Ring (21 page)

Genji wasn't exactly eloquent. He used a lot of roundabout expressions, and Asakawa soon got tired of listening. But then he said something that had Asakawa and Ryuji listening intently. "I think that what made Shizu change was that stone statue of the Ascetic we pulled up out of the sea. There was a full moon that night…" According to the old man, Shizuko's mysterious powers were somehow connected to the sea and the full moon. And on the night it happened, Genji himself had been beside her, rowing the boat. It was 1946, on a night toward the end of summer; Shizuko was twenty-one and Genji was twenty-four.

It was hot for so late in the season, and even nightfall brought no relief. Genji spoke of these events of forty-four years ago as though they had happened last night.

That sweltering evening, Genji was sitting on his front porch lazily fanning himself, gazing at the night sky calmly reflected on the moonlit sea. The silence was broken when Shizu came running up the hill to his house. She stood in front of him, tugging at his sleeve, and cried, "Gen, get your boat! We're going fishing." He asked her why, but all she would say was, "We'll never have another moonlit night like this." Genji just sat there as if in a daze, looking at the most beautiful girl on the island. "Wipe that stupid look off your face and hurry up!" She pulled at his collar until he got to his feet. Genji was used to having her push him around and tell him what to do, but he asked her anyway, "What in the world are we going fishing for?" Staring at the ocean, she gave a brisk reply: "For the statue of the Ascetic."

"Of the Ascetic?"

With raised eyebrows and a note of regret in her voice, Shizuko explained that earlier in the day, some Occupation soldiers had hurled the stone statue of the Ascetic into the sea.

In the middle of the island's eastern shore there was a beach called the Ascetic's Beach, with a small cave called the Ascetic's Grotto. It contained a stone statue of En no Ozunu, the famed Buddhist ascetic, who had been banished here in the year 699. Ozunu had been born with great wisdom, and long years of discipline had given him command of occult and mystic arts. It was said that he could summon gods and demons at will. But Ozunu's power to foretell the future had made him powerful enemies in the world of books and weapons, and he'd been judged a criminal, a menace to society, and exiled here to Izu Oshima. That had been almost thirteen hundred years ago. Ozunu holed himself up in a small cave on the beach and devoted himself to even more strenuous disciplines. He also taught farming and fishing to the people of the island, earning respect for his virtue. Finally he was pardoned and allowed to return to the mainland, where he founded the Shugendo monastic tradition. He was thought to have spent three years on the island, but stories of his time there abounded, including the legend that he had once shod himself with iron clogs and flown off to Mt Fuji. The islanders still retained a great deal of affection for En no Ozunu, and the Ascetic's Grotto was considered the holiest place on the island. A festival, known as the Festival of the Ascetic, was held every year on June 15th.

Right after the end of World War II, however, as part of their policy toward Shintoism and Buddhism, the Occupation forces had taken En no Ozunu's statue from where it was enshrined in the cave and tossed it into the ocean. Shizuko, who had deep faith in Ozunu, had evidently been watching. She had hid herself in the shadow of the rocks at Worm's Nose Point and watched carefully as the statue was cast from the American patrol boat. She memorized the exact spot.

Genji couldn't believe his ears when he heard that they were going fishing for the statue of the Ascetic. He was a good fisherman with strong arms, but he'd never tried to catch a stone statue. But there was no way he could just turn Shizuko down, given the secret feelings he nursed for her. He launched his boat into the night, thinking to take this opportunity to put her in his debt. And truth be told, being out on the sea under a beautiful moon like this, just the two of them, promised to be a wonderful thing.

They'd built fires on Ascetic's Beach and at Worm's Nose as landmarks, and now they rowed farther and farther out to sea. Both of them were quite familiar with the ocean here-the lie of the seafloor, the depth, and the schools of fish that swam here. But now it was night time, and no matter how bright the moon was, it illuminated nothing beneath the surface. Genji didn't know how Shizuko intended to find the statue. He asked her, while working the oars, but she didn't answer. She just checked their position again by the bonfires on the beach. One might have been able to get a pretty good idea of where they were by gazing over the waves at the fires on the beach, and estimating the distance between them. After they'd rowed several hundred meters, Shizuko cried, "Stop here!"

She went to the stern of the boat, leaned down close to the surface of the water, and peered into the dark sea. "Look the other way," she commanded Genji. Genji guessed what Shizuko was about to do, and his heart leapt. Shizuko stood up and took off her splash-patterned kimono. His imagination aroused by the sound of the robe slipping across her skin, Genji found it hard to breathe. Behind him he heard the sound of her jumping into the sea. As the spray hit his shoulders he turned around and looked. Shizuko was treading water, her long black hair tied back with a rag and one end of a slender rope clenched between her teeth. She thrust her upper body out of the water, took two deep breaths, then dived to the bottom of the sea.

How many times did her head pop up from the surface of the water to gasp for air? The last time, she no longer had the end of the rope in her mouth. "I've tied it fast to the Ascetic. Go ahead and pull him up," she said in a trembling voice.

Gen shifted his body to the bow of the boat and pulled on the rope. In no time Shizuko climbed aboard, draped her kimono around her body, and came up beside Genji in time to help him haul up the statue. They placed it in the centre of the boat and headed back to the shore. The whole way back, neither Genji nor Shizuko said a word. There was something in the atmosphere that quashed all questions. He found it mysterious that she'd been able to locate the statue in the darkness at the bottom of the sea. It was only three days later that he was able to ask her. She said that the Ascetic's eyes had called to her on the ocean floor. The green eyes of the statue, master of gods and demons, had glowed at the bottom of the deep dark sea… That's what Shizuko had said.

After that, Shizuko began to feel physical discomfort. She'd never even had a headache up until then, but now she often experienced searing pains in her head, accompanied by visions of things she'd never seen before flashing across her mind's eye. And it happened that these scenes she had glimpsed very soon manifested themselves in reality. Genji had questioned her in some detail. It seemed that when these future scenes inserted themselves into her brain, they were always accompanied by the same citrus fragrance in her nostrils. Genji's older sister had married and moved to Odawara, on the mainland; when she died, the scene had presented itself to Shizuko beforehand. But it didn't sound like she could actually, consciously predict things that would happen in the future. It was just that these scenes would flash across her mind, with no warning, and with no inkling of why she'd witnessed those exact scenes. So Shizuko never allowed people to ask her to predict their futures.

The following year she went up to Tokyo, despite Genji's efforts to stop her. She came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, and conceived his child. Then, at the end of the year, she went back to her hometown and gave birth to a baby girl. Sadako.

They didn't know when Genji's tale would end. Ten years later Shizuko jumped into the mouth of Mt Mihara, and to judge by the way Genji related the event, it seemed he had decided to blame it on her lover, Ikuma. It was perhaps a natural thought, as he had been Genji's rival in love, but his obvious resentment made his account hard to sit through. All they'd gleaned from him was the knowledge that Sadako's mother had been able to see the future, and the possibility that this power had been given her by a stone statue of En no Ozunu.

Just then the fax machine began to hum. It printed out an enlargement of the head shot of Sadako Yamamura that Yoshino had got from Theater Group Soaring.

Asakawa was strangely moved. This was the first actual look he'd had at this woman. Even though it had only been for the briefest moment, he'd shared the same sensations as her, seen the world from the same vantage point. It was like catching the first glimpse of a lover's face in the dim morning light, finally seeing what she looks like, after a night of entwined limbs and shared orgasms in the dark.

It was odd, but he couldn't think of her as hideous. That was only natural; although the photo that came through the fax machine was somewhat blurred around the edges, still it fully communicated the allure of Sadako's beautifully regular features.

"She's a fine woman, isn't she?" Ryuji said. Asakawa suddenly recalled Mai Takano. If you compared them purely on the basis of looks, Sadako was far more beautiful than Mai. And yet the scent of a woman was much more powerful with Mai. And what about that "eerie" quality that was supposed to characterize Sadako? It didn't come through in the photograph. Sadako had powers that ordinary people didn't have; they must have influenced the people around her.

The second page of the fax summarized information about Shizuko Yamamura. It picked up right where Genji's story had left off just now.

In 1947, having left behind her hometown of Sashikiji for the capital, Shizuko suddenly collapsed with head pains and was taken to a hospital. Through one of the doctors, she came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, an assistant professor in the psychiatry department of Taido University. Ikuma was involved in trying to find a scientific explanation for hypnotism and related phenomena, and he became very interested in Shizuko when he discovered that she had startling powers of clairvoyance. The finding went so far as to change the thrust of his research. Thereafter Ikuma would immerse himself in the study of paranormal powers, with Shizuko as the subject of his research. But the two soon progressed beyond a mere researcher-subject relationship. In spite of his having a family, Ikuma began to have romantic feelings toward Shizuko. By the end of the year she was pregnant with his child, and to escape the eyes of the world she went back home, where she had Sadako. Shizuko immediately returned to Tokyo, leaving Sadako in Sashikiji, but three years later she returned to reclaim her child. From then until the time of her suicide, evidently, she never let Sadako leave her side.

When the 1950s dawned, the partnership of Heihachiro Ikuma and Shizuko Yamamura was a sensation in the pages of the news papers and the weekly news magazines. They provided a sudden insight into the scientific underpinnings of supernatural powers. At first, perhaps dazzled by Ikuma's position as a professor at such a prestigious university, the public unanimously believed in Shizuko's powers. Even the media wrote her up in a more-or-less favorable light. Still, there were persistent claims that she could only be a fake, and when an authoritative scholarly association weighed in with the one-word comment "questionable", people began to shift their support away from the pair.

The paranormal powers Shizuko exhibited were mainly ESP-related, such as clairvoyance or second sight, and the ability to produce psychic photographs. She didn't display the power of telekinesis, the ability to move things without touching them. According to one magazine, simply by holding a piece of film in a tightly sealed envelope against her forehead, she could psychically imprint upon it a specified design; she could also identify the image on a similarly concealed piece of film a hundred times out of a hundred. However, another magazine maintained that she was nothing more than a con-woman, claiming that any magician, with some training, could easily do the same things. In this way the tide of public opinion began to rise against Shizuko and Ikuma.

Then Shizuko was visited by misfortune. In 1954 she gave birth to her second baby, but it became ill and died at only four months of age. It had been a boy. Sadako, who was seven at the time, seemed to have showered a special affection on her newborn little brother.

The following year, in 1955, Ikuma challenged the media to a public demonstration of Shizuko's powers. At first Shizuko didn't want to do it. She said that it was hard to concentrate her awareness the way she wanted to among a mass of spectators; she was afraid she'd fail. But Ikuma was unyielding. He couldn't stand being labelled a charlatan by the media, and he couldn't think of a better way to outwit them than by offering clear proof of her authenticity.

On the appointed day, Shizuko reluctantly mounted the dais in the lab theatre, under the watchful eyes of nearly a hundred scholars and representatives of the press. She was mentally exhausted, to boot, so these were hardly the best conditions for her to work under. The experiment was to proceed along quite simple lines. All she had to do was identify the numbers on a pair of dice inside a lead container. If she had just been able to exert her powers normally, it would have been no problem. But she
knew
that each one of the hundred people surrounding her was waiting and hoping for her to fail. She trembled, she crouched down on the floor, she cried out in anguish, "Enough of this!" Shizuko herself explained it this way: everybody had a certain degree of psychic power. She just had more of it than others did. But surrounded by a hundred people all willing her to fail, her power was disrupted-she couldn't get it to work. Ikuma went even further: "It's not just a hundred people. No, now the whole population of Japan is trying to stamp out the fruits of my research. When public opinion, fanned by the media, begins to turn, then the media says nothing the people don't want to hear. They should be ashamed!" Thus the great public display of clairvoyance ended with Ikuma's denunciation of the mass media.

Of course, the media interpreted Ikuma's diatribe as an attempt to shift the blame for the failed demonstration, and that's how it was written up in the next day's newspapers.
A FAKE AFTER ALL
…
THEIR TRUE COLORS REVEALED .
..
TAIDO UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR A FRAUD.
..
FIVE YEARS OF DEBATE ENDED
…
VICTORY FOR MODERN SCIENCE.
Not a single article defended them.