Authors: Koji Suzuki
When Saeko ran the idea by her father at dinner that night, his response was encouraging. “A force field, hmm? You’re on the right track. But what do you think creates that force field? I’ll give you a hint: think about the four interactive forces of the natural world.”
Now she was getting somewhere. Saeko looked up the forces that governed sub-atomic particles. With a more specific area of focus, it was easy to find what she was looking for. Almost any physics book contained information about the four interactive forces of the natural world: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.
Saeko wasn’t entirely clear on the differences between the four, but she understood that electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force functioned on an atomic and quantum level, while gravity applied to large expanses of space, like the solar system and the universe. In other words, the former three forces were the ones that were relevant to the question at hand.
As she continued to read, she came across a passage that stated, “The strong nuclear force binds together protons and neutrons and causes a powerful electric force between the nucleus and the electrons.”
That’s it!
Saeko was jubilant. “While the atom itself carries no electric charge, it contains strong electric fields and charges within. These electric fields and charges are what give structure to matter.”
So that was what created the force fields! Even though atoms contained almost nothing but empty space, these electric charges caused a repulsive force between neighboring atoms, just the way the poles of two magnets repelled each other. At the same time, they created an electric force of attraction to bind atoms together and to pull multiple atoms together to form a molecule. The strength of the bond between atoms determined whether the matter was solid, liquid, or gas. Liquids and solids could move freely through gases, but solids couldn’t encroach on the space occupied by other solids. The electric fields produced structure from mostly empty space, and these structures combined to form larger structures. These fields were the glue that bonded solids tightly together. Saeko’s elbow didn’t pass through the table thanks to the powerful electromagnetic forces at work in the quantum world.
Saeko’s father was delighted by Saeko’s explanation.
“Very good. That’s basically it. There’s just one other thing. The elementary particles that make up matter, like quarks and electrons, are classified as fermions. They’re characterized by the fact that no two fermions can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. It’s called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and it serves to maintain the structure of matter.”
Saeko wasn’t sure she understood, but she made a mental note to look up the term “fermion” later.
“The universe works much the same way. Let’s say the sun is a ball measuring ten centimeters in diameter. The earth would orbit at a distance of ten meters, and it would be about a millimeter in diameter, like a sesame seed. About 400 meters from the ball you’d find Pluto, the planet with the outermost orbit. And that gives you a basic idea of the
size of the solar system. See? Just imagine a circle with a radius of 400 meters with a ten-centimeter ball in the center. From there, the closest star would be Proxima, of the Centaurus Constellation, approximately 2,500 kilometers away. Between our solar system and that star, there’s nothing but emptiness.”
Saeko’s father paused, giving his daughter time to grasp the scale of the universe surrounding the sun.
“What do you think? Both the universe and our little world are pretty empty, huh?”
Saeko felt a wave of uneasiness. The structure of the world seemed surprisingly tenuous when she considered how riddled it was with empty space.
Saeko’s father was always trying to show her how important it was to understand the mechanisms governing her world. He reasoned that knowing those mechanisms would enable her to overcome obstacles and make better decisions in challenging situations.
Saeko reflected on these lessons from her father as she pored over physics texts, taking notes. She was so absorbed that she didn’t notice the passage of time or realize that she was hungry. A satisfying feeling of exhaustion alerted her to the fact that her brain needed nourishment. Time for a break. Saeko headed downstairs for a snack.
She took the elevator to the first floor and had a sandwich and cup of coffee in the library cafeteria. Cutting across the lobby on her way back to the reading room, Saeko noticed the newspaper and magazine racks that occupied more than half of the shelf space.
Condensed editions of each month’s news lined the walls, twelve per year, an archive of incidents past. Saeko’s gaze gravitated naturally towards the volume marked August 1994. Telling herself it would be a good break from the technical tomes she had been scouring, Saeko pulled down the volume and sat down on a sofa to rifle through its pages. Almost unconsciously, her fingers turned to August 22, 1994—the day her father had disappeared. The local news section had run a major story about the arrest of a kidnapper who had abducted a five-year-old girl. Saeko remembered the incident clearly—the place where the ransom was to have been exchanged had been close to their apartment. It had been all over the TV news as well, and Saeko recalled half-listening to the coverage that day while eating the boxed lunch she’d picked up on the way home from cram school. Skimming the local section of the newspaper was the perfect way
to jog her memory as to what sort of day it had been, and what incidents had taken place. Apart from the kidnapping, there had been a food poisoning scandal at a luxury hotel, and tidings from a provincial city where the residents were having problems with an organized crime syndicate. When the news ended, Saeko had continued watching television. It was easy to find the name of the program she’d watched in the TV listings. The names of all the old programs from that era brought a wave of nostalgia. A pop music program called “Music Parade” occupied the eight o’clock slot of the station where Hashiba worked.
Saeko remembered how hungrily she had watched the program, taking notes to learn the names and songs of popular artists. As she skimmed the list of artists appearing on the show that night, their hit songs began to come back to her. She remembered the melodies, but only bits and pieces of the lyrics.
She had been so ensconced in the program, she hadn’t noticed the time. Eight o’clock came and went. Only when the program ended and the clock read nine did Saeko realize that something was amiss. When her father was away on business, he called her every evening at eight o’clock without fail. But that night, the phone hadn’t rung.
“Hey, Sae! How’s everything going?”
As Saeko now imagined her father’s voice on the line, she felt a stab of longing and hopelessness, and her eyes welled with tears.
She looked up from the newspaper, changing her posture and her train of thought, and waited for the rush of sadness to pass. Given that her father hadn’t called at eight o’clock that night, something must have had already happened to him.
She scanned the rest of the local news pages for anything that might relate to her father’s disappearance but didn’t find anything of promise.
She turned to the morning newspaper from the next day—August 23rd. The first thing that met her eye was an article about a plane crash over the North Atlantic Ocean. “On August 22nd at 4:15 p.m., after departing from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, United Airlines Flight 323 crashed in the North Atlantic Ocean. All 515 passengers and crew members are thought to have been killed …”
It came as a shock to Saeko that the fact that a major plane crash had taken place on the same day as her father’s disappearance had slipped by her. She had been so caught up in her concern for her father that she’d been completely oblivious to anything else.
Of course, there was nothing in the paper about her father’s disappearance.
Saeko closed the heavy volume in her lap and laid her head against the back of the sofa, in the same pose she’d assumed a moment ago to fight back tears.
Even with her mind flooded with memories of her father, a certain word kept nagging at her brain, as if it had become imprinted on her mind.
Though the blinds were closed, the afternoon sun was strong, and it was much warmer inside today than it had been the night before. The rays of sunlight that streamed through the slats made thin stripes on the wall, like a spectrogram.
Sun
.
That was the word that caught in Saeko’s brain. Perhaps she’d seen it printed in the bound newspaper collection just before she’d snapped it closed, or maybe it was because she’d spent the entire morning reading about the universe and solar system. In any case, the word “sun” loomed large in Saeko’s mind.
She reopened the volume to the same page as before, scanning the local news pages of the day after her father’s disappearance from beginning to end. Finally, she spotted what she was looking for. Just below the list of winning lottery numbers was a chart that gave the high and low temperatures of the previous day in various parts of Japan. Just to the left of that spot was a tiny article, only about the quarter of the size of a standard piece. No wonder she had almost missed it.
The headline read, “Highest Incidence of Sunspots This Year.”
There. Somehow, Saeko’s subconscious had zeroed in on the word “sun” on this page.
She read the brief article: “Yesterday, a group of sunspots suddenly appeared on the sun’s surface. They were large enough to be visible to the naked eye via a filter—a highly rare phenomenon. The unusual flare-up of solar activity caused low-latitude auroras to be visible in areas of northern Japan, including Hokkaido.”
Saeko looked up from the article.
There was unusual solar activity the day my father disappeared …
A rash of sunspots, the appearance of auroras, geomagnetism—each of these phenomena were linked by causal relationships. That said, it seemed impossible to identify even a theoretical link between unusual sunspot activity and such an immediate and raw phenomenon as a human disappearance.
Saeko closed the volume and made her way back to her seat in the reading room. She opened up her notebook, but no matter how much she tried to focus, she found her mind fixated on the image of a blazing sun. Again and again, her thoughts were disturbed by the grotesque black shades flickering across its imaginary surface.
4
Night came quickly. It had still been light when Kitazawa had checked into his room, but now half of the cars on the prefectural highway already had their headlights on. Through the chinks in the breakwater, Kitazawa could see the bi-colored lights of the fishing boats coming in to the Himekawa Port bobbing up and down rhythmically with the waves. The lights of various cities bordering the Japan Sea had begun to twinkle on the horizon. Already, the temperature had dropped quite a bit.
Kitazawa turned up the lapels of his coat, hunched his back, and thrust both hands in his pockets as he made his way down the sidewalk alongside the highway towards the Hime River. As he passed the window of a barbershop that was closed for the evening, he peeked at his reflection in the glass. Illuminated by the streetlights, the shop window functioned as a mirror, affording a clear view of the style Kitazawa had cultivated after the American hard-boiled detective novels he’d loved so much in his youth.
Philip Marlowe, the detective in Raymond Chandler’s novels, always wore a beat-up old trench coat with the lapels turned up. When he entered a bar, he always ordered a double gimlet. In college, Kitazawa had spent nearly all of his time steeped in hard-boiled detective novels. He’d made every effort to be like Philip Marlowe, but he hadn’t pulled it off very well. The woman he’d dated before marrying Chieko had kidded him about it. “You might as well give it up,” she’d laughed.
After working at the nonbank and the real estate company, when Kitazawa felt like his career was at a dead end, his decision to become a detective was much more than a whim. It was something he’d fantasized about since his youth. He wanted to live like the hero of a novel: strong, cool, sharp, popular with the ladies. The boyish yearning coursed through Kitazawa’s veins.
Even now, whenever he tasted a hint of drama in his life, Kitazawa basked in the satisfaction of his chosen career. So what if he was really just a doddering old pot-bellied, balding detective putting on airs? When
his motivation flagged, Kitazawa felt that it was important to go through the motions anyway. Kitazawa gave his Philip Marlowe-esque reflection a nod. The convenience store was just two blocks ahead.
The Rendaiji branch of S Mart—Kitazawa checked the name of the shop as he entered through its automatic sliding doors, glancing quickly around the store as he posed with his collar turned up and his hands in his pockets. Aside from him, there were four other customers in the shop. Two of them were over by the magazine racks, catching up on their reading.
As he approached the young female clerk behind the counter, Kitazawa softened his expression. Young women, in particular, were often alarmed by his menacing hard-boiled detective face.
“Excuse me. Is the manager of this establishment available?” Kitazawa inquired in honeyed tones, bowing deeply.
“Um, yes …” the clerk hesitated, shooting a glance towards the back of the store, where a man squatted to arrange a display of ready-made packaged foods. The man seemed to have overheard and looked up at Kitazawa.
“May I help you?” he said.
Kitazawa moved away from the counter and flashed the man an excessively friendly smile. “Are you the manager?” he asked, approaching the man.
“Er, yes …” the man rose to his feet and took a shaky step backwards. He had a pale complexion and a medium build. Behind his wire-framed glasses, his narrow eyes darted about nervously, no doubt alarmed by Kitazawa’s threatening build and features.
Quickly, Kitazawa whipped out his business card and handed it to the man, explaining that he was investigating a missing persons case. “It took place last September. Do you remember it?”