Authors: Koji Suzuki
There’s no one here, there’s no one here …
Saeko sat repeating the mantra in her head, pleading for the feeling to dissipate.
8
Kitazawa had known it before Saeko had even pointed it out. There was no chance that the discovery of her father’s notebook at the Fujimura house could be attributed to mere chance. He slumped deeper into the office chair behind his desk. The chair slid backwards and he almost fell off. Quickly, he straightened up.
It was clear that, at some point, something had happened that led to Saeko’s father’s notebook being picked up by the Fujimuras. Kitazawa wondered if it was possible that Shinichiro Kuriyama had known anyone in the Fujimura family. If he hadn’t, could he have come across any of them at some point? Was there anything they had in common?
He decided to start with places; perhaps there had been a time when someone from the Fujimura family had been in the same place as Shinichiro. Kitazawa started to examine the files he had put together so far. The amount of information he’d been able to gather differed greatly depending on the case. He looked at the three files before him. There was one for the Fujimura family, and one for the three disappearances in Itoikawa. Finally, there was the file for Saeko’s father.
When Saeko had enlisted him to research her father’s disappearance she had given him a huge advance payment that allowed him the luxury of spending a longer period of time researching the case than he usually did. As a result, that file was much thicker than the others. In contrast, the file for the Fujimuras had the least information. There were a mix of sheafs that he’d put together and some that Saeko had provided. The Itoikawa file was in the middle. Of the three people that had gone missing from the convenience store, Kitazawa had spent the most time investigating the disappearance of Mizuho Takayama since her parents had hired him specifically to work on the case.
Mizuho had been caught on film just before her disappearance by the cameras in a convenience store. Kitazawa could picture the scene now, having seen the footage—the image of her thin arm writhing on the floor during the earthquake, the silver bracelet on her wrist. She’d been the editor for a trade journal and had been visiting Itoikawa to research an article on local jade handicraft when she’d vanished without a trace.
In fact, Kitazawa had a very comprehensive file on Mizuho’s case. When he’d just started out as a private detective he’d taken on a case concerning a missing woman. During his investigations he’d researched her travel history and discovered that she’d visited Vietnam just two months before her disappearance. Working on a hunch that there could be a link, he’d visited the place in Vietnam and had actually found the woman living there with a lover. She’d explained to him that she’d returned to Japan unable to forget this man she’d had fallen for while travelling and had decided to run away. But she had found herself missing her old life soon enough; to the joy of his client, Kitazawa was able to persuade her to come back to Japan.
Since that time Kitazawa always made a point of researching where people had visited prior to a disappearance, paying special attention to any trips abroad. He noted that Saeko’s investigations into the Fujimura family’s disappearance were missing such information—she hadn’t checked their travel histories. His own investigations had shown no potential links between her father and Kota Fujimura in Japan. As a natural next step he had looked into their history of travel abroad.
Shinichiro Kuriyama had made a vast number of trips out of Japan. His travels spanned all parts of the world: Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, Africa … Kitazawa limited the search to the few years prior to the disappearance, but even then the number of places visited was huge: England, France, America, India, Mexico, Russia, Mongolia … Kuriyama’s
most recent trip had been to Peru and Bolivia in South America.
In stark contrast to this, the Fujimura family seemed to rarely travel abroad. When they had, it was through a standard tour package: once to Guam, once to Hong Kong. Both had been family trips taken when the two children were still in elementary school. Kitazawa sighed and looked up to the ceiling. He felt heavy, lethargic. It was difficult to concentrate. He probably needed a change of pace.
He went to the bathroom, splashed water over his face, and walked back to his chair. He flicked through the data cards he had put together for each member of the Fujimura family, trying to organize his thoughts. He stopped as soon as he reached Haruko Fujimura’s. The words jumped off the page—South America. She was the only member of the family to have visited the region. Moreover, she had been travelling by herself. It stood out like a sore thumb.
Haruko was the children’s mother, Kota’s wife. During summer vacation in August of 1994 she had travelled alone to South America. She had been twenty-eight at the time, married to Kota but still without kids. Their first child, Fumi, had been born in the following year. Could this be the link Kitazawa had been looking for? The feeling of lethargy seemed to lift as his thoughts began to race with the possibility.
The question was where the two of them could have met. He knew that Shinichiro had only visited Peru and Bolivia, so if they had met, it had to be one of the two countries. But those were large countries, and he had to narrow the focus somehow. He remembered that Shinichiro had penned a number of books on the ancient civilizations of South America. He would have visited one or more of the famous archeological sites during his visit.
Kitazawa didn’t know what sort of ancient ruins existed in Peru and Bolivia. At that moment, Toshiya opened the door and poked his head into the office.
“Dad, come and take a look at this.” Toshiya held up some papers for Kitazawa to look at.
Kitazawa ignored them and waved him over. “Good timing, kid—do you know anything about the ancient civilizations of Peru and Bolivia?”
“Huh? Bit out of the blue …” Toshiya walked across the room, taking care to weave around the clutter of papers and files stacked precariously on the desk.
“I think I’ve found a link between our girl’s dad and the Fujimuras.”
“And that’s got something to do with relics in Bolivia or Peru?”
“Exactly.”
“First place that comes to mind is that Incan site, Machu Picchu. Peru. I bet there are lots more though, hang on.” Toshiya sat in front of the computer and opened a search engine.
Kitazawa watched as his son pulled up a few websites detailing the ancient ruins of the two countries. He recognized a few of the names that came up on the display: Cusco, Nazca, Machu Picchu. They were all pretty well known, he guessed, although he didn’t know much about them. Toshiya clicked through the sites in turn and summarized the contents for his father. He explained that Cusco was well known for being the symbolic capital of the Incan empire, where the emperor had built his palace. Nowadays there were no ruins per se, just some stone foundations of old Incan buildings mostly hidden underneath the more recently built Catholic churches and other Spanish edifices. Nazca, he continued, was famous for the vast drawings visible only from the sky, the Nazca Lines. Again, he dismissed these as not technically being ruins.
Kitazawa remembered a program he’d seen on the wonders of the world that had shown footage of the drawings: giant depictions of spiders, monkeys, a hummingbird. He could see the geometric shapes in his mind’s eye. The program had presented a number of theories as to why the vast pictures had been made but concluded that no single compelling argument had been agreed on to date.
Machu Picchu, the city in the sky. Kitazawa knew that it was famous for its stunning location on the sheer cliffs of the Andes themselves. The site was first discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century when an archeologist stumbled across the vast stone structures of an abandoned city at the foot of the Andes. He had been hiking through the ancient Inca trails in search of the legendary city of Vilcabamba.
Kitazawa’s interest was immediately piqued by this image of Machu Picchu as it fitted perfectly with the image of ruins in his mind. He leant over Toshiya and scanned through the text on the monitor for more information. As he did so, one of the numbers on the screen caught his attention. He stopped and went back over the last few sentences, reading more slowly this time.
At the beginning of the 16th Century, the site was abandoned, seemingly overnight. The reasons for the sudden exodus are currently unknown. 400 years later, Bingham’s archeological dig uncovered a mass open grave containing the remains of 173 bodies. Of the bodies, it was determined that 150 were female.
In all cases, the bodies had had their limbs severed before death. One theory for this is that the Incans thought to free themselves of anyone that would have slowed them down and thrown these bodies into an open grave. However, the theory does not explain why the limbs of the discarded bodies had been severed. We are still far from finding out the truth of what happened here
.
They finished reading the passage and looked at each other. Toshiya took a deep breath; he looked sickened by the mention of mutilated bodies.
“Nasty way to go …”
Kitazawa sat trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Had Shinichiro and Haruko met at Machu Picchu?
Saeko was due to stop off at his office on her way to Atami the next morning, and she would definitely want to know about this development. Her father, Shinichiro, had been travelling in South America at exactly the same time as Haruko Fujimura. There had to be a point of connection. It was the only explanation for their finding his notebook at the Fujimura house. Kitazawa pulled together some papers and looked up at Toshiya.
“Didn’t you say you had something to show me?”
“Ah yes, I almost forgot.”
Toshiya showed his printouts from the Internet. The top page bore the title, “Disappearances at Zero Magnetic Field Points.”
“I was looking for links between the disappearances and magnetic disturbances. This article came up.”
Kitazawa ran through the content of the pages. The article was about people supposedly going missing at a point off Route 152, the Akiha Road, that once connected Tenryu and Imoya. Because it crossed directly over an active fault line—the median tectonic line—the road had been severed and never repaired. Due to this, going north of Hamamatsu required splitting off via Oshikamura towards Komagane, turning left on a T-intersection just by the Bungui mountain pass. The article cited a number of cases of people vanishing mysteriously from the woods there, a short walk from a parking area near the pass, right at the spot where there was a zero magnetic field.
The few reported cases were in the form of direct testimonies by young-sounding witnesses. The article didn’t seem particularly convincing; it was somewhat sensationalist in style, like a souped-up urban legend. But there was one point in particular that caught Kitazawa’s attention.
The location.
The supposed disturbance in the magnetic field was only ten or so kilometers south of the Fujimura house in Takato, too close to be mere coincidence. He decided that the article was worth holding on to and added it to the file that he was preparing to give to Saeko the next morning.
Perhaps she’ll be able to shed some light on this …
1
Two thousand years ago, a group of early Christians assembled at a cliff face overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and dug a giant cave into its walls. It was the site they had chosen to face the end.
A series of narrow gorges snaked off from the top of the cliffs, creating a panoramic vista of conical and pointed rock faces, a topography striving for the sky. Odd pockets of weeds growing through narrow crevices in the stone walls provided occasional accents of green across the otherwise dull and gray landscape.
The devout used ropes to suspend themselves over the cliff edge and dug away at the rock face until they had a cave large enough to accommodate all that had assembled. Once the digging work was completed, they began decorating the interior of the cave. Using chisel-like tools, they carved away at the inside walls, transforming the flat surfaces into an explosion of flowers.
Their work on the interior finally completed, the people gathered together in the cave and prayed as one to the barren land. Then they sat, piously waiting for the end, full of faith in the divine prophecy they had received.
Their vigil continued for days. Each morning, when the sun rose from the horizon below, the devout continued to offer their prayers. Each night, the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks below proclaimed the continued existence of the world around them.
To the devout massed, the idea of the end of the world was pregnant with exquisite beauty. They had resolved to stand and face whatever was coming, to be resolute and pious so that they might welcome the coming of a better world. The end of the world signified an end to their suffering, to the misery they faced in their everyday lives. It promised a new beginning.
Yet, no matter how long they waited, the sun continued to rise and the waves continued to sound. Eventually the people left the cave in a mixture of despair and relief. The vast cave was left empty, its intricate carvings and painted flowers abandoned.
The cave related to the modern world the state of mind of these believers as they waited for the end of the world, an eloquent testimony to their creed that the world they anticipated was a place alive with color and flowers.
Saeko’s father had taken her to visit this storied Mediterranean cave when she was young. She remembered feeling an intense disappointment when she finally saw the place. It had been much smaller than the cave of her imagination. The wonderful images of flowers she had expected to see looked like nothing more than clumsy red scrawlings.
Now, looking out of the window of the bullet train, Saeko found herself remembering the story of those people and their cave. Something about the countryside quietly streaming past outside the window was telling her something. She wasn’t sure how exactly, but something was out of place, and the feeling sparked the memory of this tale of the end of the world.