Koji Suzuki - Edge

Suddenly, Saeko hit upon a well-known pair of opposites that should have occurred to her in junior high school.

God and the Devil .

Just as Saeko’s father had explained how males had split off from females, Saeko realized that the devil was said to originally have been a fallen angel. The mechanism by which a fallen angel became the devil resembled the way males derived from females. Both had originally emerged from their counterparts.

Perhaps the same could be said of the relationship between zero and infinity. The universe with its infinite sparkling stars was said to have emerged from nothingness a mere 14 billion years ago. In this case, too, one thing had bifurcated to spawn opposing concepts.

God and the Devil, zero and infinity … God gave rise to the Devil, zero gave rise to infinity. Moreover, the number zero was said to contain infinite energy. Black holes swallowed up all matter, allowing not even light to escape.

What was he trying to tell me?

If her father’s message had anything to do with his disappearance, she was determined to crack the riddle.

Having a goal to pursue gave Saeko the energy to go on living. It was thrilling to use her mind and push forward in her thoughts. But there was a limit to what she could achieve alone. She needed someone who could give her objective feedback on her ideas to give her thoughts more solid direction.

Two faces, father and son, popped into Saeko’s mind. It had been years since she had seen Kitazawa, but now he seemed to call her name.

Saeko meant to call Hideaki Kitazawa the next morning and visit his office in the afternoon, but she didn’t act quickly enough and ended up being called in for a meeting by editor-in-chief Maezono. When she showed up at the publishing house as requested, Maezono offered her another assignment.

Saeko’s story on the missing Fujimura family had been so widely noticed that the office now wanted to do a regular feature on current missing persons cases of a similar nature on a monthly basis. Without giving Saeko a chance to refuse, Maezono handed her a file detailing the serial disappearances of two young men from Itoigawa City.

“Please. You’re the only person for the job,” Maezono begged. When she went on to inform Saeko that at the end of the series, the articles would be collected and published in book form, Saeko was unable to refuse. Getting a book published through a major publishing house was currently her number-one professional goal.

Although these were also missing persons cases, they differed from the Fujimura incident in that the subjects had vanished individually. Both were young men around the age of twenty. There was still plenty of time before the deadline, but Saeko would have to figure out where to start her investigation.

The information on the two missing men was summarized as follows:

Tomoaki Nishimura, age 20. Worked at a convenience store. Last seen September 13, 2011 .

While on the job at an S Mart outlet near the mouth of the Himekawa River in Itoigawa, Nishimura disappeared suddenly at around 6:30 p.m. in the evening. The first person to notice his absence was the manager of the convenience store. The manager was in the process of moving some boxes into the warehouse when an earthquake with a magnitude of 4 on the Japanese scale struck Itoigawa. He got down low to the ground and wasn’t hurt, but when he returned to the store premises Nishimura had vanished from behind the counter. At first the manager assumed that Nishimura had been startled by the tremor and left to take refuge somewhere. But after some time had passed without Nishimura’s return, the manager grew concerned and called Nishimura’s parents. His parents hadn’t seen their son since he’d left for work. His current whereabouts remain a mystery .

Nobuhisa Igarashi, age 19. Vocational school student. Missing since mid-September, 2011 .

Originally from Namerikawa City, Toyama Prefecture, Igarashi had moved to Itoigawa to attend culinary school. His parents in Namerikawa lost contact with him in mid-September .

The attendance records at the culinary institute suggested that Igarashi had run into some sort of trouble between September 13th and 15th, but Igarashi’s attendance had always been spotty, so it was difficult to be sure. Igarashi didn’t have many close friends, so nobody had taken much notice of his absence from school .

Unable to reach her son by phone for several days, his mother grew concerned and paid a visit to his boarding house. The state of his room suggested that its inhabitant hadn’t been home for several days .

The missing persons report was filed with the police on September 19th .

Nishimura and Igarashi hadn’t known each other, but they both lived in Itoigawa City and Igarashi’s boarding house was extremely close to S Mart, suggesting a link between the two cases.

The obvious explanation was that they had both been involved in some sort of incident. Perhaps they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and gotten into an altercation with a group of bikers or such. The first step would be to search for potential witnesses, but if the police were already investigating the cases, they would have long taken such measures.

Saeko wanted to establish a hypothesis and then launch an investigation accordingly, but she wasn’t sure of herself based on how the Fujimura case had turned out. At the time, Saeko had pored over the documents and identified Kota Fujimura’s older brother Seiji as a shady character. She had pursued that line of investigation in her research but had found her expectations dashed upon meeting Seiji in person. As a result, her report had lacked a central focus. Even so, it had been fairly well received. Saeko should have derived more confidence from that fact, but she was a perfectionist, and it was hard for her to take the first step towards anything without establishing a clear roadmap.

As Saeko pondered where to start, the image of Kitazawa’s face in the back of her mind grew even stronger. What had been a mild impulse to visit his office grew into an irresistible need. It seemed like an unbelievable coincidence that Kitazawa’s image had popped into her mind just yesterday at the library; today she had been handed another missing persons assignment.

Kitazawa was a private detective who ran his own investigations agency specializing in missing persons. He’d been in the business forty years and had an extensive network of contacts, not just in Japan but worldwide. When it came to tracking down missing people, he was an unrivaled expert.

Kitazawa wasn’t an inconspicuous man — he weighed in at around a hundred kilos. At the same time, he had an incongruously high voice and his speech was often peppered with childish expressions. The effect was bizarre, and people who weren’t used to him often assumed he was having a laugh at them. But once you got to know him, it didn’t matter. He was a loveable character, and Saeko owed him a tremendous debt of gratitude. And now, she very much needed his help with this new assignment from her editor. After taking leave of Maezono, Saeko headed straight for Kitazawa’s office.

From the Yotsuya Sanchome intersection, Saeko turned up a side street and found the building she was looking for. As before, the office bore a sign that read “Man Search” in English letters, though the sign itself was new since her last visit.

At the age of seventeen, a desperate Saeko had gazed up at the same building.

Whenever her father was away on business, he called home at eight o’clock every night. On August 21, 1994, he had called from his hotel in Narita after returning from Bolivia and informed her that he would head out to Takamatsu, Shikoku the next day. But at eight o’clock the next evening there was no call. As far as Saeko could remember, her father had never failed to call when he was away on a trip. Even if he was on the opposite side of the earth, he always called promptly at 8 p.m. Japan time to check in with his daughter. No matter where he went, he was always concerned about his only daughter’s well-being, and the act of calling at eight every night seemed a compulsive habit.