Кэйго Хигасино - The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping

The days were tranquil; my mind was anything but. I was worried about Juri. Why didn’t they report on it at all? I didn’t think the police needed to censor the press. I was worried about the post on the CPT Owners Club, too. According to the last message, it seemed like Juri hadn’t gotten home at all. What had happened after that? Since then, there hadn’t been a new post.

If Juri were home, that would be okay. Katsutoshi Katsuragi might have pulled some strings to keep the press quiet. Because if a girl that age were kidnapped, everyone would expect something to have happened to her.

But I had the feeling I shouldn’t be too optimistic.

One cause of my anxiety was the Yokosuka condo. According to Juri, her friend Yuki was renting in a women-only condo, but when I looked into it, there were a good number of men living there. And part of the building was even company-owned housing for a steel manufacturer. Juri had said Yuki’s room was a studio, but when I asked the super about it at a later date, he said there were no such units at all.

Why had Juri told such a lie?

I retraced my memory. What she’d said about the condo being for women only had gone something like this:

But it’s better if you don’t come. Because it’s a women-only condo. You could just chill at Yokosuka harbor and gaze at the passing ships .

Basically, she had just not wanted me to go with her and made up that lie on the spot. Why had she not wanted me to come?

I recalled what had happened the time we had gone to Yokosuka again on the last day. On that occasion, I’d tried to go to the condo with her. Her navigation had suddenly become erratic. On the way there we’d actually gotten lost. Why had that happened?

My theory was that she’d been searching for a random condo. She hadn’t wanted me to go to Yuki’s condo no matter what, so she’d found one similar to Yuki’s and tricked me. If so, that condo not being women-only and not having studios made sense. It did, but then new doubts arose. Why had she gone so far to keep me from going to Yuki’s condo? And where had she hidden the two hundred seventy million yen she’d been carrying?

Was there some secret about Yuki’s condo that she didn’t want to share with me? But what sort of secret necessitated not even allowing me to go to the building?

At that point, I tried questioning the fundamentals of the situation. Did Yuki’s condo actually exist? No, to begin with, was this friend, Yuki, real?

Juri had given that name when the game had only just started. She had confessed to calling her friend and leaving a message on the answering machine. When I proposed canceling the whole plan, Juri had said we could just go to the room and erase the message. So we’d gone all the way to Yokosuka.

If Yuki was an imaginary person, that meant the answering machine story was also a lie. Why tell that particular lie?

There was just one thing I could think of. She simply wanted to take me to Yokosuka. What would have been the point, though? Going there had served the tactical use of misdirecting the police as to the location of the culprits’ hideout. But that was my idea and not Juri’s suggestion. To grasp at straws, the only suggestion she did make was to go to a hill where you could see the stars. What was that about? What had that done?

No matter how I thought about it, the Yuki part didn’t seem like a made-up story. Then why had Juri made up a lie about the condo? At that point my thoughts went in circles. I felt like I was wandering in a labyrinth far away from the goal.

There was one more cause for my anxiety. It was Katsutoshi Katsuragi.

According to the people involved in the new Nissei Automobile car release, Katsuragi hadn’t attended meetings at all since last weekend. There were rumors that he hadn’t been coming to work either. Why had that man, who hadn’t let his style suffer even as I inflicted my kidnapping game on him, started taking time off from work now that it was over?

The faces of the father and daughter pair, Katsutoshi and Juri Katsuragi, alternately drifted through my mind. I didn’t know what the two of them were thinking. I couldn’t begin to guess where they were now and what they were up to. That fact harried me to no end.

“Excuse me, could you please lift your left hand a little more? Ah, that’s right. That’s perfect.” The bearded cameraman clicked the shutter in succession.

The person being photographed was a popular pro golfer who had recently become active outside of Japan as well. He held a putter and made a pose as though he’d just gotten the ball in the hole. He seemed accustomed to being photographed, and there was little awkwardness in his expression. I took comfort in knowing that the shoot probably wouldn’t take long.

It was for a magazine promo for a wristwatch made by a German company. Because they wanted to highlight its impact- and vibration-resistance, we had a golfer promote it. We were showing how, even with his powerful swing, the watch was invulnerable.

After the shoot was the interview. Beforehand, we had the pro-golfer put on the watch and hit some balls. We would ask about how that felt. Of course, it wasn’t me who would ask; the assigned writer would also conduct the interview. While that happened in a tearoom in the studio, I attended to the wristwatch-only shoot. A junior coworker of mine named Yamamoto would be there for the interview.

It seemed around the time our shoot was done, the interview had ended. After seeing the pro golfer off to the entrance, I had a meeting with the writer about the content. He was a young man with long hair. After we had spoken for a bit, I feared that he might be missing the point, so I instructed him in detail about what aspects to emphasize. The writer seemed dissatisfied, but an article meant to showcase his own literary sensibilities was worthless.

“Mr. Sakuma, you’re as harsh as ever. That writer was hoping to delve into a pro golfer’s true face and was focusing his questions on that,” Yamamoto divulged bemusedly in the car on the way back to the office. He was driving.

“We’re not letting a guy like him tamper with our precious ad. I bet he wants to make it as a nonfiction writer one day, but if he can’t grasp the point of an assignment, no wonder he hasn’t gotten there yet.”

“Haha, I guess you could say that.” Yamamoto laughed like it was the funniest thing, then lowered his voice a little and added, “By the way, Mr. Sakuma, did you hear about Mr. Katsuragi?”

“Mr. Katsuragi? The executive vice president?” I asked with a start.

“Yes, of course. It seems that something happened to his daughter.”

Now my heart skipped a beat. “Like what?”

“I don’t really know, but it seems she’s gone missing.”

I faced Yamamoto. If he had been looking at me, he might have noticed that I’d gone pale. Luckily, his eyes were on the street.

“Missing?” My voice sounded an octave too high.

“I don’t know the details. I only heard about it from someone else, and he told me it was just a rumor at Nissei Automobile. But it seems like a concrete story, and they’re saying that’s why Mr. Katsuragi hasn’t been showing up to work lately. He did or didn’t put in a missing person report, and so on.”

“Why would that become a rumor? Did Mr. Katsuragi tell someone?”

“He must have. Assuming the rumors are true.”

“When did you hear about this?”

“This morning. Before setting out for this job. I wanted to see if you’d heard about it but didn’t get the chance. The way you’re acting now, I suppose you hadn’t.”

“I didn’t know at all.”

“I see. It’s just a rumor though.” Yamamoto continued to drive unaware of the importance of what had come out of his mouth.