Birthday (12 page)

Shigemori harangued Sadako like that for a good ten minutes. After he released her, she didn't come out again until it was almost show time. When she finally emerged in order to prepare her costume and props, her expression was one that Kitajima told Yoshino he'd never forgotten to this day.

Deep despair. He couldn't think of how else to describe it. She'd been thrust into this, her first role, at the last minute, and audiences hadn't reacted well to her. As the run dragged on she'd gotten progressively more depressed. That might have been part of it now. In any case, she looked like she'd hit rock bottom. Usually she emanated a kind of aura, but now all the light had gone out of her. She looked utterly enervated. Kitajima watched from behind as she climbed the stairs to the backstage area; she seemed to be filled with an inexpressible pain.

That was all Kitajima saw that day.

He only found out what had really happened several years later, after he'd quit the troupe and joined an event-planning company.

He and Okubo had gotten together for a drink—

their first meeting after quitting the troupe and going their own ways. Kitajima had mentioned that final afternoon before the last performance. "What happened that day, anyway?"

Yoshino's subsequent narrative was based on what Kitajima had repeated to him of Okubo's reply.

Okubo had gone up to the sound booth to look for the tape containing his imitation of Shigemori. Toyama wasn't there, so he made use of his absence to ransack the room. He found the cassette deck under the desk with the tape still in it. He listened to it from the beginning. From the label, he knew this was the tape he was after, but on playback he couldn't find the impressions.

He fast-forwarded and then pressed play again, repeating this over and over until he was satisfied he hadn't missed it, finally concluding that "somebody must've erased it already." Then, just as he began to relax, his ears began to pick up a woman's moan.

"Ahhh... ohhh..." was what he heard, along with some ragged breathing. Okubo was still a virgin, so he didn't know what he was hearing at first. He kept listening out of sheer curiosity, until gradually the moaning turned into words. It was then he realized who the voice belonged to.

"Sadako..." muttered Okubo. That was her voice, he was sure of it. That was her, panting, moaning, and calling out a name, saying she loved someone.

Don't ever love me more than you do now. I don't want to lose you, Toyama.

The breathing was forced and now and then it stopped; the voice was excited.

Toyama, I love you.

Okubo was enraptured. Forget about the words, the voice alone had something about it that would stimulate any listener's sensitivities.

But something abruptly brought Okubo back to his senses. The words arrived in his mind with all their meaning, and when they did, his body was invaded by an uncontrollable emotion. He couldn't put a name on it.

It involved a strong desire for Sadako. He'd liked Sadako too, just like Toyama, and his feelings had been decid-edly mixed as he'd watched the way things developed from rehearsals on through the actual performances.

Maybe he just couldn't stand watching the girl he loved, this girl younger than him, cozy up to the director to get a part. Maybe at heart he was a sore loser who hated seeing the girl he loved make her stage debut before him. Judging by this tape, she loved Toyama: maybe he was just burning with jealousy toward him. And on top of all that, it might have been pure malice that had made him think of presenting this as evidence to Shigemori, who was openly trying to seduce Sadako.

You old bastard, it's just like I've always thought when I was doing impressions of you: the jilted-lover role suits you.

Okubo felt his face grow hot as he contemplated all these factors. But the only explanation he had for what he did next was that the devil had made him do it.

He rewound the tape a bit, hit play, and turned up the volume. Making sure that Sadako could be heard, he then turned on the intercom to the green room and dressing rooms. Everybody would be able to hear Sadako calling Toyama's name ecstatically.

At this point, Toyama gave a cry, almost a scream.

"Holy..."

Yoshino gave him a sympathetic look. "You really didn't know?"

He'd never even suspected. "How could I have known? I was gone. A friend of mine had come to see the play, and we'd gone out to lunch." Lunch was provided in the theater for everybody, but on that day of all days, Toyama had been invited to eat out.

"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.

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

meter that measured the recording level didn't budge from zero.

Which meant—it was the logical conclusion—that Sadako's voice could not have been recorded on that tape.

Suddenly he felt dizzy—he staggered down the sidewalk, then leaned up against a telephone pole. The dizziness and shortness of breath were particularly bad today.

Usually if he rested for a few minutes his spells would pass, but now the dizziness got so bad he felt like throwing up. He didn't feel like this was going to go away any-time soon.

He entered the building where he worked. His department was on the fifth floor, but he couldn't make it up there yet. He collapsed onto a couch in the ground-floor reception area and waited for the nausea and fatigue to recede. He felt a little better than he had back there on the sidewalk, but he wasn't up to returning to work quite yet.

The reception area began to fade to white.

"Mr. Toyama."

He heard someone, somewhere, call his name. His vision grew hazy, like he was seeing everything through a film. He rubbed his eyes.

"Mr. Toyama."

The voice approached until it was right next to him.

A hand patted him twice on the shoulder.

"Mr. Toyama, what's wrong? I've been calling your name."

He looked up toward the voice, alternately squint-ing and opening his eyes wide.

Fujisaki, a production assistant, and Yasui, a mixer, were standing beside him. Both of them worked for him.

Toyama gazed up at them as though at something painfully bright. Fujisaki frowned. "I'm worried."

What's wrong?

He wanted to ask what was worrying Fujisaki, but he couldn't speak all of a sudden.

"Are you alright, Mr. Toyama?"

"S-s-sorry. C-could you bring me some—water?"

"Right away."

Fujisaki went to the vending machine in the corner and bought a sports drink, which he handed to Toyama.

Toyama drank it down. Only then did he begin to feel a little more human. He said what he had tried to say before.