"Everybody was told to keep quiet about it."
"By whom?"
"Shigemori, of course."
"Shigemori heard the tape?"
"It would seem so. It so happened he was in the green room at the time. When Sadako's voice came over the intercom, he heard it. That's why he rushed to Sadako all in a tizzy like that."
Both Yoshino and Toyama knew what had happened to Shigemori after that.
The last performance went off without a hitch.
They cleaned up the stage, and then had the wrap party as scheduled. Once that was finished Shigemori had collected the other troupe leaders for a game of mah-jongg, as was his wont. According to Yoshino's information, at that time one of the leading actors, Arima, had re-counted to Shigemori an example of Sadako's peculiar powers. This in turn prompted Shigemori to get excited and say, "I'm going to storm her room."
He was unusually drunk, and no one could restrain him by word or action. His companions decided that it would be dangerous for him physically if he drank any more; everybody gave up on mah-jongg and began to get ready to go home. But nobody (they said) expected Shigemori to actually go through with it.
What really happened would remain forever en-shrouded in darkness. Not a soul knew if Shigemori's passions had really driven him to visit Sadako's place in the middle of the night. Shigemori did show up at the rehearsal space the next day, but he was so quiet as to be almost unrecognizable. He just wandered around aimlessly, doing nothing in particular, and then he sat down in a chair and stopped breathing, as if going to sleep. The cause of death was determined to be sudden heart fail-ure. Everyone assumed that the impossible performance schedule had hastened his death, and nobody was particularly surprised.
There was something ironic in the story, Toyama felt. He thought of all the agonizing days he'd spent in the sound booth back then, all the jealousy he'd suffered, despite Sadako's assurances that she loved him, because of her insistence on keeping things secret from Shigemori. He'd always thought how wonderful it would be if everyone could hear the sincerity in her voice when she said she loved him. Ironically, they had. He'd wished that Shigemori in particular could hear it, as a reproof for the way he was using his authority to hit on Sadako.
In fact, he had.
Toyama hung his head as he thought about it. He'd told Sadako, straight out, his heart's secret desire.
...Sadako...you'd make me so happy if you'd just say you love me in front of everyone...
The tape had been broadcast from the sound booth.
Toyama himself was master of the sound booth. At the time, he'd been out to lunch, but Sadako probably didn't know that. Knowing what he most wanted, Sadako had no doubt concluded that she knew who had played her moans over the intercom.
There was no sense stamping his feet about it now.
He didn't know what had happened with Shigemori that night, but it was all but certain that Sadako's disappearance was connected to her relationship with Toyama.
She probably felt he'd betrayed her. Nothing could be more of an affront to a young woman than what she thought he'd done to her: betrayed her and played her sex-cries over a loudspeaker.
And so she'd quit the troupe, and left Toyama without a word.
He felt drained of all strength. Sadako was probably dead. He couldn't explain himself to her. It was too late for regrets. It was all over, everything. But Okubo's mischief was in a perverse way just what Toyama had wanted. He didn't know how to feel about it.
He recalled little Okubo's face. For the first time in a long time, he realized he wanted to see Okubo. To see him, and to find out in greater detail what had happened.
But Toyama himself had quit Theater Group Soaring two months after Sadako had left, and he'd lost touch with his former colleagues.
"By the way, you wouldn't know how I could get in touch with Okubo, would you?"
Yoshino, as a reporter, seemed like he might have better information than Toyama about things like that.
After all, he'd tracked down all eight former interns.
"Okubo is...well, he's dead."
"Dead?"
Taken by surprise, Toyama jerked backward. Something felt wrong.
"I was only able to make contact with four of you, yourself included."
"What about the other four?"
"Don't you see? They're all dead."
Toyama and Okubo were the oldest of their group; Toyama was forty-seven, the same age Okubo would have been if he'd lived. The same age Shigemori had been when he died. Most of the others were two or three years younger—too young to die, at any rate. What were the chances of four out of eight of them being dead by their mid-forties? Not great, Toyama figured.
"How did Okubo die?" It had to be either an illness or an accident.
"I know it happened ten years ago. I don't know how. Why don't you ask Mr. Kitajima? He's my source."
Toyama decided he'd do that. Of course he would.
"Do you know how I can get in touch with him?"
Yoshino searched his briefcase, pulled out his notepad, and read off the phone number. It was in the city. As he copied it down, Toyama thought he'd try Kitajima the very next day.
10
Toyama left the subway station and headed down Hitotsugi Street toward his office. He felt cold sweat trickle down his back, rivulet after rivulet. The weather was balmy, considering it was almost December. Gazing at the cloudless sky should have given Toyama a corresponding sense of peace, but it didn't.
Yesterday he'd contacted Kitajima for the first time in ages. The things they'd talked about—he couldn't get them out of his head now. They left a bad aftertaste, one that he couldn't quite define, and couldn't get rid of.
According to Kitajima, Okubo and the other three had all died within the last few years, one after the other.
And in each case the cause of death had been heart-related: angina pectoris, myocardial infarction, heart fail-ure. But there was another, even scarier, coincidence.
When Okubo had played the tape of Sadako in bliss over the intercom into the big room, three interns had been present: Shinichiro Mori, Keiko Takahata, and Mayu Yumi. Those three plus Shigemori, who'd also happened to be there, made four. And it so happened that all four had died of heart-related illnesses. They'd died at different times—Shigemori the very next day, the other three only twenty-odd years later—but still, it was too much to be dismissed as mere coincidence.
The first of the three to die was Okubo, the main culprit: he'd gone at age thirty-seven from a myocardial infarction. But in any case, all five of the people who had heard the tape were dead. It was disturbing, to say the least.
Did I hear it?
Toyama began to worry. He hadn't actually listened to the tape, but he'd heard what was on it—that is, he'd received Sadako's voice directly into his brain, where it had resonated as if to engrave itself there. Those words of hers that had once brought him unmatched ecstasy now began to take on a different meaning.
He realized there was something he'd forgotten to tell Yoshino the other day. Which was that he was absolutely sure there was no way Sadako's voice could have been recorded on that tape.
Even now, twenty-four years later, he could remember it clearly. In order to erase Okubo's impressions he had pressed the record button on the tape deck. Normally this would record over what was already on the tape, but in this case he wanted simply to make the tape blank, so he turned off the built-in microphone. This was important—he'd checked several times to make sure it was off. He had a visual memory of it: the VU