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  She’d collapsed on the slope of a mountain. She could see damp humus peeking through the weeds.

  The man worrying about her now was working for the school as a gardener, and somewhere in her heart she knew that he posed no threat to her. But with her consciousness fading, behind the gardener’s face she saw the shadowy visage of the man she’d encountered over ten years earlier. His dark, expressionless face was coming toward her with a vividness that seemed quite real.

  She couldn’t allow herself to trust this voice telling her that she was all right. The man who’d uttered the same words so very long ago had tried to kill her.

  “No…please stop,” she whispered impotently.

  Akane pushed away his rubber-gloved hands and sank onto the ground.

  5

  Takanori descended to the underground bicycle parking area and took out his bike, which he hadn’t used for some time. A month ago he’d gotten into some trouble after hitting a pedestrian, and ever since then he’d lost the desire to ride it. He was about to travel to and from the Studio Oz office, though, and going by bicycle was the best way. He guessed that Akane would be arriving after seven, which meant that he needed to wrap this business up and return to the apartment before then. Going to the office wouldn’t even take him five minutes on a bike.

  Traveling light—without a bag or anything else, just the USB stick stuffed into his jeans pocket—Takanori pedaled his bicycle and ascended a slope. Each time his wheels jumped on a small gap, little fragments of the images stuck in his mind leapt up. Even a cursory viewing would have revealed the video as being exceedingly unnatural. To say nothing of its eeriness, any number of questions squirmed inside his head.

  The man’s body exuded the reek of flesh, and that simply couldn’t be faked using CG or any other contrivance. This was a real video—there was no doubt. Yet the way his body had moved after kicking out the chair was unnatural in the extreme.

  Once he kicked it out, his body should have fallen only a foot or so. And yet it had seemed to fall right through the floor and to come crashing through the ceiling, dropping from above a moment later. There was no way that a body could fall through the floor one second and then pass through the ceiling the next. What was more, the man had stopped his fall at a position where he couldn’t be seen from the neck up as if he’d arranged it that way.

  Takanori could sense that the man had intended to conceal his face. It could be identified for only the briefest of moments: after the fall, when the body passed straight down through the center of the screen. Yet the eyes had been covered with a white cloth, obscuring the overall features.

  Takanori had studied the video very closely, playing it frame-by-frame as the man’s face passed straight down the screen from top to bottom. Watching it repeatedly, he’d been seized by an unpleasant sensation. He felt like he’d met the man somewhere—not just seen him in a video or a photo, but in person.

  The man’s body was real, but his movement was fake…Who in the world had made this freak of a video, and for what purpose? But first and foremost, Takanori’s doubts took on a more realistic cast. Even if he analyzed and processed this live suicide video, it could never be used for television.

  Working in CG once used to be a more creative job. The technology’s real purpose was to craft images that couldn’t exist in the real world, to broaden the scope of what could be depicted in TV commercials or animated films. No matter how Takanori processed this creepy suicide video, it could never be used in a two-hour program. If anything, it might be usable for a short scene in a horror movie. Or perhaps Studio Oz was trying to get involved in making horror movies now? He supposed it was possible, but he’d never heard even a whisper of it at the studio.

  He was pedaling his bike on the slope now because he was dying to know Yoneda’s real intention in handing him the USB stick.

  Locking his bike in front of the shrubbery, Takanori passed through the auto-lock entrance into the lobby. It was his second time visiting the office that day. He took the elevator up to the fourth floor, walked along the outside corridor, and opened the door without knocking, as usual. It would have been unlocked when he rang the intercom.

  Yoneda was so blinkered that once he started working, he hated to stop what he was doing for even a moment. If there was time to knock, just come in—or so went his logic.

  Takanori didn’t have a particularly sharp nose, but he could easily discern at least this much: a new scent flowed in the entrance now that hadn’t been present a few hours earlier when he left the office, an alluring aroma clearly distinct from the foul smell of cigarettes and mold and scattered shoes.

  The simplest explanation was that there had been a visitor right before him, but no woman ever visited Studio Oz before to leave a scent so full of pheromones, and he couldn’t figure it out for the life of him. The only woman on staff was Kanako Nishijima, and she had no affinity whatsoever with cosmetics or even skin lotions.

  There were no women’s shoes, and even if there had been a visitor, it was obvious that she was already gone.

  Yoneda was sitting with his legs crossed in the center of the room, and there were cards arranged on the carpet. Takanori had never seen him playing cards before.

  “My, my, solitaire?”

  Takanori sat down with his legs crossed, facing his boss.

  “No, dummy,” replied Yoneda. “Can’t you tell? These’re tarot cards.”

  Takanori found that even more unusual. Yoneda hated fortune telling. “Does it really work?”

  Having always been lectured by the same man about the stupidity of such practices, Takanori looked down at the tarot cards with disdain. Meanwhile, Yoneda seemed not to care and was quite absorbed in flipping the cards.

  This was a method for beginners, using only the major arcana cards. Yoneda shuffled them, picked a few with the picture side facing down, and placed them on the carpet.

  With tarot fortunes, you needed to read a story into the pictures on the lined-up cards. First you had to think about what you wanted to know, and after picturing it in detail in your mind, you flipped the cards over, and then intuited the meaning from the drawings. There was no single, absolute interpretation with tarot, and the story changed depending on the sensibility and whim of the person seeking to divine the meaning.

  “What do you want to learn?” asked Takanori.

  “Well, it is tarot…Romance, of course.”

  He’s not the least bit romantic and hates fortune telling…Now he’s playing tarot for luck in love?

  After feeling dumbstruck, Takanori laughed out loud.

  “I don’t think you’re playing with a full deck. This hot and muggy weather must be getting to you,” he said.

  “You wanna laugh? Go ahead. I wanna get it on with a hot woman one more time. Something wrong with that?”

  Yoneda didn’t mind the ridicule at all—he just kept trying to read the meaning from the cards he’d lined up. It seemed that he couldn’t set up the story in the way he wanted, though. “This isn’t what I want,” he complained, shuffling the cards again when he was halfway through.

  Then he looked up at Takanori, who was still laughing.

  “Your turn, then,” Yoneda said reproachfully. “You do it.”

  Takanori had never once tried tarot.

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Just pick three cards and place them in the form of a triangle. The meaning is gonna be different depending on where you place them vertically, so be careful about that.”

  Major arcana cards could be arranged in various ways, and each one was called a spread. Though unsure whether Yoneda’s directions conformed to the official rules, Takanori followed them, shuffling the cards well, picking three, and placing them in a triangle. Since the cards were still upside down, it was unclear what kind of pictures they hid.

  Takanori raised his head and waited for the next instructions. Yoneda took turns looking at a booklet called Tarot for Beginners and at the cards as he spoke. />
  “You gotta picture what you want to know in your mind. The past, the future, it doesn’t matter. Even something to do with the job you’re working on, like how you’re gonna do with it. Now, once you can picture it vividly, start from the top of the triangle and flip one card at a time, counterclockwise. Got it?”

  Takanori still couldn’t picture what he wanted to know but flipped the card at the top. It revealed a crowned woman covered in a white veil and sitting in a chair.

  “Wow, the High Priestess. But it’s in the inverted position,” confirmed Yoneda. He opened the book and started reading out the drawing’s significance. “She’s the highest among all the women in the priesthood. The pages of the book she’s holding in her hands are opened up to the viewer, which means she’s offering us knowledge and learning. The meaning when it’s in the normal position is ‘knowledge, learning, wisdom.’ In the inverted position, it means ‘cruelty, hysteria, selfishness,’ et cetera. All right, flip another one.”

  Takanori flipped the card on the bottom left. It featured a drawing of a man who was hanging upside down, with one leg tied to a bar that had been placed between two trees.

  Yoneda began to interpret this immediately. “The card’s called ‘The Hanged Man.’ Also known as ‘The Condemned.’ The man is hanging upside down, with his left leg tied to a tree that’s shaped like a torii gate. Beneath his head is a deep valley, but even though he’s in an extremely difficult situation, he has a defiant smile on his face. It’s as if he willingly accepted this condition. This punishment is a form of initiation, and once he’s endured it, he can reach even greater spiritual heights, or so it’s implied. In the normal position, it means ‘self-sacrifice, ordeal, perseverance.’ In the inverted position, it means ‘meaningless sacrifice, a surrender to desires,’ and such.”

  As Takanori listened to Yoneda’s explanation, his consciousness became more and more drawn to the image.

  In the normal position, “The Hanged Man” was hanging upside down, but because the card was in the inverted position from Takanori’s perspective, the man was not hanging, but appeared instead to be standing with one leg bent. His pose looked exactly like the man in the video immediately before he’d kicked out the chair and hanged himself. Unconsciously, a sound escaped from Takanori’s lips.

  “Huh.”

  Seeing Takanori’s expression change abruptly, Yoneda nudged his elbow, looking pleased with himself. “Ha ha. You’ve got something on your mind, haven’t you?”

  Admiring how insensitive Yoneda could be, Takanori stared hard at his face.

  Takanori was here to find out just why he needed to analyze the video of a live hanging. His boss had ordered him to.

  Have you forgotten? he wanted to complain, but held his tongue. From his side the drawing looked like a person preparing to hang himself, but he realized that from his boss’s perspective the man was doing a handstand with his leg bent. Perhaps Yoneda didn’t associate the image with the suicide hanging.

  “Okay, down to the last card. Time to face your past.”

  My past…

  Only after hearing this did Takanori realize that he hadn’t decided what it was he wanted to know.

  The past…I’ve been trying to learn about my past?

  Now he understood. Trying to recall his past was often vexing to him. When he turned the pages of his life, which spanned twenty-eight years up to that point, one part was always blotted out in black. No matter how hard he tried, it wouldn’t come to him, and just tracing the threads of his memory got painful.

  Was this one page of his past—shrouded in dark clouds—being revealed?

  Takanori flipped the last remaining card.

  Looking at the drawing, Yoneda frowned.

  “Now you’ve done it. That’s ‘Death.’ An extremely bad omen. Let’s see…Drawn on the card is an image of Death holding a scythe in its hand, reaping the souls of mankind. Death is a skeleton without any flesh, and no identifiable gender, so it could be associated with androgyny. Its pointed foot is piercing the ground, and with this leg as a pivot the body is rotating. This spiral motion is none other than the Dance of Death. In this normal position, it means ‘destruction, the end, an omen of death.’ In the inverted position, it means ‘rebirth after death.’”

  From where Takanori sat, the card was in the inverted position.

  “Rebirth after death”—the words began to coil around the folds of his brain. They overlapped parts of the black memory that was inserted in the pages of his past. An image of sinking slowly into a dark abyss rose in his mind, and as it did the veins of his temples began pulsing intensely. He felt like he was suffocating, as if there were a lump in his throat.

  Unable to stand the sensation, Takanori reached out to the cards and mixed them up violently as if to destroy the story that was forming.

  “Give me a break.”

  Seeing Takanori exploding with irritation, Yoneda sipped his green tea and pouted.

  “Not much use in complaining about what your fortune said, y’know.”

  With one knee bent up, Takanori took out the USB stick from his pocket and tossed it on top of the shuffled cards.

  “I didn’t come back to find out my fortune. I’m here because I wanted to know what this is all about.”

  “Same thing. It’s all the same.”

  Takanori had no idea what that meant and asked, “What are you talking about? What’s the same?”

  “I mean the one who brought the USB and the one who brought the tarot cards is the same person.”

  At that moment, Takanori felt like he could see Yoneda’s very skull through his scalp and patchy, balding hair. What Takanori had ended up cultivating in the film department at his fine arts college was not so much facility with the latest video technology but rather the traditional ability to draw. In fact, his skills as a painter helped him more than anything in his current occupation. In trying to render a figure on a canvas, you needed to see into the bone structure that made up the human body. Without that ability, making realistic CG images was impossible. With video technology, once you landed a job you could learn naturally little by little, but drawing well required a lengthy apprenticeship.

  Just as Takanori was about to probe into Yoneda’s skull, the scent from a little while ago came back to his nostrils. That alluring aroma, specific to women, had lingered at the entrance…

  He came to realize that “the same person” Yoneda mentioned was the woman who had visited the office a little while ago.

  “So, who is it? The woman, I mean,” Takanori asked.

  “Her name is Kiyomi Sakata.”

  Through industry rumors, Takanori more or less knew who she was, even though he’d never met her. A former actress turned fortune-teller. She had to be close to fifty years old but still possessed a miraculous youth—truly a woman of indeterminate age. She composed her own screenplays and made TV programs and movies as a producer. And she also had many followers, not only actors and TV personalities, but even musicians. Her influence reached to every corner of show business…

  That was about everything that Takanori knew about Kiyomi Sakata.

  So the video I’m trying to analyze was brought to us by Kiyomi Sakata.

  Takanori ruminated on that fact.

  6

  It was a 35-mm film, a relic from a bygone era. She’d never seen one before and knew of them only thanks to Takanori. But that was what this was, running on a projector and clanking as if it were about to fall apart any minute.

  Akane was looking at both the images and the device projecting them. The scene couldn’t exist in the real world.

  Film is nothing more than thin plastic subjected to photo processing, so she had to wonder where this much light was coming from. The unnatural profusion formed bands and was emanating from everywhere. It was so lifelike that she felt she could almost touch it, each individual band seemingly asserting its existence.

  A thorn of light very nearly speared Akane’s cheek but retre
ated at the last moment. Then a picture scroll of a life began to unfold before her.

  She saw a young woman passing through a school gate, a female teacher conducting a language lesson in the classroom, a college student studying to be a Japanese teacher in a department of education, a girl going to junior high and high school from the facility…All of them were Akane.

  The life she’d led until now was being projected on the screen in reverse. The more scratches that appeared in these black and white images, the younger Akane was getting. When it got to the age that she was in her last year of elementary school, the screen went black for several seconds. Then the face of someone dear to her appeared, someone now gone. Next, Akane was a baby again, cradled and nursing at her mother’s breast. Finally, after going through a tunnel, she stopped moving inside a small sphere.

  Within the sphere were the echoes of a slow heartbeat. When a clanking noise took the place of the heartbeat, the images and the device disappeared, leaving her surrounded in darkness.

  But Akane felt no anxiety—she felt endless joy and warmth, and gratitude welled up inside her. She’d gone back into her mother’s womb.

  Then, at the peak of her happiness, she woke up.

  She didn’t know where she was. As she grew more aware of herself, trying to figure out where this was, her fear that she might be dead receded.

  At first, her entire body seemed to be covered by a white veil. A new world coated in a sticky white film surrounded her. She felt like she was at the center of the world, and it wasn’t a bad feeling. Not only wasn’t it bad, it was tickling and elating.

  She didn’t even want to blink to miss this moment, so she kept her eyes open. The soft, floating sensation withdrew, and a hard, flat, rectangular surface gradually started to rise up. This thing above her looked like a rectangular lid. Its four corners were connected to white walls stretching deep down, the bottom of which disappeared beneath her, beyond her field of vision.