Birthday

1

November 1990

............................................................, and

his dream was set in a theater, one that seated about four hundred people, the kind he was so used to, and had been for so long. He wasn't in the audience seating or onstage, but in a sound booth overlooking the stage from behind the seats; evidently he was in charge of sound effects. In front of him, illuminated by a work light, were the mixer in its cabinet and a reel-to-reel tape deck. He was seated on a chair, the index finger of his right hand on the tape recorder's play button and his left hand on the mixer, adjusting sound levels; his gaze was fixed on the play onstage. He knew, all too well, that this was a dream. And he knew, roughly, what was going to happen next, if he didn't wake up first, which didn't look like it was going to happen...and it was this self-awareness that he found so mystifying. He couldn't figure out what to call this neither/nor state he was in, as he crossed and recrossed the border between sleep and wakefulness.

The sound booth was located next to the lighting booth. It played an important role in supporting and in-tensifying the drama unfolding onstage. His job was to watch the progress of the play and provide music and sound effects at just the right moments, in response to signals from the stage director and in synch with the lighting man. This troupe was quite particular about how the music was handled. The actors' movements and lines were meant to match the rhythms of the songs he provided, so if his timing on the start button was off, it would ruin the whole play. They required constant concentration from their soundman: he wasn't able to relax, even for a moment, until the play was over.

Onstage, his favorite actress was performing, with great earnestness, the part she'd at long last landed. It was her debut—her career as an actress depended on each one of these precious moments, and she was savoring them.

He liked her personally, which only made him more determined to get the sound cues exactly right. His every thought was concentrated on the finger that would press play. He could feel sweat beading on his fingertip.

The music would play, and she'd sing a snippet of song: that was how the scene went. He'd push the play button, and from the speaker in front of the stage would come the sound, a snippet that he'd recorded and edited himself. That was what was supposed to happen.

He pressed play.

But what came from the speaker was no sound he'd ever heard before. Not only was it not music, it was too creepy even for one of their sound effects. Though he could hardly make it out, he thought it sounded like someone moaning—when the scene called for a cheerful little song. It was more than enough to destroy the play.

He watched the tape reel spin. It was his tape, the one he'd put together: no doubt about that. And he knew exactly what sounds were on it, and where. This keening wail was totally unforeseen.

Who the hell put this on here!

There was no time to think of a solution. Doubt as-sailed him from every side, and in his panic he allowed an effect scheduled for the next scene to play now. The ringing of a telephone echoed through the theater. The situation was beyond salvaging now.

The actress was young and inexperienced, and she couldn't improvise her way out of the situation. She simply stopped and looked up at the sound booth. With the house lights down and the booth's work light on, she'd be able to see him from the stage.

She looked up at him with a weapon-like clarity of gaze, and an accusatory gleam began to come into her eyes.

How dare you ruin my debut like this!

He gave up. He had no explanation for how those moans had gotten there. There was no way he was to blame—if anything, he was the victim. But he couldn't even voice his excuses: his body had stiffened, and he couldn't move. It felt like sleep paralysis.

Now all the actors onstage had stopped performing and were looking up at the sound booth. Audience members, too, following the actors' gazes, were beginning to turn around in their seats, half standing up to stare at him. His whole body felt the force of their recrimina-tions.

It's not my fault! It's not my fault!

He didn't speak the words aloud, but somehow the microphone picked up the voice in his head and ampli-fied it until it resounded throughout the theater.

"It's not my fault! It's not my fault!"

This attempt at self-vindication, more like a desperate cry, only poured oil on the flames. The crowd's reproach reached an even higher pitch, engulfing the hall.

But the sharpest gaze of all belonged to the young actress making her first appearance on a stage. The woman who had joined the troupe at the same time as him, with whom he'd done odd jobs together when they were interns, the woman with whom he'd exchanged encouraging words, the woman who had gradually become the object of his affections... He wanted to help her. He couldn't. Far from it: he was dragging her down. All he wanted, and he wanted it from the bottom of his heart, was for her to succeed as an actress, and now he was stealing that future from her, and all he could do was gnash his teeth... He could say he loved her all he wanted, but in reality it all came down to this.

Clutching at his chest, drowning in sweat, Toyama awoke from his dream.

For the first few minutes after waking up from the dream, he didn't know where he was. Then, as he got his breathing under control and looked around, Toyama began to grasp the situation. Mirrored ceiling, a circular bed that wasn't his, a woman in a towel sitting next to that oversized bed...

He tried to look up at her, and suddenly his chest hurt like it was being squeezed. He shivered; he could feel a cold sweat break out on his back. His chest and back had been giving him a lot of pain lately; this time, too, it made him uneasy. Not again, he thought; maybe he ought to see a doctor after all.

"You were having a nightmare."

She flashed him a playful smile, as if he'd shown her something really amusing.

Toyama groaned and lay there supine and motion-less for a time. He was afraid that if he made the wrong move now he'd get dizzy and fall over. He waited for his breathing to relax.

At length he gingerly rolled over on the bed. He might be alright.

He quietly separated himself from the woman, weighing what he'd dreamed against what he knew to be real; he heaved a sigh. How many times had he dreamed terrifying things, knowing all the while that it was a dream? And each time, even knowing it for what it was, he cowered before the same dream, and then felt relief when he was able to confirm it wasn't real.

He looked at his watch and asked the woman, "Hey, how long have I been asleep?"

"Fifteen minutes, maybe? I saw you were asleep and went to take a shower. When I got back, you were having a nightmare. You're being punished for all the bad stuff you do, don't you think?"

Toyama gave a bitter smile and buried his face in the pillow. He had more than an inkling of what she was talking about. Here he was, forty-seven, married, a father, and he was still fooling around. No doubt the woman assumed his wife must've found out and confronted him, and thus the cold sweat.

He wasn't drunk. It wasn't even night. It was two in the afternoon. Once they left the hotel they'd be under the clear blue skies of late November. He'd had a little lull at work, so he'd called up an old flame under the pre-tense of doing lunch; they'd gone to a hotel; sated from food and sex, and tired from accumulated fatigue, he'd suddenly been overcome by sleep; and in those few minutes, that fragmentary dream... It wasn't hard to assign it meaning. The same dream had tormented him over and over as a twenty-three-year-old college student. That was twenty-four years ago.

The dream came in lots of variations. Sometimes, he'd be sitting in the sound booth cuing the tape, which he'd mended with adhesive tape, and it would break, with an audible snap. Sometimes the tape would produce a strange noise unconnected with the scene onstage. What all the variants had in common was the fact that his actions produced some sound that ruined the performance of the woman he loved just as she was going to make her stage debut.

He'd had that nightmare twenty-four years ago. At the time he'd been manning the sound booth for Theater Group Soaring: it had been an all-too-plausible scenario then, and in fact something along those lines had actually happened to him.

But he hadn't had the dream for twenty-four years—

why was it back now? He thought he knew the answer to that.

The guy's business card was still in his card-case.

Kenzo Yoshino, Daily News, Yokosuka Branch Office.

It was a month now since this Yoshino guy had called him up out of the blue. A weekday afternoon.

Toyama had just come back from lunch and sat down at his desk. He answered the phone himself. The caller, this Yoshino, had first confirmed Toyama's name and the fact that in 1965 he had been a member of Theater Group Soaring, and then he'd taken a deep breath and said, I'd like to ask you a few questions about Sadako Yamamura, if I may.

Toyama remembered Yoshino's voice distinctly: it was that of a man struggling against panic, grasping at straw. And it was no wonder the man's voice had left such an impression, considering what he'd said. Toyama had never met the man, but he was talking about Sadako Yamamura, a woman whose name Toyama hadn't heard anyone utter for twenty-four years, as often as he might recall it in secret to himself. Every time he thought of her face his chest tightened and his pulse quickened. Obviously, he wasn't over her yet, even all these years later.

Yoshino said he wanted to get together and talk with him about Sadako. Toyama agreed to meet him once. He couldn't pass up the chance, considering how much the subject interested him, too. He arranged to meet Yoshino in a coffee shop in Akasaka, near his office.

Yoshino looked every inch the old-time reporter as, stroking his beard, he tried to coax forth Toyama's distant memories. He concentrated on the time immediately surrounding Sadako's disappearance.

Sadako Yamamura went missing in 1966, right after a Soaring performance, correct?

Yoshino was very persistent about wanting to know her movements after leaving the troupe. He didn't rush, and he paused between each question, but his vocal and facial expressions betrayed the depth of his interest in Sadako.

What happened to Sadako twenty-four years ago?

How was Toyama to know? He'd searched for her himself, desperately. If ever he'd found out where Sadako had disappeared to, his life now would be very different.

And so he knew exactly why the nightmare was back. It was all due to Yoshino, his mention of Sadako's name. It was the only thing that could have brought back those dreams, and all the suffering they had caused him.

2

They emerged from the hotel into glaring sunlight.

The harsh light bothered him—or was it his conscience, after what he'd done in that room? Quite a contrast to the mild signs of late autumn all around them.

They walked quickly up the sidewalk to a place where the crowd thinned out. Toyama clasped the woman's hand and muttered, "Well, gotta go."

"Back to the office?" she replied, with an untroubled smile. She took one hand from her hip and waved.

Goodbye.

"I've got a ton of work to catch up on."

"But in spite of that, you just couldn't control this," she said, gesturing as if to grab his crotch. "You never could."

It suddenly occurred to Toyama that it might be time to quit this. He wasn't young anymore, and there was no telling when one of his attacks might turn life-threatening.

"I'll give you a call," he said, blowing her a little kiss and turning away. After walking a bit, he turned to look back: she was still watching him. He waved, then hurried through the Nogizaka neighborhood toward Hitotsugi Street. When he'd said he had a ton of work to catch up on, it was no lie.

In his junior year of college he'd suddenly taken it into his head to become a playwright. That was how he'd come to join Theater Group Soaring's production department. So far so good, but it turned out that there were so many good writers and directors in the group who were senior to him that he knew he'd never get a chance to show what he was capable of. Placed in charge of music, he learned the job and then went back to school, graduating a year late. He lucked into a job at a record company, where he became a project director; he'd been doing it for twenty-three years now. The job was just something that had allowed him to utilize his experience with theater sound, but once he'd gotten into it he found it a fas-cinating line of work—he came to look at it as a calling.

It was a fun job, as long as he was in the studio involved with recording. He'd never once found that part of the job unpleasant. Sometimes he hated attending planning meetings with executives, but dealing with musicians gave him virtually no stress at all. All in all he felt it was a job worth doing, and he was glad he'd found it. Not only that, but the industry as a whole was healthy, and things looked like they were only going to get better. Things were bullish in every respect, his salary was all he could wish for, and he never lacked for female company. Toyama had no complaints about the situation he found himself in. Even the work that now awaited him back at the office was fundamentally something he enjoyed. He had no worries, other than, lately, some physical problems.

But he had to admit that hearing Yoshino mention Sadako Yamamura, and now dreaming about her again, unsettled him in ways he couldn't quite pin down.

Sadako, it was fair to say, was the only woman in the world for him. He'd botched his first marriage. The second one was more stable, and they had kids. Surrounded by children and a wife too young for him, he had a satisfying life now—but he often wondered "what if."

What would have happened if Sadako and I had gotten married?

That wasn't the only "if" that occurred to him.

If the end of the world came, who would I want to be with!

If I could do it all over, who would I spend my hfe with?

If I could only make love to a woman once in my life, who would it be?

The answer to all these questions, for Toyama, was Sadako. If she appeared before him this very instant and offered to accept him, he'd be prepared to give up anything and everything. He even thought he'd be willing to die, if he could only touch her skin once more.

I've got to call.

If he could catch up on his work today, he'd have quite a bit of free time tomorrow, November 27th. It wouldn't be too much trouble to go down to Yokosuka if he was asked to.

He decided it would be better to call from a pay phone than from the office, so he walked to the edge of the sidewalk and took out a telephone card and the man's business card. He punched the number for the Yokosuka Branch Office of the Daily News. Kenzo Yoshino himself answered.

Their last conversation had been pretty one-sided, with Yoshino asking all the questions. He'd seemed to be in a hurry, and had given only the most rudimentary replies to Toyama's inquiries. As soon as he'd learned what he wanted to know, or realized that he could get no further information from Toyama, Yoshino had cut their meeting short, getting up and walking out. It had left Toyama with a myriad of questions, and the feeling that Yoshino's be-havior had been inconsiderate, to say the least.

Why was a reporter sniffing around after Sadako anyway?

That was the most obvious question, and now it was whirling around in his head. Toyama briefly explained to Yoshino what he wanted to know and asked, politely, if they could get together and talk.

He added that if he needed to he'd be willing to go down to Yokosuka, but Yoshino said that wouldn't be necessary, and he explained his schedule for tomorrow.

A colleague from the Daily News had died the day before in a Shinagawa hospital, and Yoshino was planning to go up to Shinagawa for the funeral. He said he could meet him for an hour or so after the funeral.

Let's meet at four o'clock at Shinbaba Station on the Keihin Express line, at the ticket gate.

Toyama repeated the time and place, wrote them in his schedule book, and hung up.

3

The sun was quick in setting today. Toward late afternoon the sky darkened as if shrouded in mist and the sun sank with violent rapidity. The air grew markedly chill, and it felt like winter as he stood by the ticket gate, which opened into a shopping street.

Toyama and Yoshino were both there five minutes early.

Yoshino looked more careworn and forlorn than he had a month before. Of course, he'd just come from a junior colleague's funeral—that probably had something to do with it. When someone younger dies, it's always depressing.

Toyama had never gotten out at this station before.

He knew that if he walked east he'd eventually run into a canal, and before that he'd hit the Shore Road, running north and south. On the water side of that was a quiet warehouse district, where overhead one could hear the horns of shipping in Tokyo Bay.

Toyama and Yoshino walked together to a coffee shop just this side of the Shore Road. They went inside and ordered coffee, but before they'd had time to exchange more than a few words, Yoshino's pager went off.

He left the table and went to the pink pay phone in the back of the shop. Toyama watched him from behind.

Yoshino looked every inch the reporter as he cradled the receiver on his shoulder and dialed.

Toyama had no difficulty overhearing Yoshino's end of the conversation.

"What? Mai Takano's been found dead?"

Mai Takano... Of course Toyama had never heard the name before. All he was interested in was what happened to Sadako. He couldn't muster any interest in this woman whose name he didn't recognize. He tried to ignore the rest of the conversation.

Yoshino made no effort to muffle his voice as he bent over the receiver and barked out questions. The somewhat sad expression of a moment before was gone now, and Yoshino was once again the reporter sniffing out a story. He looked reenergized.

"Three days ago... Where? ...East Shinagawa—wait a minute, that's not far from where I am now. I could swing by if I have time... Which was it? You know, was it a forensic autopsy or an administrative one? I see...

Hmm, ninety hours after time of death.... Huh? Signs that she gave birth just prior to death? ...the umbilical cord? Are you kidding me? And what about the baby?

...Gone? You mean...hide nor hair?"

It was enough for Toyama to piece together the situation. Three days ago a woman named Mai Takano had been found dead in this vicinity. An autopsy had been performed, revealing that she'd given birth immediately before her death. And the child was now missing.

A shocking incident, to be sure. But after all, it had nothing to do with him. It didn't matter to him who had died and how, or what she'd given birth to—or even if that newborn baby had, totally under its own power (strange though that would be), disappeared...

Toyama thought—was determined to think—that the incident had no connection with him, and yet his nerves were tingling.

Mai Takano.

He'd never heard the name before. So why did he now feel like it was engraved somewhere deep in his heart?

He found himself imagining her body, already enter-ing rigor mortis, with something squirming beside it.

Imagining an infant climbing over its mother's corpse and walking away.

A chill came over him. He had a powerful intuition regarding what Mai Takano had given birth to, and it wouldn't let him tell himself anymore that he wasn't interested. As he watched Yoshino hunched over the phone and listened to the unguarded fragments of his conversation, the facts, or pieces of them, began to form definite images in his brain and play themselves out. It was like when he took segments of music and edited them together into a single, smoothly flowing track.

Toyama closed his eyes and turned his face to the ceiling. The voice at the phone stopped and there was a moment of silence. When he opened his eyes again, Yoshino was seated opposite him—when had he returned?

The last few minutes, the duration of the phone call, felt distorted to Toyama—forcefully so, like he'd been twisted up and tossed abruptly into another dimension.

"Is there something wrong?" Yoshino sounded concerned by the look of enervated astonishment on Toyama's face.

Toyama straightened up in his seat—he'd sunk into a slouch—and took a deep breath before saying, "No...

But it sounds like you've got quite a sensational incident on your hands."

"I don't know about that yet. A young female was found dead on a rooftop, is all."

"Nearby?"

"Yeah, East Shinagawa. An office building. She was found in the exhaust shaft on the roof—a hole, basically.

Odd, right?"

"Was it murder?"

"It doesn't sound like it. Probably an accident."

"I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but, um, I heard you say that there were signs she'd given birth just before dying."

Yoshino gave Toyama an indecipherable grin and a questioning glance. Why are you so interested in this!

"Well, I don't know anything yet—I just heard the report. A pity it had to happen to someone so young, though. She was a smart girl. Pretty, too."

Yoshino looked away and stroked his beard. There seemed to be something more bothering him. Toyama had a hunch.

"This Mai Takano—she didn't happen to be an acquaintance of yours?"

Yoshino immediately shook his head. "No, I didn't know her personally. But a colleague of mine did, Asakawa. It was his funeral I was at: we were pretty close. He knew her."

A look of anxiety crossed Yoshino's face, and Toyama observed it. Anxiety—but more than that, dread.

"Their deaths—were they just a coincidence?"

At the question, Yoshino's dread deepened, and Toyama saw that too.

First his friend Asakawa dies, and now a girl Asakawa knew. Neither death in itself terribly suspi-cious, but precisely because there was so little information, it was natural for an outsider to want to connect them.

Yoshino's eyes began darting around the room, as if he were desperately coming up with ideas and rejecting them.

"Yeah, right... Now, about Sadako Yamamura."

Yoshino changed the subject, but the way he said it made it seem almost as if Sadako had something to do with Asakawa's and Mai's deaths.

The last time Toyama and Yoshino had met, Toyama had simply answered the questions put to him.

That had been his role, and he'd played it to the hilt, but he had no intention of reprising it. This time he was determined to take the initiative and find out why a reporter was so interested in ascertaining what had happened to Sadako.

So he came right out and said it. "Don't you think it's about time you told me why you want to know what she was doing twenty-four years ago?"

Yoshino hung his head and looked beaten—it was the same look he'd had the last time they'd met.

"See, the thing is...I don't really know myself."

That was what he'd said last time, too. Toyama couldn't accept it. A reporter for a major news organiza-tion follows a woman's quarter-century-old trail through the nooks and crannies of the city, and he doesn't even know why?

"Don't give me that." Toyama's expression began to change.

Yoshino raised his hands and said, "Okay. I'll be honest with you. Kazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter in the main office, was investigating something, and Sadako Yamamura's name came up. He needed information. But he was tied up elsewhere at the time, so he asked me to help him out. He told me to find out whatever I could about what Sadako Yamamura was doing twenty-four years ago."

Toyama leaned forward. "What was he investigating?"

"That's the thing. He never told me. And then he got in a traffic accident and went into a coma. He died without ever regaining consciousness. I don't know why he was so insistent about finding out about her. I guess the truth is lost in a grove—like in that movie, you know?"

Toyama peered deep into Yoshino's eyes, trying to tell if he was lying. He didn't seem to be, at least about the big stuff. But he might be lying about the details.

Toyama deduced how Yoshino had been led to him.

First he would have gone to Theater Group Soaring's rehearsal space, where he would have found out who else had joined the troupe as an intern in February of 1965.

The resumes they'd all submitted together with their entrance exams were still stored in the troupe's offices. As far as Toyama could recall, there had been eight of them that year. No doubt Yoshino had thought he could trace Sadako's steps by speaking to all of them.

"Did you talk to the others?"

Toyama could only remember the names of two or three others, besides Sadako. He had no contact with any of them now—no idea where they were or what they were doing.

"Of the people who joined Soaring in 1965, I was able to track down four, including yourself."

"So you were able to contact the other three as well?"

Yoshino nodded. "I talked to them on the phone."

"Who?"

"Iino, Kitajima, and Kato."

As Yoshino said the names, Toyama was able to recall the faces. They'd been slumbering in the recesses of his memory; now he could feel them coming back to him, more clearly by the moment. Of course, in his mind, everyone still looked twenty.

Iino: he'd completely forgotten about Iino. Didn't speak much; a skilled mime. The older girls had liked him: they'd kind of adopted him.

Kitajima: small, not much stage presence, but he was good with his lines. He'd been used as a narrator, impressive for an intern. Toyama thought he'd had a slight crush on Sadako, too.

Kato: her first name was Keiko, he remembered now. Her name had been so ordinary that Shigemori, their director and head of the troupe, had given her a flashy stage name. "Yurako Tatsunomiya." She was quite beautiful, and she certainly wasn't aiming for comic roles, which was what such an overwrought name might have steered her toward. Still, the name was a direct gift from the troupe's founder-director, and she couldn't very well turn it down. Toyama remembered how hard a time she'd had hiding her mixed feelings.

They'd all be out drinking, and people would start mock-ing the name, which would leave her near tears as she tried to defend it.

In fact, it was Sadako who probably wanted a stage name most. Her real name was too old-fashioned for a modern beauty like hers. She should have received a stage name when she first went on stage, last-minute though it was. But Shigemori had sent her on under her real name.

All these things about people Toyama thought he'd forgotten came vividly back as Yoshino said their names.

He began to wax nostalgic. But just as he was on the point of losing himself in the feelings of his youth, he dug in his heels. He had another question to ask.

"So you only talked to Iino, Kitajima, and Kato on the phone?" Why was I the only one you met face-to-face?

"I called you first, too, you know."

"I know that. What I mean is, you let it go at a phone call for the other three, but you wanted to meet me in person. Why?"

Yoshino studied Toyama with a surprised look. His expression said, Do you even have to ask?

"I thought you knew. The other three all said the same thing, that you and Sadako had a special relationship back then."

A special relationship.

He felt his strength leave him, and he sank down into his seat again. From this position he could see stains on the ceiling.

"Is that it..."

It made sense now. No wonder Yoshino had wanted to meet him in person, instead of just talking on the phone like with the other three.

He'd always meant to hide his closeness to Sadako from the other interns, not to mention the troupe as a whole. But it now seemed that his fellow interns had seen right through him. So much so that they still remembered it twenty-four years later. He and Sadako must have made quite an impression. But Toyama couldn't believe there was anything all that memorable about himself, which meant it must have been Sadako's striking character that they remembered. Unless they'd really all been that in-trigued by their relationship.

"Would you be willing to tell me what happened?"

Toyama lowered his gaze to find Yoshino staring at him with eyes brimming with curiosity.

"What do you mean?"

"Sadako Yamamura disappeared all of a sudden after the spring production in 1966 finished its run. I think you know why."

Toyama realized what Yoshino was thinking: if anybody would know why Sadako had left, he would, even if he didn't know where she'd gone. Yoshino had a hungry-wolf glint in his eyes.

"You've got to be kidding."

Toyama had nothing to give this predator. If he'd known why she left him, without telling him where she was going, his life since age twenty-three wouldn't have been so dark and cheerless.

"Oh, right. Shall I show you something?"

Yoshino rummaged in his briefcase and came up with a script. The battered cover read:

THEATER GROUP SOARING

ELEVENTH PRODUCTION

GIRL IN BLACK

(TWO ACTS, FOUR SCENES)

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY

YUSAKU SHIGEMORI

It was a copy of the bound galley of the script.

Toyama reached for it in spite of himself. He opened it. It smelled like twenty-four years ago.

"Where did you get this?" He asked without thinking.

"I borrowed it from the troupe's office, after swear-ing I'd return it. In March of 1966, Sadako Yamamura snagged a part as an understudy in this. Her disappearance was more or less simultaneous with the end of the run. What happened? It has to have had something to do with the play..."

"Have you read it?"

"Of course I have. But it's just the script: it doesn't tell me much."

Toyama began flipping through the pages. Twenty-four years ago he'd owned a copy of this. It was probably in one of his bookshelves now, but then again he'd no doubt lost it in one of the many moves that had accompanied his first marriage and divorce. No. No matter how he searched, this was something he'd never find at home.

The staff's names were written on the first page.

Sound: Hiroshi Toyama.

Finding his own name there gave him a weird, tick-lish sort of feeling, as if he'd come face to face with his twenty-three-year-old self.

Next came the names of the cast.

The Girl in Black: Aiko Hazuki.

But Aiko Hazuki's name had been crossed out, and next to it somebody had written in ballpoint pen the name "Sadako Yamamura."

The girl who held the key to the story hadn't been given a name. Despite her importance, she didn't appear on stage all that much, although her few appearances had been designed for maximum impact. The part had originally belonged to Aiko Hazuki, one of the troupe's mid-ranked actresses. However, mere days before the first performance, Hazuki had collapsed, ill; Sadako, who had been attending every rehearsal as Hazuki's prompter, was asked to step in for her. It was to be her stage debut.

Thinking about it now, it seemed almost as if Shigemori had written the script especially for Sadako, as if under her inducement, even though she was nothing but an intern. At the time, of course, such a thought would never have crossed Toyama's mind. But when he considered her character and her image, unfaded in his mind after all these years, it almost seemed more plausible to think that Shigemori had written the part intending to cast her in it. The Girl in Black was that perfect for Sadako.

He turned the page. This seemed to be Shigemori's own copy of the script: the spaces between the lines of dialogue and stage directions were crammed with performance notes and critiques of the actors' performances, all in cramped handwriting. There were even details regarding the timing of the sound effects.

Ml—Theme song.

The curtain rises. A living room set occupies stage center. The lights come up gradually, and the set begins to brighten.

M5—Distant church bells. Mixed in, the sound of

many footsteps, the noise of a crowd.

This was the Girl in Black's first scene. Following a sound effect cue, she was to appear onstage for just an instant.

Unconsciously, Toyama was tapping the tabletop with his right index finger.

Play button—on.

The tape spun, the sound effect began. The Girl in Black was supposed to step onto the stage in synch with the sound.

The Girl in Black: an ill omen. She wasn't to be visible from every seat in the house: from some points you wouldn't be able to see her because of where she was standing. She'd be onstage, but only some people would know it. But that was okay: it was part of the effect of the play.

Toyama could see her again vividly. She was eighteen. The only woman he'd ever loved, the woman he couldn't forget even now...

Without meaning to, Toyama spoke her name.

4

March 1966

It was full-dress rehearsal day for Theater Group Soaring's eleventh production. Toyama had shut himself up in the sound booth to make his final adjustments. Tomorrow was opening day, and he was checking his tapes and equalizers to make sure everything was as it should be; even now, all alone in front of the control board, he was enjoying his job. He caught himself whistling. After two months of rehearsals, they'd been able to formally move into the theater—excitement was winning out even over the nervousness of opening. All throughout rehearsals he'd had Shigemori sitting next to him giving him detailed orders concerning the sound, and when he failed to follow instructions absolutely to the letter, Shigemori had bawled him out mercilessly. The director couldn't tolerate a second's delay in a sound effect or a slight discrepancy in volume. Day after day of pressure had begun to take a toll on his stomach... But now the sound booth was his castle, his independent kingdom.

The director rarely looked in, and as long as Toyama got the timing right with the tapes, he got no complaints.

Once a play got underway the director's attention was always riveted to the stage—he paid so little attention to the sound that Toyama would actually begin to wonder what all the fuss had been about. Knowing this idio-syncrasy of Shigemori's, Toyama had eagerly anticipated his move into the theater's sound booth.

It wasn't as if he were utterly free from anxiety—he had nightmares about an unplanned sound getting through—but he knew that couldn't happen, so as a worry it was nothing compared to the pressure the director's presence had brought to bear on him. It was only a dream...kind of amusing, really.

Toyama's sound booth was at the top of a spiral staircase leading up from the lobby, right next to the lighting booth. There was no way to get directly to it from the stage area, so anyone coming from the green room or backstage had to first go out to the lobby and then up the stairs. There was an intercom connection with the backstage area, so communication was easy enough, but once the doors had been opened actually going back and forth became quite troublesome. Maybe that was why Shigemori seemed to lose interest in the sound once the play started. In their rehearsal space, the director's chair was right next to the soundman's—an unfortunate circumstance that forced Toyama to bear a burden he otherwise would have been spared.

They finished unloading in the morning, spent the afternoon getting everything into place, and in the evening they were scheduled to have their final full-dress rehearsal. This, too, was easy on the soundman. All he had to carry in was his tape reels; he was spared the heavy labor of lugging in the props.

Once in a while Toyama would raise his head and look down at the busily transforming stage. On the other side of the soundproof glass, the set was almost complete. From this vantage he could see everybody working together to create a single finished product. It was something he enjoyed watching: it felt like a reward for the long, difficult rehearsals. He fancied that at that very moment the actors, with no particular job to do, were in the green room savoring the exact same feeling.

Toyama ate his dinner—they'd had it brought in—

and then he set up his music reel and his sound effects reel and checked the sequence of cues. No problems at all. All that was left now was to wait for the dress rehearsal to begin. After it was finished, they'd get together for a final round of feedback, and then break for the night. The theater had a strict closing time, so there would be no midnight rehearsals tonight. For him, moving into the theater also meant freedom from having to stick around for late rehearsals, worrying about missing his last train home.

Suddenly Toyama sensed a presence behind him. He turned around.

The door was ajar, and a woman was standing just outside it. In the dim light of the booth he couldn't make out her face. Toyama got up and opened the door wider.

"Oh, Sada. It's you."

Sadako Yamamura stood in the doorway blankly.

Toyama took her hand and brought her into the booth, shutting the door again behind her. The door was heavy, soundproof.

He waited for her to say something, but she just stared past him, tight-lipped, at the almost-complete stage below. The living room set was being assembled, and the director was giving detailed instructions regarding the placement of its various components.

"I'm afraid."

The words resonated with all the naive simplicity of an aspiring actress facing her first appearance onstage.

Sadako had graduated from high school on the island of Izu Oshima and immediately come up to Tokyo; she'd made a remarkably rapid transition from intern to actress. She had every right to be nervous and uneasy.

Needless to say, out of the eight interns, she was the only one going onstage tonight.

Toyama tried to encourage her. "Don't worry. I'll be cheering for you up here."

Sadako shook her head. "That's not what I mean."

Her gaze was hollow as she shifted it from the stage to the spinning tape reel. It was blank—he'd just checked it, but he'd neglected to push stop, so on it spun.

Toyama stopped it and rewound it.

"Everybody's scared when they debut," he said over the sound of the tape rewinding. But Sadako's reply was strangely off, like an out-of-focus picture.

"Hey, is there a woman's voice on that tape?"

Toyama laughed. As far as he could recall, he'd never recorded a solo human voice: playing something like that while an actor was delivering his lines would kill the performance. Under normal circumstances they'd never overlay dialogue with dialogue like that.

"What kind of question is that, out of the blue?"

"It's something Okubo said a few minutes ago, you know, when you were checking your sound levels. He made a funny face, like he was afraid of something. He said there was a woman's voice on the tape. Not only that, he said he'd heard it before. So I..."

Okubo was another one of the interns, multital-ented but short, and so sensitive about it that it had given him a complex of sorts. He was another one who had a crush on Sadako.

"I know what you're talking about. That's crowd noise. You know, what we play in the background during your scene."

They'd taken the crowd noise for that scene from a movie. The voices were just supposed to be submerged in the background; no one voice was supposed to be heard above the others. But it might be possible for someone to have the auditory illusion that he or she was hearing one of them in particular, in an aural close-up, as it were.

"No, that's not it." Her denial was forceful enough to bother Toyama.

"Well, then, do you know what scene it was?"

If he could figure out where it was on the tape, he could check it now on the headphones. If there was a strange woman's voice on there, he had to deal with it now, or it would be trouble later.

But the chances of that were next to nil. He couldn't count the number of times he'd listened to the tape during rehearsals. Not to mention the repeated scrutiny he'd given it on his headphones when he'd edited it together. There was no way a stray sound could have gotten on there at this point.

"Okubo's been saying strange things. You know that little Shinto altar backstage?"

"Most playhouses have 'em."

Toyama was beginning to guess what Okubo must have been telling Sadako. Just as theaters all had Shinto altars, they all had scary stories whispered about them.

Handling the set pieces and props allowed for lots of accidents and injuries, and wherever actors gathered there were bound to be vortices of ill feeling—as a result there probably wasn't a theater around without one or two spook tales. Okubo had probably been scaring Sadako with some nonsense like that. In which case, her insistence on there being a woman's voice on the tape was probably groundless.

"No, there's another one."

"Another what?"

"Altar."

Toyama had seen the altar himself any number of times, set into the concrete wall stage left, at the back.

But that was the only one he knew of.

"Where?"

Still standing in front of the door, Sadako raised her left hand and pointed. The spot she indicated was behind the table. Toyama couldn't see it from where he was. But all of a sudden a chill ran down his spine. This room was his castle: he liked to think he knew what was where.

There couldn't be an altar here.

He started to get up.

She giggled. "Startled?"

"Don't scare me like that!" He sat back down. The chair felt cold somehow.

"Come on, it's over here." Sadako took Toyama's hand and pulled him out of his chair, seating herself in front of a cabinet built into the wall. A pair of doors were set into the wall about ten centimeters from the floor; they opened outward. Sadako looked from Toyama to the doors, as if suggesting he open them.

A storage space. He hadn't expected one. The doors were about fifty centimeters square. There were no handles, so they blended in with the rest of the wall, and he hadn't noticed them.

He placed a finger in the center of the doors, pressed, and released. The doors opened without a sound. He'd expected to find old tape reels and cords piled randomly inside, but what he found was something rather different. Two metal shelves, on the upper of which sat two rows of tapes in carefully labeled boxes. No doubt left-overs from previous productions. The bottom shelf contained a little wooden box that looked, just as Sadako had said, like an altar.

All he'd done was open those two little doors, but the atmosphere in the sound booth was utterly changed.

A foreign space had suddenly opened up right next to the table he was so accustomed to working at. He wasn't sure whether there was actually a smell or not, but Toyama at least had the illusion that his nose detected the scent of rotting meat.

Toyama sat down next to Sadako, in front of the altar, hugging his knees. There was an offering in front of the altar, right in front of his nose now. It was a desic-cated and wrinkled thing no bigger than the tip of his little finger, and at first he thought it was a shriveled piece of burdock.

Without a hint of hesitation, Sadako picked up the piece of whatever-it-was and placed it in Toyama's hand, as if giving him a piece of candy.

Toyama allowed himself to be led along. He accepted the offering on the palm of his hand and studied He only realized what it was when Sadako brought her nose close to his palm and sniffed it. Suddenly a thought wedged its way into his brain. Not just a thought—a woman's voice, whispering.

The baby's coming.

In a flash, Toyama understood.

It's an umbilical cord. A baby's umbilical cord.

There was no mistaking it now: it was indeed an umbilical cord, severed long ago.

The instant he realized it, Toyama jumped back from the altar, flinging the thing in his hand at Sadako.

She caught it and said, calmly, as if to herself, "Looks like Okubo was right."

Toyama slowly brought his breathing under control, trying not to appear too foolish in front of a younger woman. Feigning calm, he asked, "What do you mean?"

"About the woman's voice on the tape. He said he'd heard it before, moaning, like she was in pain. He said if he had to describe it, he'd say it sounded like she was suffering the pains of childbirth. That's what he said.

And it looks like that woman had her baby."

Toyama didn't know how to respond to this. What Okubo had said was strange enough, but the way Sadako just coolly accepted it was way beyond eerie.

Just then the director's voice came over the intercom.

"Everybody, we're about to start dress rehearsal.

Cast, staff, to your places, please."

The order was salvation to Toyama: he normally didn't look forward to hearing Shigemori's voice, but now it sounded like a god's. It had power enough to drag him immediately back to reality, certainly.

Sadako had to report to her position onstage. She couldn't stay here talking nonsense.

"Hey, you're on. Break a leg," he managed to say, though his throat was dry and his voice scratchy. He placed a hand on her back and urged her toward the stage. Sadako squirmed as if reluctant and made a show of refusing to budge.

But then she said, "Okay, well, later, then."

There was something thrillingly suggestive about the way she said it, and the way she looked when she said it. Toyama thought he could see her maturing as an actress right before his eyes. Five years younger than him, in Toyama's eyes she was the very incarnation of cute. Instead of the sensuality of a grown woman, she still had the innocence of a girl: that was what attracted him, what he was madly in love with. But now she seemed so sensuous...

Toyama forgot himself as he watched Sadako descend the spiral staircase.

Since the dress rehearsal would proceed exactly like a real performance, he'd be playing the tapes from start to finish. If there was a foreign noise on there, this would be a good chance to locate it.

Toyama put on his headphones and tried to concentrate on his cues. But he was distracted by the proximity of the cabinet with the altar in it. The director hadn't yet given the sign to start. The house was dark; the sound booth was illuminated only by the work light on the table.

He stole a glance sideways. The cabinet doors were half open. Evidently he hadn't shut them tightly enough.

The voice of a woman in childbirth? Of all the stupid things.

Without taking off his headphones, Toyama moved over and pushed the cabinet door with his foot. He did it with his foot in order to show that he wasn't scared.

He heard a distinct click as the doors shut. But at that very moment, in his headphones, he heard a faint voice. It was weak, a baby's voice. He couldn't tell if it was crying or laughing...or maybe it had just been born...

Toyama stared at the tape. It wasn't moving.

The director gave the sign, and the curtain rose. He was supposed to provide the opening theme now, but his trembling hand slipped on the play button more than once, and he was late with it. He'd get a chewing-out later, not that he cared about that now.

Play button, on.

The baby's voice was gone, drowned out by the bouncy opening theme.

As Toyama sat there bathed in cold sweat, trying to figure out where the sound had come from, his nostrils detected a mild scent that reminded him of lemons.

5

The first act ended, and everybody was given a twenty-minute break except the actors the director wanted to scold. Toyama was afraid he'd be taken to task for being late with the opening theme, but no mention was made of it, and he was able to leave the sound booth for a time.

He descended to the lobby. Passing the concession kiosk he jogged down the hallway toward the actors'

green room. He didn't have long. He wasn't sure there was enough time to grab Okubo and find out what he wanted to...

He burst into the big space used as a green room.

When he saw that Okubo wasn't there he turned to a senior member of the troupe who was practicing lines in front of a mirror and said, "Sorry to disturb you, but do you know where I can find Okubo?"

The actor paused and stuck out his chin. "He's Arima's prompter, so I imagine he's with him, stage right."

"Thank you."

But in fact he nearly ran into Okubo as he went to leave the room. Okubo leaned over and jumped aside with exaggerated movements. "A thousand pardons," he said, putting on airs, speaking as if performing the role of an English gentleman. Okubo was like this: his every movement, his every pose, his every word was theatrical. He and Toyama were the same age, and so they ended up spending a lot of time together, and they got along fairly well. But sometimes Okubo's flair for the dramatic got on Toyama's nerves.

With a joyless smile, Toyama grabbed Okubo's sleeve and pulled him aside. "I need to talk to you."

"This is sudden. What about?" But Okubo's grin betrayed his lack of surprise.

"Why don't you have a seat?"

They grabbed chairs from in front of the mirror and sat down.

Okubo looked even smaller when sitting down. He kept his back and neck straight—his posture was perfect.

In fact, Toyama never saw him slouch, or even really relax. No doubt this was a method of making up for his lack of height. Okubo took pride in the fact that before joining Soaring he'd belonged to a troupe with a considerably more celebrated heritage. Just being accepted there was a considerable feat, and he'd done it—but no more. Unable to make his way in that troupe, he'd bailed out and joined Soaring, which represented coming down a notch. Okubo had persuaded himself that it was only because of his height.

In short, Toyama knew full well that Okubo's comically exaggerated way of talking and moving came from a combination of pride and insecurity.

He only had twenty minutes, though: he decided to come right out with it.

"What nonsense have you been filling Sadako's head with?"

"Are you trying to ruin my reputation? I don't recall talking nonsense to anyone," came Okubo's composed, good-natured reply.

"Listen, I'm not accusing you of anything, but something's got me worried."

"What, pray tell?"

"Hey, sound effects and music are my job. I've got a right to be concerned. I want you to be honest with me: was what you told Sadako the truth? Did you really hear a woman's voice on the tape? A woman in the throes of labor?"

Okubo clapped his hands and laughed. 'A woman in the throes of labor'? Where did you come up with that? What I said was, it sounded like the act that results in labor pains—a woman's moans when, you know...

That's what I meant, at least. I don't know what Sada thought I was talking about."

"So you were joking?"

"I was not joking," said Okubo, laughing again. He was so caught up in his own performance that it was hard to get a straight answer from him. What was he so keyed up about anyway?

"Stop fooling around, will you? I heard something."

"What?"

"A baby crying."

Okubo took a deep breath and then leaned forward, a look of concern on his face. "Where?"

"In the sound booth, over my headphones."

Okubo leaned back again. "Whoa." He looked taken aback.

"See, it connects. If you heard a woman struggling to deliver a child, see, it's too much of a coincidence." As he said this, Toyama was remembering the umbilical cord that had been placed as an offering in front of that altar.

"Why, that's a bolt from the blue! A horse of a different color!" said Okubo, in his best vaudevillian voice.

"Knock it off already. Can you just tell me what it was you told Sadako?"

"Sada's the one great hope for us interns. Between her beauty and the attention the director pays her, she's got a great future as an actress. But after all, it's her first performance—to a bystander like me, she looks incredibly nervous. I feel sorry for her. It was an act of fellow-ship, if you will. I thought I'd tell her a scary story or two, just to, you know, loosen her up a bit."

Annoyed, Toyama pressed the point. "So you didn't really hear a woman's voice on the tape?"

"Au contraire!" Okubo shook his head and pursed his lips.

"One more thing. How did you know there was an altar in the sound booth?"

"An altar? In the sound booth?" Okubo pulled a long face and clapped his hands as one does when wor-shipping at a shrine. He closed his eyes, bowed his head, and began mumbling as if reciting a sutra.

Toyama was finding Okubo even more grating than usual today. He sighed and continued. "Yes, an altar. A little one, about this big," he said, tracing its size in the air.

"I have never set foot inside yon sound booth."

"So you heard about it from someone else?"

"Well, I pray to the altar at stage left every day,"

Okubo replied, clapping his hands again.

"Okay, okay. So, you didn't tell Sadako about the altar."

"Not only didn't I tell her about it, I had no idea it was there myself."

So how did Sadako know it was there! She had claimed Okubo told her, but Okubo was saying he didn't know about it. S—one of them was lying? Okubo, at least, sounded like he was telling the truth.

Toyama pondered for a while.

When Okubo said there was a woman's voice on the sound effects tape, he was just trying to frighten Sadako. Well, that's the kind of scary story you hear in any playhouse—nothing to get seriously angry about. Okubo told Sadako that he'd heard a woman moaning in pleasure—a woman engaged in sex. But for some reason she told me that it was the sound of a woman suffering in childbirth. Was it just a misunderstanding! But what about the umbilical cord! It fits too well.

Toyama thought of what he'd heard in the headphones, that faint cry of an infant—he couldn't get it out of his head. He had to get back to the booth in time for the second act, but he was reluctant to go. He didn't want to be alone in there. He'd rather be here, under bright lights in the big room.

His gaze was hollow as he asked, "By the way, where's Sadako now?"

Suddenly Okubo was all informality. "Whaddya mean? Weren't you paying attention to the play? The Great Director kept her behind to give her direction.

She's probably still onstage now, being put through the wringer."

Toyama had already forgotten. At the end of the first act he'd watched from the sound booth window as the director had instructed a few actors to line up on stage for feedback. He'd noticed Sadako among them. That's where she'd be now, listening to Shigemori tell her what was wrong with her performance and how she could have done it better.

From where he stood, it looked to Toyama like Shigemori paid Sadako an abnormal amount of attention. He'd been shocked sometimes during rehearsals to see the way Shigemori looked at her—on the verge of tears, with an expression made up of equal parts love and hatred and a gaze so intense that no one acquainted with Shigemori would have believed it. Shigemori held absolute power within the troupe, so if he had his eye on someone it was a foregone conclusion that he'd be making physical advances. And of course that was something Toyama, given his love for Sadako, would do anything to avert.

Just then Shigemori's voice came over the intercom.

"The second act will be starting soon. Places, everyone."

Toyama started to run, knowing how much distance separated the big room from his sound booth. So when Okubo spoke, it was to his back.

"Hey, Toyama, don't leave the intercom on in the sound booth anymore. We can hear everything you say in here."

Toyama turned around in time to catch Okubo winking at him.

He thought about Okubo's words as he made his way down the narrow hallway toward the sound booth.

...They can hear me in the ready room? I always keep the intercom in there switched off when I'm not using it—I doubt I could've left it on.

Still, Okubo's remark bothered him. Had someone in the green room overheard him saying something he shouldn't have?

6

The feel of the floor under his feet abruptly changed as he went from the green room to the lobby. The hallway to the green room was concrete covered with linoleum: hard and cold. The lobby floor, meanwhile, was covered with a lush carpet.

Tomorrow, opening night, this lobby would be full of audience members. Toyama crossed it and started to climb the spiral staircase to the sound booth. As he did so he heard hushed voices in conversation somewhere. A man's voice, and a woman's—both lowered, as if afraid of being overheard. Toyama halted halfway up the stairs and turned around.

Toyama saw two people standing in a corner by the recessed doors leading into the seating area. A tall man and a slender woman, facing each other. Toyama peered closely at them, with the unmistakable sense that he was watching something he shouldn't. He moved into a position from which they couldn't see him and held his breath.

The man was facing in Toyama's direction but he was half hidden by the wall, so Toyama could only see his face intermittently; the woman's back was turned to him. Toyama saw at once that the man was Shigemori, the director. And though he couldn't see her face, from her clothing and the outlines of her body Toyama knew who the woman was, as well.

"Sadako..." Without realizing it he let slip the name of the woman he loved.

Shigemori had his hands on her shoulders, shaking her gently, and now and then he'd lean close and whisper something into her ear. He certainly didn't appear to be speaking to her as just another actress—the way he drew close to her suggested he wasn't simply giving her point-ers on her performance.

Toyama tried—the effort was great, but necessary—

to make sure that what he was seeing meant what he thought it did; he was seething. Shigemori was using his position as head of the troupe to hit on a young actress.

Toyama found this unforgivable. He could understand it, and he knew that in the theater world it was even toler-ated; inexperienced he may have been, but he comprehended that much.

The real question was how Sadako would react.

Given her position he knew she couldn't reject Shigemori too forcefully, but he hoped she had enough skill to evade him gently, without injuring his feelings. He knew how hard it would be, but he yearned for her to show him how adroitly she could act here. If she didn't, Toyama would have a hard time trusting the words of love they'd exchanged.

Their relationship was not a physical one, but Sadako had said, "I love you," and Toyama had never doubted it.

Toyama had declared his feelings first. It had been the previous year, during rehearsals for the fall production. The opportunity had presented itself unexpectedly.

The production was a musical involving several dance numbers, and the troupe had invited a pair of professional dancers, both women, to join them as guests.

The dancers' schedules were so tight that they often had to miss rehearsal, so Sadako had been drafted as a standin. Standin was as far as it went, though: she never got to appear onstage.

Toyama had never even imagined Sadako in a dance scene, so when he saw her dancing up close, he was amazed. From the day they'd both taken the troupe's entrance exam she'd stood out; she'd been the object of Toyama's longing attentions ever since then. Even so, he had no way of knowing that her talents included dancing. The first time he saw her move in that provocative way, it further inflamed his passion for her.

But Sadako didn't seem confident in her dancing.

Often he would see her hang her head in thought after carrying out some instruction of the choreographer's.

Sadako's dancing certainly worked for Toyama, but it didn't seem to satisfy Sadako herself.

Once, during a break, Toyama went to the bathroom.

He ran into Sadako next to the communal sink, and he took the opportunity to praise her dancing. "You're pretty good," he said. But she seemed to think he was being sarcastic, and she fixed him with a powerful glare.

"You don't have to use that kind of tone. I'll practice—I'll get better, and then I'll show you."

No doubt the older actresses had been needling her about her dance skills. As a result, she was unable to hear the sincerity in his praise, and so she'd excused herself as an amateur and gotten surly about it to boot.

She turned on her heel to leave. Toyama hurried after her. "I didn't mean it like that at all!"

He placed a hand on her shoulder, but she shook him off, saying, "Look, even I know I'm not any good, okay?"

"Well, I think you are. Please believe me. I'm not being sarcastic or anything: I really think you're good. I was just trying to boost your confidence a little..."

"You're lying."

"I'm not! Look, I'm not the kind of guy to beat around the bush like that. If I thought you were a bad dancer, I'd tell you, honestly."

They stared at each other. Toyama tried to make his pure intentions felt in his gaze.

Maybe it worked. She didn't look entirely convinced, but she managed an awkward smile, nodded, and whispered, "Okay. Thanks."

That was the first time he'd felt a real emotional connection with Sadako.

From then on he tried to give her advice whenever he could, both in secret and openly. If he noticed something while watching her practice, he'd tell her, purely as an objective bystander. He was tireless in his efforts to help her improve as an actress.

Toyama was the kind of guy girls liked, and as Sadako saw the feelings he had for her, she began to open up toward him. She stood out, and as a result she was always having to put up with backbiting and slander from older members of the troupe, vicious rumors and the like. With all that, she was understandably grateful for Toyama's affection.

The interns took turns cleaning the rehearsal space in pairs. One day in September Toyama was paired with Sadako, and they happened to show up at the same time.

It was early afternoon, and the space was deserted except for the two of them; they still had well over an hour to themselves before rehearsal was to start.

They saw to the cleaning, including the bathroom, and then Toyama sat down at the piano in the corner of the rehearsal space. It was a broken-down old upright, and several of its strings were out of tune. He contrived to avoid those notes as he set about playing Sadako a few tunes of his own devising.

Sadako stood beside him listening in silence at first, but then she sat down on the bench and let her fingers wander over the keyboard. Not quite a duet, but she did manage to follow along.

She'd never had formal lessons, she told him, but there was one tune she'd learned to play well enough just by watching. It was a mournful melody. Toyama had heard it before, but he couldn't remember what it was called. He stood up as if pushed off the bench; now it was his turn to listen from behind while Sadako played.

Her left hand played the chords with some hesitation, while her right picked out the melody. Her playing wasn't very good, but there was something about it that tugged at Toyama. Not only did she have what it took to shine as an actress, but now it seemed she had a flair for music as well.

He was unable to resist the urge when it came over him. He stared at the white nape of her neck, covered by her long hair; he watched as she lifted her right hand to brush away her bangs and then lowered it again to the keys with a supple movement. Everything about her, everything she did, mingled girlishness and womanli-ness, and he found it inexpressibly attractive.

Toyama had overheard more than one older member of the troupe describe Sadako as "that creepy girl." The only way Toyama could make sense of it was to figure that Sadako's preternatural beauty struck them—particularly the women—as eerie.

There was no resisting the strength of his feelings toward her, so he gave himself over to them. He hadn't planned on making a pass at her. It was just that his love could no longer be contained.

He moved quite naturally. "Sadako," he said, and embraced her from behind, intending to bring his face close to hers as she gazed down at the keys. But it was as if she had eyes in the back of her head. Sensing his movements, she stood up and caught him in a full-on embrace. He'd been apprehensive, of course, about how he'd be received, afraid of rejection and all the awkwardness and humiliation it would bring. He hadn't dared hope for this kind of acceptance. He'd miscalculated—but in the best possible way.

Toyama was twenty-three, and he'd known his share of women, but never had he experienced greater pleasure than he knew in that hug there in front of the piano. They stood there for a time, cheek-to-cheek, and then they pulled back gently so their lips could find each other. Anyone who happened to be present would have seen something fresh and pure, not lascivious, in their embrace.

Between kisses, they had whispered to each other:

"I've loved you since the moment we first met,"

Toyama had told her.

And Sadako had responded in kind. "I love you,"

she'd said.

So what was the meaning of what he saw now?

Toyama stamped his feet on the spiral staircase and gnashed his teeth. He wanted to rush in and pull Shigemori off her. Every time their faces disappeared into the corner he was tormented by a vision of them kissing. But Shigemori, forty-seven this year, was in the prime of his career as an impresario and playwright—a respected name in the theater world. If Toyama made the wrong move things could go badly not just for him but for Sadako as well. He felt as if his chest were being ripped open, but he told himself he'd just have to endure it for now.

As he grew used to the sight of them and began to calm down a bit, Toyama noticed something strange about Shigemori's expression. He always had an intensity in his gaze when he watched Sadako rehearse, but now he looked like a man possessed. "Possessed": that was the only word for it. He was no longer himself. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes bloodshot, his breathing ragged. From time to time he pressed a hand to his chest.

Watching all this, Toyama started to hope again. It began to appear that Shigemori was making a pass at her, but that Sadako was subtly deflecting his advances. Perhaps she wasn't making herself a liar after all.

Just then, however, she did something unbelievable.

Toyama saw her lean out from the shelter of the corner and press her lips to Shigemori's.

Shigemori pulled back, as if startled, and stared at her wide-eyed. It seemed that Sadako had done something Shigemori had neither expected nor desired.

Toyama knew that his own expression of astonishment must match Shigemori's. His own eyes were wide as he watched Sadako from behind.

But she didn't stop there. She pulled back a little, and then reached her left hand out toward Shigemori's crotch while Shigemori watched in surprise. She brought her palm up next to where his testicles must be and pretended to cup them from beneath. Then she actually squeezed them two or three times, as if playing with rubber balls.

Shigemori pulled back, his face clouded over with confusion; he grimaced, as if about to burst into tears...

Shigemori began to collapse—fainting? He staggered and leaned back against the wall, chest heaving, one hand pressed to his chest and the other rubbing his neck.

What's going on?

Just a moment ago Toyama had hated Shigemori, but now he found himself sympathizing with the man.

Right about now they were both equally confused. Neither could assign meaning to Sadako's actions. Why had she suddenly kissed Shigemori? Why had she cradled his testicles in her hand? She had to mean something by it.

Sadako stepped away from the wall, leaving Shigemori there in his altered physical state, and suddenly turned toward Toyama. It was as if she'd known he was there all along. About twenty yards separated them, and he was mostly hidden behind the railing of the staircase, but still she looked straight at him, as if the eyes in the back of her head had already located him. It reminded him of how she'd reacted when he'd tried to embrace her that day when she was playing the piano. The way she'd moved, then and now, was amazing—intuition didn't begin to cover it.

Sadako met Toyama's gaze and flashed him a victo-rious wink.

You know what's going on, don't you? said her look.

But he didn't.

Sadako disappeared into the hallway leading to the green room, leaving confusion in her wake.

In contrast to Sadako's resolute, purposeful gaze, Shigemori appeared to be seeing nothing, his hollow gaze still turned toward the ceiling. He hadn't noticed Toyama in front of him. Sadako had disappeared speed-ily, leaving him sluggish, bereft of his usually scintillat-ing wits.

At length he seemed to come around. He pushed open the door and staggered into the theater. He was a tall, slender man, but at the moment his limbs looked leaden.

Both Sadako and Shigemori having left his field of vision, Toyama went into the sound booth.

His tapes were all ready. The curtain could go up any time, and he'd have no problems.

Finally Shigemori's voice came over the intercom.

"Okay, everyone. We're about to start the second act."

His voice quavered enough to be noticeable even to someone who hadn't just witnessed what Toyama had.

7

The curtain had gone up on the dress rehearsal's second act, but Toyama couldn't concentrate on his job. The scene he'd just seen kept flickering before his mind's eye, making him careless about checking for stray sounds on the tape. Jealousy, rage, and shock welled up from the depths of his heart and turned into a rushing current that threatened to engulf him.

For six months now, he'd considered his and Sadako's relationship to be that of lovers. When nobody was watching they'd hold and kiss each other, but that and honeyed words marked the extent of their relationship: no matter how he sought it, nothing more was forthcoming. Still, he was satisfied with what they had.

He decided that it must be her youth—she was only eighteen—that kept things from developing physically.

He found her innocence pleasing, in a way. She was a virgin. Of that he'd never had a doubt.

The only thing that nagged at him was Sadako's extreme caution that nobody else find out about their relationship. It seemed a bit excessive to Toyama.

When they were alone, her attitude proclaimed that she truly loved him. But when they were with other members of the troupe, she treated him with particular coldness, so that he was wracked with anxiety. For his part, he always looked on her as someone special to him, no matter where they were. But not her: when people were around, she treated him like just another face in the crowd.

His fondest wish was for her to sit by him, even in the presence of their colleagues, and simply look at him.

He was tired of being ignored in front of the others: it only made him watch her more closely, only increased his desire to elude the others so he could hold and kiss her.

He could understand her not wanting to be gossiped about, but still, he wished things would change. When he told her this, however, she always gave him the same answer.

I don't want to let everybody know how close we are. What we have is our little secret, and I want you to keep it that way. Okay? You can't tell anybody about us. Promise me—if you don't, I'll lose you.

Her explanation never convinced him. Why did things have to be kept so secret? What he'd witnessed her doing with Shigemori just now suggested a possible reason.

Everybody who joined the troupe did so because they wanted to make it as an actor or actress. Sadako radiated that desire even more strongly than most, and with her it was mingled with something in her gaze that challenged society in ways that normal people couldn't quite fathom. It verged on hostility. Sometimes Toyama saw a coldness and contempt for the world in her eyes that made him flinch.

The world doesn't hate you as much as you think it does.

He tried again and again to tell her that, but she never listened. She'd just scold him for being naive, saying if he went through life like that, they'd get him—at times like that she acted like a much older woman.

He wondered what there was in her past to make her that way, and sometimes he even tried to ask, non-chalantly. But she always evaded his questions, and so he was never able to grasp the true nature of her near-enmity toward society.

The only way for Sadako to triumph over the world was to become a famous actress. It was the one thing an eighteen-year-old girl could do that would command universal admiration in one fell swoop. He was sure she knew that.

Which led Toyama to a deduction. Becoming a star meant grabbing every chance that presented itself. What could she do right here, right now? The answer was plain. She could cozy up to Shigemori, who held absolute power over the troupe, in hopes of getting a part. That had to be how she'd gotten such an important role in the current production. It was, after all, a major coup for an intern who'd only been with the troupe for a year.

But how? Toyama didn't want to think about that.

The image of the two of them in the corner kept returning to his thoughts, tormenting him.

He thought he knew now why she'd wanted to keep her relationship with him so secret. It was quite clear. If it became common knowledge in the troupe that she and Toyama were lovers, word of it would naturally reach Shigemori. Certainly Shigemori would not be pleased to learn she had a boyfriend, and that would lessen her chances of ingratiating herself with him.

Am I just being toyed with? By this nineteen-year-old woman-child? This sylph?

Toyama hung his head—still wearing his headphones. For a moment, his eyes left the stage.

The stage manager's voice crackled over the intercom. "Hey, Toyama, you forgot the ring!"

He looked up. He'd missed his timing. Hurriedly he pressed the play button and the sound of a ringing telephone issued forth. It was late, so the actor onstage had been forced to ad lib; now he waited for it to ring twice before picking up the receiver. As he did so, Toyama stopped the tape.

Disaster had been averted, but all the same the stage manager berated him. "Idiot! Are you even watching the stage?"

"Sorry," Toyama said immediately.

"Just pay attention, alright?"

"I will."

He sighed as he broke out in a cold sweat. He had no excuse. He'd lost himself, lost his concentration, and caused problems for his colleagues. All because of his love for Sadako.

Shit. Get a hold of yourself.

He couldn't stand not being able to control his feelings. He'd always thought of himself as strong-willed, not at all the type to let himself be swept along by his emotions. And look at him now—all on account of a woman.

He shook his head, trying to clear it of lewd fantasies.

It was no use. Onstage, Sadako's scene was starting.

The Girl in Black appeared from stage left and stood wordlessly behind a middle-aged man who was yelling into a telephone. The man sensed something behind him, fell silent, and turned around. The stage went dark for an instant. When the lights came on again, the Girl in Black had disappeared. It was a remarkable effect, really, a skillful combination of lighting and set design.

The man dropped the receiver, terrified: he'd just seen a girl's ghost...

The scene was pivotal, the key to understanding the play as a whole.

The Girl in Black had only been onstage for a moment before she disappeared. Toyama called out to her.

"Sadako..."

It was less a cry than a plea that she return, that shadow he'd only just glimpsed. Suddenly he had a premonition that she would disappear from his life just like she had from the stage.

Hey, now, don't go borrowing trouble.

He kept his eyes on the stage. The Girl in Black had one more scene.

This time she appeared from the rear center of the stage. She stood on a platform stage center and opened her mouth as if to speak. But then the lights went out again. A complete change of scene. In the end the audience would never know what the Girl in Black was trying to say. That was how it was set up.

Toyama was projecting his own feelings onto the events onstage. When she opened her mouth he didn't want her to stop, he wanted her to say it loud. Stop hiding it from the other members of the troupe—let everyone know about their relationship.

Toyama, I love you.

How wonderful it would be to hear her say that in front of a huge audience. Once everybody knew, they wouldn't have to embrace in secret anymore. What a relief that would be.

He wanted to be able to speak his love for Sadako openly, fearing no one. He'd make doubly sure Shigemori heard about it, to let him know that it was him, not Shigemori, that Sadako loved. Then even Shigemori couldn't persist in the kind of acts Toyama had just witnessed.

He'd gotten confused. It was Sadako who'd taken such an active role in what he'd seen in the empty lobby—not Shigemori.

The Girl in Black disappeared from the stage, leaving only an afterimage—it was quite effective, really, the way she made such a deep impression in spite of her minimal time onstage. She said nothing that wasn't necessary—certainly not goodbye.

But he didn't want her to disappear like that in real life.

8

The dress rehearsal ended without a long feedback session, just a "Good job, everyone."

When Shigemori said that, it meant that everyone could go home. They were free. Toyama was tired. He put a hand on his chest in relief. He'd made mistakes, and if the director had started to complain about them there'd be no end to it.

They weren't getting to go home early because the run-through had been especially good, though; apparently Shigemori himself was so tired that he just had to let them go. The cast and crew stood around on the stage or in the aisles and Shigemori said a brief word to each of them about their performances that night, telling them all to give it their best over the next three weeks.

He was pale, and slumped down into a seat; he made no move to stand.

The actors, on the other hand, were glowing with elation: opening day was tomorrow. They all congratu-lated each other on a job well done, and then began to drift apart, some to go home and some to rehearse more.

The theater itself closed at midnight, so they all had to be out by then. There was a night watchman who checked to make sure none of them hung around later than that.

Toyama headed back to the sound booth to clean up.

"Well, then," he muttered as he tried to decide if there was anything left to do for tomorrow.

His mind was still occupied with Sadako and his conflicting feelings toward her, but he'd managed to check all his tapes over the course of the run-through, and nothing was out of order. He trusted his ears. No matter how scattered his thoughts, his ears would have picked up any noise that was out of place. Anything he might have missed on his headphones would be too soft for the audience to detect, and definitely too soft to disrupt the performance.

The cassette recorder—I almost forgot.

From a shelf beneath the desk he took out a cassette deck. It had leather straps on the sides to make it easier to carry: now he pulled it out by one of those straps.

It was the newest model, made so you could slip a strap over a shoulder and carry it around, and it had a built-in microphone. It was good for recording things like street noise: he could take this outside and record with it, and then transfer the recording to a reel-to-reel tape for editing.

The tape in this deck, he realized, did contain things he'd rather nobody hear. Yesterday afternoon, when the interns were alone in their rehearsal space, they'd gotten up to a little mischief.

Okubo had instigated the whole thing. He was particularly good at impressions, or so he said, and he'd announced that he wanted to record some so he could evaluate himself. This model of cassette deck was still not very common, so he asked Toyama how to operate it, as he gathered everyone around.

Okuho began running through a few of his best bits for the small crowd, which consisted entirely of interns.

After each ovation, Okubo rewound the tape and played it back, cracking up over his own performance as he reviewed it. The reviews themselves were amusing, and the tape-deck-centered revelry escalated.

At first Okubo was doing impressions of TV personalities, but after a while he shifted his target to people they knew. One of the leading actors in the troupe had a peculiar way of speaking, so he poked fun at that, and everyone laughed. Finally he set his sights on Shigemori.

This was forbidden territory. Some of the more timid interns went to the office to make doubly sure Shigemori wasn't in—there would be hell to pay if they were overheard. Once they had ascertained that he was out, Okubo cut loose with his most energetic and elaborate impression yet.

Okubo had Shigemori down pat, from the tone he took when giving feedback to the overwrought voice he'd use when bawling someone out for a bad performance to the lines he'd use to seduce new actresses. They all knew Shigemori well enough to find the performance hilarious, and Okubo went on and on, the tape recorder on all the while.

Toyama had gotten it all on tape—the very tape before him now. What he needed to do was to have a blank tape all set in the deck so it would be ready if he needed it during the premiere or later. But he didn't have another tape. He wracked his brain for a solution.

This tape, with everyone laughing at Shigemori, was a dangerous object. If the director happened to hear it, he wouldn't let them off with just a yelling-at. The listeners would have it bad enough, but there was no telling what he'd do to Okubo for mimicking him trying to pick up a woman—and failing, at that.

Toyama elected to erase the tape.

To do that, all he had to do was press record with the microphone turned off. The tape would be restored to its original blank state. It was too much trouble to figure out what was where on the tape, so he decided just to erase the whole thing, start to finish. The problem was, that would take forty-five minutes.

He pressed the record button and watched as the tape began to advance. This would destroy all evidence of their little game.

With nothing else to do, he glanced idly at the stage, where a few actors were walking around, checking their marks. Sadako was standing on the dais at stage center.

She had her mouth open as if about to speak: they were rehearsing the bit where the lights went out. Over and over, until she was satisfied. What was it she was trying to say? No, the question should be, did Shigemori even have any lines in mind for her when he wrote the scene? If so, Toyama knew he wanted to hear them directly from Sadako.

He leaned close to the glass and focused on Sadako.

She seemed to be aware that he was watching her: she stopped, lowered her hands, and turned her gaze in his direction. He could feel it, even at that distance. At that moment, they were connected by the thread of their mutual gaze.

The overhead light was on in the sound booth, so no doubt Toyama's face was visible from the other side of the glass. Meanwhile, the lights were on over the stage, giving it a totally different ambience from the dress rehearsal: Sadako's face looked different under the white light, her color contrasting with her black costume, but differently than usual. There was something obscene about it, as if her underclothes were showing through.

Sadako stepped down from the stage into the seats, heading for the lobby.

She's coming up to the booth.

He imagined her movements. Now she was crossing the lobby; now she was climbing the spiral staircase to the sound booth. She was in no hurry—in fact, she was taking her time, to make him anxious. She moved with light elegance.

He waited for the knock at the door.

...3, 2, 1, 0.

At zero, the door swung open, without a knock.

Sadako slipped into the room and closed the door behind her.

"Did you call?" She was quite alluring in her stage clothes, up close.

Toyama remained silent and unsmiling. He hoped that his anger was showing through in his expression, but he had no idea what he really looked like to her. In any case, he was trying to look as out-of-sorts as he could, but Sadako just ignored it and crossed the room.

She unfolded a metal chair and sat down on it.

Toyama maintained his silence. Finally Sadako spoke, pretending to have noticed just now. "Hey, what are you so mad about?"

Of course she knew why he was angry: she had to know. It annoyed him that she was pretending not to, and he snapped.

"What the hell was that back there?"

Sadako raised an eyebrow. "Oh, that." She pursed her lips and laughed mischievously.

"Did you know I was watching when you did that to Mr. Shigemori?" They always called him Mister Shigemori, so Toyama called him that now, out of habit, but it didn't match his mood, so he made a show of muttering, "Shigemori, that bastard."

"Are you jealous?"

She was sitting on the edge of her seat, and now she put both hands on the chair and made a little move as if to get up.

"Jealous? I'm concerned for you, baby."

It was a lie, and a transparent one at that. He wasn't concerned for anyone but himself. All his rage sprang from a heart tortured by jealousy.

"Toyama, maybe you'd better not call me 'baby'."

Her tone was not harsh, but it was firm. Toyama was somewhat taken aback by this display of will on her part, and he had to bite his lip to keep from saying, "I'm sorry."

"No matter how much you cozy up to Shigemori, I just don't think it's going to help you in the future. If you have a dream you've got to reach out and take it on your own."

Reach out and. take it... What a cliché—Toyama was disgusted with himself for uttering something straight out of a teen soap opera.

"A dream? Toyama, do you know what my dream is?"

"To become a great actress, right?"

Sadako brought a hand to one cheek and gave a hard-to-define smile.

"How many people do you think would come see me if I made it as a stage actress?"

"You don't have to stick to the stage. There's TV, movies."

"What about that, that red light—see it?"

Sadako pointed to the cassette deck that was erasing Okubo's impressions. A tiny lamp glowed red, signifying that it was recording.

"The cassette deck?"

"It's so much smaller than a reel-to-reel. Looks really easy to record on, too."

"Yes, it is pretty convenient."

"I wonder if images will be like that, too. If we'll ever be able to record images, not just on film like in a movie theater, but on something small like a cassette tape."

What she was saying didn't sound all that far-fetched—no doubt that day was fast approaching.

"I'm sure we will, sooner or later. Maybe someday we'll be able to sit at home and watch one of your movies on TV."

"But that's a long way off, isn't it?" She sounded depressed about it.

"It's not impossible, though. You could do it."

"But it would be too late."

"What do you mean?"

"By that time, I'd be an old woman."

She had a point. Even assuming Sadako kept steadily maturing as an actress, by the time a cassette-like image-storage system came into widespread use, she'd no longer be considered young.

"Don't be in such a rush."

"I don't want to get old. I want to stay young forever. Wouldn't that be great?"

Nobody fears aging like an aspiring young actress, reflected Toyama. Sadako was evidently no exception.

"I wouldn't mind growing old with you."

It was almost a proposal, despite the casual way he said it. And he meant it. Aging held no horrors for him, as long as he and Sadako could live together. And when he finally died of old age, he could do it with a smile on his face provided she was there beside him. For an instant Toyama imagined dying in Sadako's arms. She was gazing into his eyes while the world receded spinning into the distance. He was old...but for some reason Sadako was still her present age. In his head the image was startlingly clear.

The muscles around Sadako's mouth relaxed as she realized that Toyama really did want to be with her. She knit her brow and said, a little defensively, "You're under the impression that I like Mr. Shigemori, aren't you?

You've got the wrong idea."

"Well, I don't want to think that. But considering what I saw you do—"

She wouldn't let him finish. She shook her head and said, "No, no. You misunderstand. I can't stand him. He comes on way too strong. In fact, he scares me. It's like he's obsessed with me—he's just creepy. I hate it. Why can't he be a little more laid back—especially at his age?"

So even Shigemori had struck out with Sadako.

Toyama actually began to feel a little sorry for him—was it possible that he was seriously in love with Sadako, at age forty-seven?

"To be honest, it's really hard for me—I don't know how to tell you what I really feel. I want to believe you, Sadako, but..."

Sadako leaned forward in the folding chair and put a hand on Toyama's knee.

"Toyama," she said.

She was only nineteen, but it seemed she knew just how to relieve the frustration of a man suffering from jealousy.

She stood up and turned off the lights. Once she'd turned out the desk light, the booth was dark except for what light found its way through the window from the stage below. It was enough to dimly illuminate Sadako's body. But then the last actors left the stage, and that light too was extinguished. All was black except for the tiny red glow of the record light on the cassette deck in the corner.

Something clicked in the darkness. Sadako must have locked the door from the inside. After a while, Toyama felt her weight on his knees. So slender to look at, she was surprisingly heavy.

He could see nothing: only by her weight did he know she was there. She guided his hands as he undressed her. They unzipped her dress in the back, and then she slipped it off over her head. Now Sadako was straddling him in her underwear as he sat there.

At the soft touch of her skin, the outlines of Sadako's body took shape in Toyama's mind. She'd taken off her dress, but ironically she was now becoming the Girl in Black herself. The fact that he couldn't see her in the darkness only stimulated his imagination as her naked form took on solidity in his mind's eye. The red glow from the tape deck only made her blacker.

As he savored the satisfaction of having her all to himself at last, Toyama's frustration and jealousy melted away.

He lost track of time. He forgot himself completely as they touched each other's bodies, as he stroked her hair, as he lifted her head and ran his lips over her neck; naturally, his desire progressed to the next level. But every time he started to reach a hand between her legs, she would stop his hand—sometimes gently, and sometimes brusquely. Finally, as if to distract him, she reached into his shorts.

It took him no time at all to climax: her hands moved, and in response Toyama finished, stifling a moan.

Not a drop of his ejaculate hit his clothes or the floor: Sadako caught it all in her hands. In his abandon, Toyama was unable to figure out what she was doing now. From the sounds, he thought she might be rubbing her hands together in it. Once she'd covered her hands in his fluid like lather from a bar of soap, she put her arms around his face, his neck, and embraced him. He smelled his own.

Then Sadako whispered in his ear, barely loud enough to hear, "Don't ever love me more than you do now. I don't want to lose you, Toyama."

It didn't feel as if she'd said the words at all, but rather as if they'd been delivered straight into his brain.

Toyama, I love you.

Was he hallucinating from the strength of his desire? No—her voice pressed itself directly into his mind.

These were the words he wanted everyone to hear—

if indeed he was hearing them himself. He especially wanted Shigemori to hear them.

"Sadako," he whispered, in a dry, scratchy voice,

"you'd make me so happy if you'd just say you love me in front of everyone..."

But she shook her head.

At that moment his foot hit the cabinet. He heard something fall. He'd forgotten himself in his love for Sadako, but just for an instant his attention was claimed by the altar hidden at his feet, and the offering lain in front of it.

Toyama, I love you.

Again, her voice coming into his brain—and together with it he thought he heard, from somewhere, the sound of a baby crying. It wasn't his imagination: he definitely heard a newborn baby crying, behind Sadako.

9

November 1990

Every cell in his body was reliving the touch of Sadako's skin. This wasn't like a mental recollection: it felt as if the memory were engraved in his very DNA.

He told Yoshino about that episode from his youth, but he didn't go into every single little detail. He just gave him the general outlines, the salient points of the day of the final dress rehearsal. But as he spoke he was remembering Sadako's voice, the softness of her skin, the feel of her hair, as if it were yesterday.

Toyama, I love you.

Her voice still lingered in his ear—whether he'd really heard it or only hallucinated it, he could recreate its resonance, its mysterious ambience, exactly. It was the voice of the only woman he'd ever met with whom he could have been truly happy.

He wanted to see her again, if at all possible. Where was she now? What was she doing? The fact that Yoshino couldn't find her was at least proof that she hadn't made a name for herself as an actress. That in itself he found unbelievable, for a woman with such a unique allure as hers. He began to feel uneasy.

He found it took courage just to ask. But somehow he managed to voice his query. "By the way, Mr.

Yoshino. What do you think Sadako's doing now? Please, don't keep anything back from me—whatever you might know."

Yoshino rested his chin on his hand; he licked the cover of his fountain pen with the tip of his tongue.

"Of all the ridiculous... I'm trying to find out what happened to her. How could I have any idea what she's doing now?"

"I think you people know something. Don't you think it's a bit unfair for you to ask me all these questions and then not answer mine?"

"But..."

Toyama leaned forward earnestly and looked Yoshino square in his bearded face.

"Is Sadako alive?"

He had to come straight out and ask it: otherwise they'd keep going in circles.

Yoshino looked taken aback by Toyama's serious-ness. He made a strange face, then shook his head twice, gently.

"I hate to say it, but she's probably..." Warning him that nothing was definite yet, Yoshino told Toyama that the information his colleague Asakawa had come across gave them reason to speculate that Sadako Yamamura was no longer alive. There was a possibility that she'd been involved in some kind of incident, and that it had happened right after her disappearance from the troupe twenty-four years ago. Again, it was still only specula-tion. But...

But it was enough. It was the development Toyama had feared, and it didn't surprise him. He'd had a feeling, for he didn't know how long now, that Sadako was no longer of this world.

Still, hearing Yoshino state it as a near-certainty caused a physical reaction in Toyama that was far more honest than he'd expected. To his surprise, tears began not just rolling down his cheeks, but actually falling to splash on the floor. In his forty-seven years he'd never dreamed his body was capable of such a thing. She was the one burning love of his life... But that was twenty-four years ago. He was more experienced now—he knew he was even something of a playboy—and now he was weeping over confirmation of Sadako's death. He couldn't help but see something comical in it.

Startled, Yoshino searched in his satchel until he found a tissue. Wordlessly he offered it to Toyama.

"Sorry, I don't know what..." Toyama trailed off and blew his nose.

"I know how you must be feeling."

But Yoshino's words sounded utterly fake.

How could you know?

Toyama started to blow his nose again, but then decided to ask something that had been on his mind all along.

"By the way, you said you'd talked on the phone with some of my old colleagues from the troupe."

"Yes. Iino, Kitajima, and Kato."

"And that they all knew I had a relationship with Sadako."

"That's right."

That didn't sit right with Toyama, given the excessive care Sadako had taken to ensure that their relationship wasn't made public. Toyama, too, in response to her demands, had made a point of not mentioning it to anybody. In spite of all that, they knew. He wondered how.

"I don't get it. I was pretty sure we'd kept it under wraps."

Seeing that Toyama had gotten his emotions under control, Yoshino ventured a smile.

"You were fooling yourself, my friend. When two people are in love, people notice, no matter how much they try to hide it."

"Did they say anything specific?"

Yoshino gave a little half-laugh, half-sigh. "Oh, maybe you didn't know about this. Well, it seems someone played a trick on you."

"A trick?"

"This is twenty-four years ago we're talking about, after all, so it seemed pointless to me at first, but hearing what you had to say has cleared something up for me.

Things make sense now."

Yoshino then told Toyama something he'd heard from Kitajima. Not precisely as Kitajima had told him—

he blended what he'd gotten from Kitajima with what he'd just learned from Toyama to come up with his own version of what had happened.

It was an April afternoon, the closing day of their three-week run.

It was closing day, and the interns were all gathered in the big room behind the dressing rooms, enjoying a rare moment of leisure. After that day's performance, a late matinee, the play would be over: they'd break down the sets and lighting, and then the wrap party would begin. A week or more's vacation awaited them after that. For the first time in three months, they'd be able to really relax.

Already feeling somewhat liberated, Okubo had gathered everybody to watch him do impressions again.

Kitajima was still among them at this point, cheering him on with the rest.

It wasn't clear who had brought it up. Once Okubo was all revved up, though, somebody mentioned the tape they'd recorded him on last time. This brought back memories: oh, that's right—we sure had fun that time, etc. etc. Meanwhile Okubo lost interest in his impressions and started gathering wool. Then he suddenly started to worry about that cassette, asking everybody what had happened to it. Nobody knew. Finally he realized if anybody would know, it was Toyama, he being in charge of the tape deck.

That tape constituted a grave danger to Okubo. If Shigemori found it, then at the very least his week's vacation might be canceled. He decided that he wouldn't be able to make it through closing day with any peace of mind unless he disposed of the tape.

So he said he was going up to the sound booth to look for it. As Okubo lost interest in his impressions in order to concentrate on finding the tape, Kitajima lost interest in Okubo. He left the room, heading for the restroom off the lobby. Before the doors to the theater opened, that restroom was usually empty, and Kitajima always went there when he needed to sit down to do his business.

He walked together with Okubo as far as the lobby, then they separated, Okubo climbing the spiral stairs to the sound booth and Kitajima going into the empty restroom.

He took his time. When he was finished he made a call from the pay phone to check on some tickets, and when he finally returned to the big room he almost ran into a red-faced Shigemori rushing from the room. At that moment Kitajima sensed that something bad had happened, but since Shigemori didn't seem to notice him at all he decided that he wasn't the target of the director's anger, and so he relaxed.

In terms of timing, it seemed likely that Shigemori had learned of the cassette and was overreacting to it.

But as Kitajima watched to see what Shigemori would do next, he saw something unexpected.

Shigemori was definitely flustered, but Kitajima couldn't tell if he was angry or disturbed. He opened the door of the women's dressing room and called for Sadako Yamamura repeatedly, in a low voice.

Kitajima watched from behind the sink. A woman came to the door in response to Shigemori's call. Probably Sadako, but since she didn't step into the hallway where Shigemori stood, Kitajima couldn't see her at all.

From what Shigemori said next, though, it was clear who it was.

"I don't believe you, Sadako."

Shigemori seemed to have a hand on her shoulder, now shaking her, now stroking her, now with a pleading look on his face, now with a threatening scowl, but looking straight at her all the while. Sometimes his eyes seemed to brim with tears. In profile, as Kitajima saw him, Shigemori was showing commingled love and hatred.

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.

10

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.

"What's wrong?"

"You'll have to come hear for yourself. I can't believe it."

Toyama stood up shakily and followed Fujisaki and Yasui to the elevator to the third floor, Studio 2. This was usually used for making classical recordings: it was perfect for strings, for chamber music and the like.

Fujisaki and Yasui had just yesterday gotten back from a recording session in another town. They'd rented a hall in the mountains that was popular for recording and taken the musicians up there: the clean, dry air made for a great sound.

They'd already reported to Toyama that the session had gone well. All that was left in terms of studio work was some editing. Then the album would be done, ready for release as a CD. It would hit the record stores soon.

"Is there a problem?"

Fujisaki held out a pair of headphones and said,

"Just take a listen."

Toyama put on the headphones and sat down at the mixing table. At a look from him, Fujisaki hit play and the tape reel started moving.

He heard a pretty piano melody. Nothing wrong here. He flashed Fujisaki a puzzled look.

"Right there." Fujisaki rewound the tape and played it again. The piano was descrescendoing from mezzo forte to mezzo piano, but there was something else there, besides the piano. It was faint, but Toyama's trained ears were able to pick it out. His eyes started darting about the room. He was visibly shaken. He started to tremble.

"What do you think it is? It sounds like a baby crying to me."

A baby crying, weakly. But that wasn't all there was.

Fujisaki might not have heard it, but Toyama did: somewhere behind the cries, there were words, floating in and out of hearing. There it was. He felt a rush of nostalgia as he recognized the voice.

Toyama, I love you.

He doubted Fujisaki or Yasui could hear it. All they'd be able to hear was the baby. And their thinking was probably that there must have been a baby in a car behind the hall or something, and that their mikes had picked up its crying.

But that's not it. That's not what happened.

Toyama screamed the words, but only in his own mind.

"This is a problem, wouldn't you say, Mr. Toyama?

What do you want to do? This is the master tape, and what's more it's the only take we've got. I could swear this sound wasn't there when we were recording."

Toyama rushed out of the studio, leaving Fujisaki shaking his head.

"Mr. Toyama—where are you going?"

At the door he turned around and gasped, "It's stuffy in here. I need to go get some air." It was all he could do just to get that much out.

He left the studio and went down the hall. While he waited for the elevator to arrive, he pressed his face against the window at the end of the hall and stared down at the street below. Shadow and light swirled in the bright afternoon sun. The street began to turn misty white—as if his retinas were clouding over, although he knew they weren't—and finally everything began to turn black. The cold sweat made his forehead slippery against the glass, a nasty feeling; it was an oily sweat.

Blacks and whites reversed, and all color drained from the world, except for a single point that hit Toyama's eye like an arrow. A woman, in a wrong-for-the-season lime-green dress.

He was reminded of that time in the sound booth in the playhouse, long ago, when despite being lost in his lovemaking with Sadako, the red light on the cassette deck in the corner caught his eye. Shining in the black-ness like that, it only served to underscore the darkness.

This was like a strange transposition of that scene.

That lime-green dress was the only spot of natural color left in the graying landscape, and it made for a violent disharmony. It disrupted the monochrome world with a fearsome, storm-like force. That tiny green speck asserted rulership over all.

The elevator door opened. He went to the first floor and across the reception area. By the time he'd left the building, the world had regained its former color. But the pain that gripped Toyama's chest would not go away.

11

He was unbearably thirsty. He'd just drunk a whole can of sports drink, the one Fujisaki had given him, but the dryness in his throat was becoming unendurable.

He bought a lemon soda at a vending machine right outside the building and drank it. As he did he could feel how much his body needed the fluid, but he didn't even register it as a pleasant taste: it seemed to be converted directly to cold sweat. He threw away the half-drunk soda and began to walk.

Waiting for the elevator, looking out the window, he'd felt a dizziness, and a sense that the world was losing its color, and in the midst of it a single spot of bright green had caught his eye. Now as he walked aimlessly, his mind was still on that green glow.

The scene in the sound booth twenty-four years ago came back to him like yesterday. Partly it was because of the voice he'd just heard in the studio, that whisper lurk-ing behind the baby's cries. The voice was Sadako's. It had to be.

Sounds and smells, he reflected, could be like sparks igniting an explosion of old memories. In this case, the previous twenty-four years had somehow been removed from his memory circuits—somehow the present moment was being fused with the time he spent with Sadako in the sound booth.

That smell.

He'd begun to worry about that odd smell in the sound booth. At first he hadn't even noticed it. But every time he entered the room it impinged on his consciousness a little more, until he'd decided he had to try and nail down its source.

He couldn't figure out how to describe the smell: it wasn't rotten or anything, but then again it wasn't exactly fragrant. It was pungent—not strong, exactly, but subtly stimulating to the olfactory membrane.

Lemon.

His mind hit on it at last. Maybe there was a lemon somewhere in the room. But if there was, it had to have been there for a while, in which case it would be rotten, and that wasn't the smell. It was something fresh, like something just peeled. Something not yellow, but still green with youth—something not yet ripe.

He searched the room. He opened every cabinet, searched every shelf, but found nothing. The only thing he discovered was that the dried-up umbilical cord that had been placed before the little altar as an offering was gone. He couldn't think of who might have taken it or when. As far as he knew, Sadako was the only other person aware of its existence, but it was hardly worth accusing her of taking it—in fact, he was kind of relieved the grotesque thing was gone. He was reluctant to bring it up with her at all.

So the umbilical cord was gone, and in its place was the faint scent of unripe lemon.

The umbilical cord?

Once, in a book, he'd seen a color photo of a twelve-week old fetus in the womb. It was curled up, arms and legs stuck out in front of it; its head was much bigger than its body. It was only five or six centimeters long, but it was recognizably human—it was even possible to tell what sex it was. You could see a tiny protrusion in the genital area.

What stuck in Toyama's memory was the thread connecting the little fetus to its mother. The umbilical cord was thicker than the fetus's limbs and lined with red veins; it twisted and looped around, fixed firmly to the placenta. It was this very important conduit that brought oxygen and nutrients to the fetus.

To the fetus, the womb was the entire world; the umbilical cord, then, was the sole connection between the fetus's world and the outside. In that sense it was an interface. Only when it left its mother's body would the fetus realize that there was another world outside the one it had been living in. Looking at the photo, Toyama had tried to imagine what a surprise that would be for the fetus. And it had struck him that, as long as you were inside, you could never know about the outside.

Walking along the sidewalk he was suddenly overcome by a feeling of strangulation centered on a spot just above his navel—his stomach, probably. Chill sweat continued to stream from his pores. The joints in his arms ached, and when he tried to raise them they wouldn't move. He could barely keep walking.

His heart beat violently.

A single fact flashed across his mind.

Everybody who heard Sadako's voice over the intercom from the sound booth twenty-four years ago died of heart disease. .. But I wasn't there. I didn't hear the tape.

He was desperate in his denial, but then another voice seemed to speak.

But you heard it directly from her, didn't you? And the words came to you not through your tympanic membranes, but directly into your brain.

That had to have been his imagination. He wasn't telepathic, and anyway, there was no such thing as words forcing their way directly into a person's mind.

Toyama, I love you.

They came back to him now, those precious words from his beloved. But now they brought with them terror, as well.

The seed of anxiety had been sown. Why were those same words present on the reel-to-reel tape in the studio? Why had Sadako whispered to him so insistently from behind the baby's crying? He had actually heard those words through the medium of tape: he felt terror, shock, anxiety, and nostalgia—it made no sense, but his love for Sadako flamed up again. Only the thinnest of lines separated terror and love for him now; his feelings of twenty-four years ago were back, the same as they ever were, but at the same time he could distinctly feel something wrong with his heart.

He could tell without even having to turn around: the girl in the green dress was on the sidewalk across the street, behind him. Her pace was somewhat quicker than his. He kept walking. He didn't know where he was going, or why he had to keep walking. He just pressed on, without looking back.

When the girl in the green dress was even with him, she crossed to his side of the street, threading her way between moving cars. He detected the fragrance of unripe lemon, the same as he'd smelled twenty-four years ago.

Now she was right next to him. She was close enough to reach out and touch. He stumbled, and the back of his hand brushed her arm. She was alive, sure enough. The touch of his hand confirmed it.

He glanced at the girl out of the corner of his eye.

She was wearing a green one-piece dress with no sleeves—the season being what it was, he got chills just looking at her. It made her stand out among the passersby on the sidewalk. The way she asserted herself in a crowd hadn't changed at all.

Her whole body seemed to be saying, Look! I'm here.

Her hair fell to the middle of her back; her hands were so white as to be almost translucent. The nail on the first finger of one of her hands was split. He looked at her feet. She wore no stockings, just pumps on her bare feet; she had purple bruises on her ankles. She was tall, with a nicely balanced figure—that too was un-changed.

The cramping in his stomach got worse and worse, and Toyama couldn't keep his feet moving. He collapsed on the sidewalk against the girl in the green dress. It seemed that the world was starting to close in on him.

His back came into contact with the girl's bare legs, his greasy sweat dampening her soft skin.

He stayed there like that for a while, cradled on her knees. Passersby looked down at him and said things, but he couldn't make out what.

He thought he heard the word ambulance, faintly.

He didn't like all these people staring at him. He wanted to chase them away, but his body was like a steel bar. He couldn't move. All he wanted was to be still, cradled there on the girl's knees.

He tried to lift a hand and touch her cheek. No such luck. The desire raced in his mind like an engine in neutral. His mind and his body were separate now, and it frustrated him.

Sadako's face was before him now. He'd missed her so much. Now he was staring up at her face, still young, untouched by the intervening quarter century, and he didn't find it strange at all. She was supposed to be dead...but that didn't matter now. Why hadn't she aged?

That didn't matter either. He was just happy to be able to touch her, alive like long ago. His happiness pushed aside his fear of impending death; he found he could endure the rapid collapse of the world upon him. He only wished he could be free of this pain squeezing his stomach.

Somewhere in the distance he could hear the approach of an ambulance. The air brought him the rever-berations of its siren. His arms were immobile from his shoulders to his elbows, but he thought he could still move his fingers. His hand crawled toward Sadako, and managed to catch hold of her.

With her free hand, Sadako reached into her hand-bag and pulled out a small object wrapped in tissue paper; the tissue had turned brown in spots. She opened the tissue, took out what it enclosed, and laid it on Toyama's palm. He felt this had happened to him once before, somewhere: she'd plucked something up and laid it on his palm...

In order to see it, he tucked in his chin and looked down toward his waist. The object lay naturally on his palm, weighing virtually nothing.

He tried to pull his hand closer to get a better look at it. The trembling of his palm made the object vibrate as though it had a life of its own. He finally understood: it was an umbilical cord.

This one wasn't dried and shriveled like the one he'd seen twenty-four years ago: this had fresh blood on it. It had probably been cut no more than a week ago. It was the conduit between a womb and a mother's body, an interface between the inner world and the outer.

The umbilical cord looked strangely like it had been torn—the ends had clearly not been snipped by sharp scissors.

His field of vision had shrunk even further: now all he could see was Sadako's face. He had no way of knowing what was causing the symptoms now fast progress-ing through his body, but he had a vague premonition of death. It looked, ironically enough, like he was to be granted his wish of dying in Sadako's arms.

He tried to smile. He wanted Sadako to respond in kind, but she remained without expression.

Out of habit, Toyama's forefinger began to move.

When it used to be time for him to play the theme music at the end of a show, he'd always focus himself by rubbing his thumb and forefinger together before pressing play.

Sadako opened her mouth and began to speak.

What? What are you trying to say?

But whatever she was about to say stopped at her throat, and never reached Toyama's consciousness. In the end, maybe the Girl in Black hadn't been trying to say anything at all.

Play button, on.

He moved his forefinger, then gently squeezed the umbilical cord. There was no longer any doubt in his mind whose it was.

Sadako's been reborn.

A moment later the lights went out, signaling that the curtain was about to fall for Toyama.

He heard applause, somewhere. And the many gazes that had been turned on him all simultaneously...