, as if to distract him, she reached into his shorts.
It took him no time at all to climax: her hands moved, and in response Toyama finished, stifling a moan.
Not a drop of his ejaculate hit his clothes or the floor: Sadako caught it all in her hands. In his abandon, Toyama was unable to figure out what she was doing now. From the sounds, he thought she might be rubbing her hands together in it. Once she'd covered her hands in his fluid like lather from a bar of soap, she put her arms around his face, his neck, and embraced him. He smelled his own.
Then Sadako whispered in his ear, barely loud enough to hear, "Don't ever love me more than you do now. I don't want to lose you, Toyama."
It didn't feel as if she'd said the words at all, but rather as if they'd been delivered straight into his brain.
Toyama, I love you.
Was he hallucinating from the strength of his desire? No—her voice pressed itself directly into his mind.
These were the words he wanted everyone to hear—
if indeed he was hearing them himself. He especially wanted Shigemori to hear them.
"Sadako," he whispered, in a dry, scratchy voice,
"you'd make me so happy if you'd just say you love me in front of everyone..."
But she shook her head.
At that moment his foot hit the cabinet. He heard something fall. He'd forgotten himself in his love for Sadako, but just for an instant his attention was claimed by the altar hidden at his feet, and the offering lain in front of it.
Toyama, I love you.
Again, her voice coming into his brain—and together with it he thought he heard, from somewhere, the sound of a baby crying. It wasn't his imagination: he definitely heard a newborn baby crying, behind Sadako.
9
November 1990
Every cell in his body was reliving the touch of Sadako's skin. This wasn't like a mental recollection: it felt as if the memory were engraved in his very DNA.
He told Yoshino about that episode from his youth, but he didn't go into every single little detail. He just gave him the general outlines, the salient points of the day of the final dress rehearsal. But as he spoke he was remembering Sadako's voice, the softness of her skin, the feel of her hair, as if it were yesterday.
Toyama, I love you.
Her voice still lingered in his ear—whether he'd really heard it or only hallucinated it, he could recreate its resonance, its mysterious ambience, exactly. It was the voice of the only woman he'd ever met with whom he could have been truly happy.
He wanted to see her again, if at all possible. Where was she now? What was she doing? The fact that Yoshino couldn't find her was at least proof that she hadn't made a name for herself as an actress. That in itself he found unbelievable, for a woman with such a unique allure as hers. He began to feel uneasy.
He found it took courage just to ask. But somehow he managed to voice his query. "By the way, Mr.
Yoshino. What do you think Sadako's doing now? Please, don't keep anything back from me—whatever you might know."
Yoshino rested his chin on his hand; he licked the cover of his fountain pen with the tip of his tongue.
"Of all the ridiculous... I'm trying to find out what happened to her. How could I have any idea what she's doing now?"
"I think you people know something. Don't you think it's a bit unfair for you to ask me all these questions and then not answer mine?"
"But..."
Toyama leaned forward earnestly and looked Yoshino square in his bearded face.
"Is Sadako alive?"
He had to come straight out and ask it: otherwise they'd keep going in circles.
Yoshino looked taken aback by Toyama's serious-ness. He made a strange face, then shook his head twice, gently.
"I hate to say it, but she's probably..." Warning him that nothing was definite yet, Yoshino told Toyama that the information his colleague Asakawa had come across gave them reason to speculate that Sadako Yamamura was no longer alive. There was a possibility that she'd been involved in some kind of incident, and that it had happened right after her disappearance from the troupe twenty-four years ago. Again, it was still only specula-tion. But...
But it was enough. It was the development Toyama had feared, and it didn't surprise him. He'd had a feeling, for he didn't know how long now, that Sadako was no longer of this world.
Still, hearing Yoshino state it as a near-certainty caused a physical reaction in Toyama that was far more honest than he'd expected. To his surprise, tears began not just rolling down his cheeks, but actually falling to splash on the floor. In his forty-seven years he'd never dreamed his body was capable of such a thing. She was the one burning love of his life... But that was twenty-four years ago. He was more experienced now—he knew he was even something of a playboy—and now he was weeping over confirmation of Sadako's death. He couldn't help but see something comical in it.
Startled, Yoshino searched in his satchel until he found a tissue. Wordlessly he offered it to Toyama.
"Sorry, I don't know what..." Toyama trailed off and blew his nose.
"I know how you must be feeling."
But Yoshino's words sounded utterly fake.
How could you know?
Toyama started to blow his nose again, but then decided to ask something that had been on his mind all along.
"By the way, you said you'd talked on the phone with some of my old colleagues from the troupe."
"Yes. Iino, Kitajima, and Kato."
"And that they all knew I had a relationship with Sadako."
"That's right."
That didn't sit right with Toyama, given the excessive care Sadako had taken to ensure that their relationship wasn't made public. Toyama, too, in response to her demands, had made a point of not mentioning it to anybody. In spite of all that, they knew. He wondered how.
"I don't get it. I was pretty sure we'd kept it under wraps."
Seeing that Toyama had gotten his emotions under control, Yoshino ventured a smile.
"You were fooling yourself, my friend. When two people are in love, people notice, no matter how much they try to hide it."
"Did they say anything specific?"
Yoshino gave a little half-laugh, half-sigh. "Oh, maybe you didn't know about this. Well, it seems someone played a trick on you."
"A trick?"
"This is twenty-four years ago we're talking about, after all, so it seemed pointless to me at first, but hearing what you had to say has cleared something up for me.
Things make sense now."
Yoshino then told Toyama something he'd heard from Kitajima. Not precisely as Kitajima had told him—
he blended what he'd gotten from Kitajima with what he'd just learned from Toyama to come up with his own version of what had happened.
It was an April afternoon, the closing day of their three-week run.