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PART

ONE

THE BEGINNING

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Haruko Higiichi

Haruko Higuchi had arranged to meet Akira Hirano for lunch at a soba shop. Akira arrived late and, though they hadn't seen each other in four years, sat down without apologizing. "Some things never change," she said. Then, to the cook in his white smock behind the counter: "Two specials."

The shop was in the basement of a building near Sendai Station occupied by an insurance company, at the end of a subterranean row of bars and restaurants. It was near the electronics company where Akira was employed, and the two of them had often come here for soba in the days when Haruko had worked there as well. It seemed like the right spot for their reunion.

"Some things never change," Akira said again.

"You're right. The menu is exactly the same. But they've got wasabi in a tube now instead of the fresh-grated stuff they used to serve."

"1 meant you. Do you really have a kid?"

"She's four years and nine months old."

"Well, Tm three years and three hundred and thirty-nine months old," said Akira, keeping a straight face.

"You can do that in your head? That's quite a talent."

"Comes in handy in the dating world," she laughed.

Dating! Haruko smiled at the memory of single life and studied Akira more closely. She was short and slender, her hair dyed brown and curled. Her eyelids were heavy, her lips full. She wore little makeup. Though it was chilly in Sendai in late November, she only had a black sweater on.

"You know," Akira said, "1 always wanted to ask you what you thought of me when we worked together. We sat next to each other all that time. Did you think 1 was an idiot, never talking about anything but meri? You must

THE BEGINNING

have hated me. But you were always so polite. Was that just to keep me at a distance?"

"I admired vou."

"Don't be ridiculous."

Though they were the same age, Haruko had envied Akira's energy, her constant, animated commentary on life—the cute salesman visiting the office, the idiosyncrasies of her current boyfriend, some sexy underwear she had discovered. "There was no discouraging you."

"'No discouraging'? You make me sound like a cockroach," Akira said, lowering an eyebrow in mock offense.

"1 always thought you were so cool. When your boyfriend called during work, you'd just tell the boss you wanted to take time off and leave—and the amazing thing was, no one held it against you."

"Not that 1 did that every day."

"Often enough!" Haruko laughed.

"You just have to pick your spots. Know when you can get away with it."

"Pick your spots. . . ."

"But Tm always ready to leave early if something special comes up."

"Okay, what if 1 call someday and tell you I'm getting divorced?"

"Td be out the door in a flash."

T hen maybe I'll do just that, Haruko Higuchi thought.

T he restaurant, she noted, was not particularly crowded for noon on a weekday, and at first she wondered whether it might be struggling to keep afloat, but then she noticed a new flat-screen T V mounted high on one wall, the sort of thing you wouldn't buy if you were about to go out of business.

T he TV was tuned to the noon news. It was a national broadcast, and yet the shot showed a local scene, the front of Sendai Station. Below the banner of the network, the sight of the familiar building was disconcerting, as though one's own home had suddenly shown up on the news. T he caption (jn the j)icture announced that Prime Minister Kaneda's motorcade was about to leave the station.

"Sendai's caught Kaneda lever," Akira observed, glancing u|) at the screen, her chin j)roj)ped on her palm. "Iwerybody at our ollice went out to watch instead ol going to lunch."

"The security is amazing. They've closed a lot ol ro.ids," said Haruko,

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remembering the police lines she'd seen on her way there. The men had been wearing padded armor, like baseball catchers, with "Miyagi Prefectural Police" across the chest.

"I suppose the local bigwigs would be in trouble if anything happened to a popular new prime minister. A whole lot of trouble. . . ." Akira took one last look at the TV and turned her attention to the lunch that had just arrived.

They talked about Akira's boyfriend as they ate their soba. They had met at a party; he was three years younger than her, a serious sort with a baby face, who was anxious to please no matter what she asked of him. "It's like I found this lamp—I just rub it and he pops out ready to do my bidding."

"A genie."

"But the best part is his name: Masakado! Like the shogun. I'm going out with Taira no Masakado! Lord of all Japan!"

"And where does Lord Masakado work?"

"That's sort of interesting, too," she said, her voice rising slightly, as though she'd suddenly realized something else to his credit. "Have you ever heard of a 'Securitv Pod'?"

"Those things they've installed all over the city?"

"The ones that look like R2-D2 from Star Wars.”

"Are they really collecting information?" Haruko asked. They had been touted as a way to "promote public safety." But it was unclear what they were recording and who had access to the information.

"According to Lord Masakado, it doesn't amount to much," Akira said. "He thinks satellites are more accurate and efficient. The pods basically take pictures in the area right around them and record cell phone transmissions. But we live in a surveillance societv, that's for sure."

"So what's his role in all this?"

"You might say he's in maintenance."

"He maintains surveillance on society?"

"Not exactly. He cleans the lenses. They go around in a van and check each pod, make repairs, wipe the lens. Pretty exciting, no?"

"Any wedding plans?"

"Wedding? Plans? Next question. But speaking of marriage, how's yours going?"

"I'm not sure what to say."

THE BEGINNING

"Well, what about the kid? Boy or girl? Cute, I'm sure."

"A girl. And cute—1 suppose." Haruko paused for a moment, resisting the urge to launch into a description of Nanami. "But, back to you, are you thinking of marrying Masakado?"

.Akira stopped, a noodle suspended in mid-slurp between her chopsticks, and stared at Haruko. Then, after a moment, moving only her lips, she sucked up the rest of the noodle. "You only get one card at a time," she said at last.

"1 don't follow."

"Well, for example, when you're dealt the ten of spades, you have a problem—should you hold it or throw it in for another card? Tens are tricky that way. You might get a better card. In that sense, aces or fours are a lot easier to figure out."

"So, Masakado is the ten of spades?" Haruko tried to imagine how the man would feel about the comparison. "I'll bet he's really a face card."

"No, afraid not." She smiled and shook her head. "Though 1 would say he looks like a jack." Akira's affection for her boyfriend showed in the line of her smile. "But what about you?" she asked. "Did you settle for a face card on top of the deck? Stand pat when you were dealt your husband, game over?"

"Well, he wasn't exactly the first card." Haruko grimaced. "T hough 1 guess he did turn up pretty early in the game."

Akira slurped her soba more enthusiastically, as if enjoying these confidences. When she had finished another mouthful, she stuck a finger in the air. "T hat's right, you used to talk about a guy you dated in college—good-looking but tlakv."

Haruko nodded, summoning uj) Masaharu Aoyagi's face in her head. Akira's prying was like pulling the plug on a keg of wine, among a stack of them piled precaricjusly against a wall. Her memories of her time with Aoyagi began tkjoding back. She tumbled for the cork, her fingers slij)pery, and barely managed to push it back in the hole. 'I he torrent stopped, but bits of thitigs, like scraps ot |)hotographs, tumbled into view—glim|)ses of their earliest days at college, Aoyagi's boyish lace when they'd lust met, and later his stunned look when she'd announted she was leaving him.

"Do you remember that dcHivery triuk driver who w.is in the news lor a while a couj)le ol years ago?" Haruko said eventually.

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Akira, finishing another bite of soba, looked puzzled for a moment but then stuck her finger in the air again. "I do. You mean the nice-looking guy who was all over the TV for catching a burglar? How could 1 forget that face? For a while there, Sendai had the hots for him like it has for Kaneda now. 1 suppose 1 got a pretty good case myself,” she admitted. "Good-looking but a bit rough around the edges. In the end, though, 1 could riever understand why people got so worked up about it all.”

"Because the woman he rescued was a star,” Haruko said.

"That's right. What was her name?”

"1 don't remember anymore.”

"Which is exactly my point,” Akira said, adding a little hot water to her bowl.

Haruko shook her head. "1 suppose everything fades away eventually. The star's name, the truck driver, old boyfriends.”

"Though they must go on doing something somewhere, even after we've forgotten them. . . . But where is that little girl of yours today?” she added.

"At kindergarten.”

Akira fixed her with a skeptical look. "Are you sure you didn't make her up?” She held Haruko's gaze for a moment before breaking into a smile.

The TV screen was still filled with familiar buildings, scenes of downtown Sendai along the main street heading south from the prefectural offices and city hall. The sidewalks were jammed, despite the November cold. Haruko wondered where so many people could have come from, while life elsewhere in the city went on as usual. She remembered that someone had once told her that thirty percent of worker ants in a colony aren't actually working at any given moment. So the crowds here were that thirty percent, she decided.

"They're that desperate to see the prime minister?” Akira said.

"Maybe because he comes from Miyagi, they feel like they know him.”

"Though no one around here paid much attention when he ran in the primaries. The governor all but laughed at him, said he was too young to have a chance. But once he became prime minister, they were just begging him to come back for a hometown parade.”

"It does seem like a lot of fuss,” Haruko pointed out. "It's not as though he won Olympic gold.”

"And he's already been in office six months. I suppose he was paying them

THE BEGINNING

back by delaying the parade until now." Her tone was cynical. "Serves them right for not backing him from the start."

"There he is," murmured one of the customers behind Haruko. A car passed slowly from left to right across the screen. For a moment she thought it was snowing, but then realized they were throwing tickertape from the buildings along the route. There was something old-fashioned about the scraps of paper fluttering down on the parade. The festive mood of the crowd was unmistakable, and you could almost feel the anticipation as a patrol car cut across the screen, and then a long convertible came into view.

"There he is, that's Kaneda," the man behind Haruko said. They couldn't hear much of the broadcast since the TV was mounted so high on the wall, but they could tell that an excited announcer was repeating the prime minister's name.

He was seated in the back of the convertible, waving to the crowd. Fhe camera zoomed in for a close-up, revealing the face of a man who was still young—at fifty, the youngest prime minister in Japanese history. An unusually dignified face, with undeniable ciiarisma. Full eyebrows, a well-formed nose, piercing eyes, relaxed manner—he might easily have been mistaken for a movie star. A face that showed traces of innocence and experience in equal measure. The members of his own Liberal Party joked that his carelessly styled hair was still jet-black because he hadn't suffered enough, but his expression was subtle, notoriously difficult to read: were those slightly pursed lips smiling or bracing for the next challenge? Fhe slim woman seated next to him looked serene and well bred, and perhaps slightly cold.

Akira pointed at the screen, addressing the man in the limousine. "We're counting on you," she said.

Haruko remembered a debate she'd seen on FV between Kaneda and his opponent, the venerable Labor Party boss, Makoto Ayukawa. 1 hough Kaneda was said to have played rugby in college, he had looked slender, almost tleli-cate, next t(j the older man. His manner had been understated and respectful, but he had fixed Ayukawa with a sharp stare throughout the debate. When Ayukawa had accused him ol being young and overly idealistic, Kaneda had responded witiiout missing a beat: "1 got into politics because 1 w.mtc'd to turn ideals into realities."

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"My husband said it all along."

"What?" asked Akira. "That he's lucky to be married to such a good-looker?"

"No," Haruko laughed. "That too few politicians are ready to lay down their lives for the country."

"He can say that again. They either die of old age or off themselves after a scandal."

"He says Kaneda seems like one of the few who might," said Haruko.

"He can say that again, too."

At first, Haruko wasn't sure what she was seeing. As Kaneda's limousine crept across the screen, something white dropped into the picture—as though a curious bird had swooped down on the car . . . though the tail was too long for a bird. It was probably just a clump of tickertape, or so she thought.

She still couldn't hear the announcer. The white object descended on the limousine.

"Is that a toy plane?" someone murmured. Haruko wasn't sure whether it was Akira or someone behind her—or a voice in her own head.

The camera caught the propellers spinning over the small body of a remote-controlled helicopter as it hovered for a moment above the car. Then the sound of an explosion filled the room, white smoke billowed across the screen, and the picture seemed to warp.

For a moment, Haruko thought something had happened to the TV, but the picture quickly returned, showing the street through a veil of smoke and people fleeing in every direction. The pavement where the camera was focused seemed to be on fire.

The silence in the soba shop was broken only by the hushed voice of the announcer saying, "A bomb! A bomb!"

PART

TWO

THE AUDIENCE

Day One

Toru Tanaka dropped his head back on the pillow and gazed at his left leg on the bed below him. It had started to itch inside the cast, so he pulled himself up a bit and glanced around for the ear pick he used to scratch his leg.

"Hey, Tanaka," said his roommate. "Looking for the pick?" The curtain down the middle of the room had been left open. The white-haired, slackmouthed man in the next bed had casts on both legs. His face was round, his eyes wide-set. Toru shook his head, annoyed at being so easy to read.

The man, Yasushi Hodogaya, had been in the room when Toru arrived. Toru had only recently turned thirty-five, and this sixty-something roommate was old enough to be his father, but Hodogaya had decided they were going to be buddies, members of the "brotherhood of broken bones." Worse yet, he never missed an opportunity to play up his twofold injury, reminding Torn how much worse off he was having broken both legs.

Annoying, too, was his habit of muttering insults at the TV screen while a chess program was on, as if he played better than the experts on the show. But Toru knew nothing about chess, so he had no way of knowing whether Hodogaya's criticism was justified.

Fortunately, despite the casts, Hodogaya would often jump out of bed and leave the room on a pair of crutches, sometimes for long periods. He seemed so mobile that Toru had to stop himself from asking when his roommate planned to check out.

"Hey, Tanaka. You know who that was came to see me?" Hodogaya asked one day.

"How should 1 know?" said Toru.

THE AUDIENCE

"You'd never believe me if 1 told you."

"Then don't tell me."

Hodogaya would have been approaching retirement if he had worked for a respectable company, and work might have been the last thing he'd have wanted to discuss. But, perhaps because his job seemed a bit shady, he was always anxious to talk about it. He told stories of his adventures in the underw^orld that were probably mostly bluster, claiming to be friendly with various thugs and yakuza bosses. But Torn had to admit that the men who came to visit him were pretty tough-looking, something Hodogaya took pleasure in pointing out.

Now, as the pair of them lay in bed, someone appeared at the door of their room and knocked. It was the boy from the room next door, also on crutches.

"What's up?" said Hodogaya.

"Toru!" said the boy. "Did you see what happened? On TV?" It struck Toru as odd and a bit annoying to have a boy of middle school age calling him by his first name, but he had decided it was just his way of being friendly.

"TV?" he said, looking over at the set on the table against the wall. He reached for the remote and switched it on. The hospital charged for TV privileges, but he had bought a prepaid card and earphones. "Seen what?"

"What happefiedV said the boy. "At least we won't be bored in here for a while," he added, before disappearing as quickly as he'd come. Tbru wondered what all the fuss was about as a man with a solemn expression appeared on the screen. He was holding a microphone and had a bandage around his head. T he background looked familiar, until Torn realized it was right here in Sendai—along the main street dividing the city from north to south.

"T hat's right," said Hodogaya from the next bed. "T he parade's today. Kane-da's coming, the new prime minister." Almost simultaneously Torn noticed the headline streaming across the bottom of the screen: "Prime Minister Kaneda assassinated by remcAe-controlled bomb." He grabbed the earphones and j)ut them on.

"T lungs are finally calming down, but trattic is still at a standstill aiul the city is in chaos." T he announcer's voice was tense; he had ob\'iously been injured in the exj)losion.

Toru watched the screen intently, vaguely aware that 1 lodogaya had turned tfjward his own T V and j)ut on his eaiphones. The l)r()adcast was jumpy and

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confusing, with a constant soundtrack of honking horns and barked orders from the police—clearly not the program the producers had planned—but as he watched, Torn began to grasp what had happened.

Kaneda, who had been elected six months earlier as the first opposition party candidate to become prime minister, had been riding through downtown Sendai when a remote-controlled model helicopter had appeared from the top of a textbook warehouse and descended toward his open limousine. As it neared the car, it had exploded.

The TV station replayed the event again and again, as though the footage spoke for itself: the blast, the nearly unrecognizable remains of the car, the big zelkova trees in the median snapped in half. Apparently no spectators had been killed since the avenue was wide, but a number of people had been injured in the ensuing paiiic, and some were still unconscious. The bodies of the prime minister and his wife had not been positively identified, the announcer said, but the fact that he already referred to them as "bodies" seemed to say it all.

"Shit," Toru muttered, and knew that he'd be watching TV for a while. It was lucky to be here in the hospital—what better place to watch the after-math unfold? Still, until they had something concrete to report, the talking heads on the tube were like dogs worrying an old bone. Eyewitnesses were apparently easy to come by, since just about everyone who had been present was trapped in the congestion and roadblocks and had little to do for the time being but wander around. Most of them talked excitedly about the noise and smoke at the moment of the explosion, and about what they did afterwards. In most cases, this amourited to nothing more than running as fast as they could, but they all seemed eager to tell the story. A number of young people came on claiming to have caught the explosion on their cell-phone cameras, but when the images were put up on the screen, they were disappointingly grainy and indistinct.

T he prime minister's number two man, Katsuo Ebisawa, ventured out just once. He was nearly seventy, but he was built like a rugby player and whenever he had appeared with the much younger Kaneda, he had looked like his bodyguard. All he would say now was that the government was gathering information and that the police would report soon, before he vanished from sight.

THE AUDIENCE

At 2:00 P.M., the police held a press conference. For the media, and for Torn sitting in front of his TV, it was the first substantive moment in the coverage. The official who appeared before the cameras was from the National Police Agency rather than from the Miyagi Prefectural Police. He was introduced as Ichitaro Sasaki, the assistant division chief for General Intelligence in the Securitv Bureau.

"Title sounds like a software upgrade," Torn heard his roommate say without removing his earphones. "And he looks like Paul McCartney." He was responding to Sasaki's baby face, big, droopy eyes, and mop of curly hair— Toru had to admit there was a resemblance. "Wonder if Paul's up to the job?" Hodogaya added.

Questions were fired at Sasaki one after the other, but he just glanced at his watch from time to time and said next to nothing. Eventually, this strategy' seemed to subdue the reporters, and he answered a few questions briefly but authoritativelv.

"Where did the helicopter come from?" asked one reporter.

"We think it came from somewhere in the textbook warehouse."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Possibly from a window, or from the roof. We're looking into that now."

"Roadblocks have been set up along all the highways," another reporter broke in, "and train service in and out of the city has been susjKmded. T his isn't an investigation—it's a blockade. Won't this create havoc for businesses, not to mention for the citizens of Sendai?"

Sasaki didn't bat an eye. "At the present time, we don't know who did this or how many of them there are, but we have to prevent them from leaving the city if at all possible, l or the next few hours, we are asking for understanding and cooperation from all the affected j)arties, including the trans-{)ortation industry. Once the proper checkj)oints and investigatory measures are in j)lace, we believe we'll be able to resume train service and open the roads. Our prime minister has been murdered, and those res|)onsible are still at large. I'm alraid scjme inconvenience is inevitable. Woukl you rather tluit we worried about the etlect on |)rivate individuals and businesses and let the killers go free in the j)rocess?" He stared .it the reporter who h.id asked the question. "11 that's what you're proposing, 1 think we have a lew ciuc'stions ol our own lor you."

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''Are you cooperating with the Miyagi Prefectural Police?" someone else asked. "Is it normal for the National Police to step in so soon?"

"Is there some reason we shouldn't be here?" Sasaki shot back. "The prefectural police are providing their full support," he added. "It may be an odd way of putting it, but the fact that the crime occurred in Sendai is the one bright spot in this tragedy. Thanks to the Security Pods that were installed here last year, we've been able to collect a great deal of information, and I'm convinced we'll soon have the culprit or culprits in custody." Then he basically gave the networks their marching orders: "In response to this crisis, we are asking the media to cooperate in gathering information from the citizens of Sendai and passing it along to the authorities. You can play a vital role in encouraging public vigilance."

The commentators on the news special immediately began to review the press conference, while the announcer recapped the situation. Torn got out of bed and hobbled off to the bathroom on his crutches. After emptying his bladder, he stopped for a cigarette on the way back. In the smoking area, too, the assassination was the sole topic of conversation.

"It's the title that really matters. When you give something a name, you create an image for it, and images influence people." The speaker, seated on a bench along the wall, was Toru's neighbor, the middle school student. It occurred to Toru that the boy shouldn't be here even if he wasn't actually smoking.

"What are you talking about?" he said, sitting down next to him.

"Kenji here's wondering when they came up with this 'General Intelligence Division,"' said the boy, pointing at a wrinkled older man. "He says they used to call it 'Public Safety' or 'Central Investigation' or something like that." Toru was mildly impressed that the boy called the old man by his first name, too.

"When did they change it to General Intelligence?"

"Three years ago," said the boy. "When they reorganized the Security Bureau."

"How do you know so much about it?"

"You have loads of time to read up on stuff like that in here," he said. "Seems there was too negative an image with 'Public Safety,' and 'Peace-Preservation,'

THE AUDIENCE

'National Security/ and the rest of them. They all sound a little scary—1 guess some people in Japan are nervous about anything with 'national' in the title." Toru had never heard a kid talk like this, and he realized it made him uncomfortable. "So," the boy continued, "they needed something vaguer, a bit more abstract, and 'General Intelligence' was born. When you hear the name you're not exactly sure what they do, but everybody knows 'intelligence' is important. So the division that handles it must be okay. Anyway, it sounds a whole lot better than 'Public Safety,' that's for sure."

"Says who?" said Toru, lighting a cigarette.

"You've heard of 'appreciation payments'?" said the boy.

"No." The kid was beginning to get on his nerves.

"You must have, Toru," he said. "That's what they call the money the government supposedly pays for the upkeep of American soldiers stationed in japan. When people hear 'appreciation payment,' they feel like it's some sort of charity they're giving to the troops themselves, but the truth is the money goes straight into the U.S. treasury. Another example of strategic naming. You get it all the time, tricky words like 'appreciation' or 'hometown' or 'youth' or 'white-collar.'"

"Is that so, professor?" Toru said, unable to take much more of this.

The boy frowned. "Well, all 1 know is that the politicians and the rest of the big shots never tell us much of anything; everything happens behind the scenes. But we'd better keep our eyes open—you, too, Tbru." He looked at the old man as well, as if to say "Including you."

Perhaps because the boy had lumj)ed them together this way, the old man seemed to decide that he and Toru were now friends. "You know," he said, "they put those Security Pods in everywhere, and they're keeping track of everything we do, but nol)ody seems to c()mj)lain ... to me, that's the really scary thing."

"1 guess," said Toru, sounding only vaguely interested. He blew out a thin stream of smoke. "But they're probably better than a higher crime rate. T hat's why they put them there in the first jilace."

"But what about that serial killer? All that 'intelligence' and they still haven't caught him." A string ot murders starting about two years etiiTier hatl been the excuse the authorities used to make Send.ii the test city lor the new surveillance system.

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A number of people had been stabbed to death in the area around Sendai Station, always on Friday night. T he victims were young and old, male and female—a middle-aged man whose face had been slashed, followed the next time by a young woman whose head had almost been cut off. Since all the bodies had been mutilated with knives or blades of some kind, people in the city began referring to the killer as "Cutter," and before long the facetious nickname had given its unseen owrier a kind of creepy familiarity. There were also several victims who survived the attack, and they reported that after he had cut them, he put his face down next to theirs and yelled "Surprise!" This bizarre behavior added to the terror, but it fueled curiosity at the same time. Eventually, the whole country was talking about Cutter, the Sendai serial killer.

The police searched frantically, but Cutter left few clues, and the fact that he was an equal-opportunity killer made profiling difficult. More thari a year and twenty victims later, they had little to go on. It was said that a special unit had been deployed for the investigation, and that the officers in the unit had been authorized to use means that went beyond the normal scope of the law. It was unclear what that involved, but to date it had not resulted in Cutter's capture.

At one point, some monthly rag ran a picture with the headline "Cop Confronts Cutter." The grainy image was straight out of a comic book: a gun-toting officer chasing a grim-faced, middle-aged man in a suit. The caption was corny enough: "Wounded Cutter, escaping by the skin of his teeth, vows revenge. Killer remains at large in Sendai." But the speech balloon above Cutter's head—"Surprise!"—was over the top, and no one paid much attention.

Then, a local network affiliate caused a fuss by trying to get an exclusive interview with the killer. Apparently, a man claiming to be Cutter had contacted the station and offered to give a tell-all interview. The station had beeri skeptical at first, but after a good deal of back and forth, they began to think they were dealing with the real thing. They invited him to come to the studio, promising not to inform the authorities; but in the end, someone on the staff apparently decided this was a bad idea and called the police. The man who claimed to be Cutter was arrested when he arrived for the interview, only to turn out to have no connection with the crimes. The TV station was criticized for compromising ethical standards in pursuit of ratings, and a number of senior people lost their jobs.

THE AUDIENCE

Still, media shenanigans aside, the citizens of Sendai were terrified of this phantom killer and stopped going out at night, with the result that business at bars and restaurants dropped off drastically. In due course, when the daughter of a local business owner was murdered, a bill was proposed in the national assembly to ''restore peace and security by the introduction of mechanical means." The fact that the business owner's son-in-law was a veteran member of parliament for the ruling party probably had something to do with the hasty way the bill reached the floor of the Diet, but given the circumstances there was no public objection. After all, who was going to quibble when so many innocent people were being killed? Under normal circumstances, this kind of conspicuous invasion of privacy would have caused a violent outcry, but Cutter's yearlong reign of terror had apparently convinced Sendai, and perhaps the rest of japan along with it, and the measure sailed through the assembly.

Soon after its passage, "data-gathering terminals"—the Security Pods— began appearing around the city. They were designed to increase the quality and quantity of information available for crime prevention and investigation. In practice, the pods recorded and stored a picture of almost everyone who passed near them, day or night. They also kept track of user information for transmissions from cell phones and other mobile devices.

"In America, they passed the Patriot Act right after 9/11. . . ." T he boy was still holding forth.

"Has a nice ring to it," said Tbru.

"But it's another example of strategic naming. It sounds good, it's 'patriotic,' but in reality it lets the government record telephone calls and emails and just about anything else, no questions asked."

"What do ycm mean?"

"In the |)ast, when they susj^ected someone was up to no good, they got a search warrant and then they could gather information on that person. Now, no one knows who's a terrorist and who's not, so they gather information about everybody and then decide who's suspicious. The whole game has changed, in America and everywhere else."

"I thought Americans cared a lot about their freedom."

"But wouldn't most |)eoj)le agree to more government surveillance il Ihey

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thought it could prevent terrorism? Look at us: nobody said a word when they installed the pods in Sendai."

"I don't think anybody thinks of it like that," said Torn. "They just want that murderer caught."

"I'm sure you're right. But you know what I think? 1 think they cooked up the whole Cutter thing."

"Cooked it up?"

"They needed an excuse to put in the pods. I'm sure of it. Japanese people will put up with almost anything if you frighten them enough. The whole thing just sounds fishy. What killer is going to yell 'Surprise!' as he chops your head off? It's right out of a manga."

Torn laughed. If only the world were as simple as this kid made it out to be. "People can't be fooled that easily," he said.

"Then how did all those pods get here?" said the boy.

As soon as he got back to his room. Torn put on his earphones and turned on the TV. A telephone number, fax number, and email address flashed across the screen along with a message asking anyone with information to contact the studio. There was something almost offensive about the email address beginning "kaneda_scoop(a\"

But tips—often contradicting one another—were beginning to come in and were immediately broadcast. A tall man with a face mask had been seen talking suspiciously on a cell phone in the crowd before the parade. Several men in suits had been studying a map on the observation deck of the building across from the station. Two men were arguing in a white car parked on a street near the site of the explosion. Two other men, one clearly wearing a disguise, had been heard talking about a sexual assault on a pedestrian bridge. A young woman in the crowd had suddenly started waving just before the explosion. . . .

One of the announcers on the news special wondered aloud whether passing along all these reports before they could be confirmed might add to the confusion. The moderator seemed caught off guard by this and had no response other than to frown angrily, but one of the news analysts jumped in almost immediately to rescue him.

"In the first few hours after an incident of this nature, it's important to lay

THE fiUDIENCE

out all the cards on the table and get the large view, without ignoring any possibilities. If you start out being overcautious, you can end up delaying the investigation." What he meant, of course, was "If it's good for ratings, who cares whether it's true or not."

About this same time, Makoto Ayukawa called a news conference. Though Kaneda had beaten him handily in the election for prime minister, his Labor Party, which had governed Japan for most of the postwar period, still held a substantial majority of seats in parliament. Ayukawa was utterly composed on camera, the very image of the head of the dominant party.

"The late prime minister is, Tm sure, in all our prayers." His voice was quiet and dignified. "1 would like to emphasize," he continued, "that in this time of crisis, we put aside party differences and unite behind the effort to bring to justice those responsible for this atrocity."

"1 bet Ayukawa did it!" laughed Hodogaya. They had turned off the TV and started dinner.

"You think it was payback for the election?" Torn said. It had clearly been humiliating for Ayukawa, who had been counting on a third term as prime minister, to lose to an opponent as young as Kaneda, but he doubted he would have gone as far as assassination.

They turned on the TVs again when they'd finished eating. Some experts on remote-controlled helicopters were now being interviewed, men who fiew the models in and around Sendai. T hey were a strange assortment—an older fellow with a handsome shock of white hair, a businessman type in horn-rimmed glasses, a young guy in a grubby T-shirt who could have been a student.

"It's a 90," said the white-haired man as they watched the tape of the explosion. T he rest of them nodded agreement. T hey were apparently discussing the size of the engine on the helicopter.

"(^an you tell what model it is or the maker?" asked the interviewer.

"It's an Ooka Air Hover," said the young man, his voice going shrill from eagerness oi nerves. T he others seemed to concur. T hey watched the lootage over and (wer, asking tor ditlerent camera angles or a wider shot, and they added details about the helicopter, the kind ol gyro it usetl, the type ot mulller.

"T hey say it took oft from somewhere on to|) ol the lextl)ook Wiirehouse," said the moderator, bringing out a k>rge i)hoto that showed the luTicopter in

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front of a brick building. '"How far away could you stand and still control its flight?"

The men looked at one another for a moment, as if trying to decide who should answer.

"Well, it would depend on the transmitter and the antenna," said the older man, "but you could be at least two kilometers away without any problem. But you really can't do much unless you can follow the flight visually, so they were probably standing where they could see it. You control these things by keeping track of their position in the air, and that would be hard to do if you were too far away to see."

"There was no wind today," added the kid in the T-shirt, "so it was probably a pretty easy flight; but bad weather would have made it much trickier. They also had the extra weight of the bomb. You'd need somebody who knew what he was doing." The rest of the group nodded. Then they took a closer look at the photograph and pointed out where the silhouette differed slightly from that of a normal Ooka Air Hover—no doubt where they had attached the bomb. It was a shame, everyone agreed, that the machine had been vaporized in the explosion since it would have revealed additional information.

"So it's safe to say that this flight could not have been managed by a novice?" asked the moderator.

"It would depend how much practice they had at hovering."

"You could probably manage if you practiced every weekend for a few months."

"Perhaps," said the white-haired man, "but I think it would still be impossible for a beginner, especially with the destabilizing weight of the bomb and the problems involved in such a dangerous undertaking. I suspect this was done by a fairly experienced flyer."

"Are there many people with these skills?" asked the moderator.

"Oh sure, lots," they said, like a Greek chorus.

"But"—the white-haired man again had a reservation—"there aren't so many places you can fly, so right here in Sendai the number is actually fairly small. Nor are there lots of shops where you could get an Ooka Air Hover. It should be possible to find out who bought one recently."

"Could it have been secondhand? Or could someone have brought it from elsewhere?"

THE AUDIENCE

'That's certainly possible."

"In which case, it might be difficult to determine where this particular machine came from."

"I suppose so."

"And anyone who planned something like this would be careful to cover his tracks," said the moderator, obviously satisfied that he'd made a point.

Ichitaro Sasaki of General Intelligence showed up on the program late that evening. "We have a number of promising leads, and we're following up on every one of them," he said. "But we will still need to keep the city under tight security, and in particular the area around Higashi Nibancho Avenue will be closed off for several more days, so we ask for your continued cooperation." Somehow, as he spoke, Paul McCartney, who had looked so unimpressive, began to seem reassuring, someone to be depended on.

After the interview, the news special came to an end. Perhaps everyone was simply worn out from all the excitement, or maybe they had finally begun to feel guilty about replaying the same few seconds of the bomb exploding for the umpteenth time. But as soon as the show ended, the station began to run a hastily assembled video biography of Prime Minister Kaneda, covering his life from the early years, through his days in business, and on to his political career. T here were shots of him looking almost heroic as he announced his first run for parliament, tapes of eloquent speeches, debates with crafty political opponents, coverage of the primaries, his dramatic win in Sendai, his debate with Ayukawa in the general election, and his inauguration, all leading up to the climax—today's parade through the city and the appearance of the model helicopter. Knowing the ending. Torn turned off the TV and dosed his eyes.

Day I wo

He checked the clock: 7:00 a.m. But when he |)ulletl aside the curtain that divided the room, Hodogaya was already watching TV.

"Now it's really getting interesting," he said, twistitig to look at lom and j)ulling one earbiid out. He seemed to leel sorry lor this roommate who was

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late for the show. 'The police held an emergency news conference a couple of hours ago, while we were asleep."

"To say what?"

"They seem to have a suspect."

Torn turned on his own TV: a face and the name Masaharu Aoyagi flashed across the screen. Toru's first reaction was that the man didn't look particularly dangerous, but then it occurred to him to wonder how they had this picture if he hadn't been arrested yet. The date running under the image was about two years ago—a still from a popular news show. Why would the suspect, Masaharu Aoyagi, have been interviewed on a TV program back then? In the picture, he was wearing the familiar blue and white uniform of a well-known delivery company. The man was tall and lean, and the photographer had apparently caught him off guard, because he was frowning slightly and scratching his head. Torn finally figured out where he had seen the picture.

A couple of years ago, a very popular young actress had got into a nasty situation in the city. She was originally from Sendai and was in the habit of sneaking back to an apartment she kept there when she had time off. She had been home alone when a man had forced his way into the apartment and attacked her. Fortunately, this Masaharu Aoyagi had been making a delivery at just the same time.

When no one answered the intercom, he'd decided to leave a printed message; but he thought he heard a crash and a woman screaming inside the apartment, so he pressed the buzzer again. Still no answer. Very cautiously, he turned the knob and pushed open the door—to find a man attacking a woman. He managed to pull him off and hold him down until the police arrived.

"Did you know the apartment belonged to Rinka?" asked a reporter.

"I had no idea." He sounded a bit shaky as he answered.

"But when did you realize it was her?"

"I'm afraid I don't know much about celebrities," Aoyagi muttered. "I don't even watch TV," he added, obviously embarrassed. The reporters burst out laughing.

"She's very well known. You really don't watch TV?"

"No, I'm busy with work." Aoyagi looked down and barely whispered his answer. The reporters surged closer. With long, tousled hair and a deadpan expression, he might have passed for a slightly eccentric movie star himself.

THE AUDIENCE

but there was something fresh and unaffected about the way he dealt with the media. From soon after the incident, he attracted a great deal of attention, and in due course became a minor celebrity in his own right, if only for a short time.

The news shows sent film crews to cover him at work, and there were interviews with his coworkers and his boss. Once, when his delivery route became known in advance, a crowd gathered along the way in the hope of catching a glimpse of him—and that, too, was reported on the news. Worried that all of this disruption would affect business, his employer initially asked the media to keep their distance while he was at work, but when the furor continued they started thinking about using him in a commercial. He turned them down cold, however, and the idea was dropped; but the excuse he gave, that he didn't want anything to interfere with his job, only made his stock with the public go up.

"Weren't you frightened when you realized the attacker had a knife?" The reporters were still asking their questions on the old videotape.

"It all happened so fast," he said.

"They say you had no problem subduing Rinka's attacker. Have you done judo or something?"

"No," he told them, scratching the tip of his nose, "it was just a move a friend taught me when 1 was in school. . . ." His unease in the face of all this attention was enough to make anyone feel protective. "A leg sweep. You bring him down with a leg sweep and then kick the shit out of him—that's what my friend said."

Toru was surprised to realize that it had been more than two years ago that he'd seen the driver interviewed on T V. T he media had been all over him for a while, but in less than six months he had faded again into obscurity. T he "man of the hour" becomes just another man once enough time has passed.

Hut now, two years later, he was back in the spotlight, a sus|)ect in an assassination. Or so it would seem.

"It's hard to believe he could have done it," said the announcer as the archival lootage came to an end.

"It certainly is," agreed a woman who specialized in leneting out cek'hrity scandals. "1 covered the story, and he seemed to be a very sweet hoy, though he was a bit jumj)y sometimes."

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The announcer nodded as a piece of video that had played earlier came on the screen again. A tense and embarrassed Masaharu Aoyagi stood talking into a microphone, but this time the technicians managed to zoom in on his right hand, showing his fingers twitching violently. Then they panned down his legs, which were shifting and fidgeting. The tape was in slow motion at the end of the interview, focusing on the way his mouth went slack as he finished talking. His lips seemed frozen in a smile, his eyes wary, as though he preferred his own company to these people here in front of him. The expression passed almost instantly, caught only by the slow-motion photography, but to Tom it felt as if he'd had a glimpse of something dark and cunning behind the driver's pleasant face.

Someone on the news show said that Aoyagi had quit his job at the delivery company three months ago—which was, no doubt, the lone piece of good news for a company in an otherwise embarrassing situation. There was some comfort that the suspect was at least a "former" employee.

"Torn!" The middle school boy said loudly as he spotted him in the smoking area and came to sit next to him. "Getting interesting, don't you think? The police must be pretty desperate if they've already named a suspect."

"Well, when somebody kills the prime minister right in front of them, 1 guess their asses are on the line. Td say they're desperate. But," he added, bringing up something that had been bothering him, "we don't really know that this Aoyagi did it yet, so it seems a little soon to be shouting his name all over the place."

"1 bet they have plenty of proof already; or maybe, since it's an emergency, they just want to arrest him as soon as they can and worry about his rights later."

"You think they really have proof?" Toru said.

"Well, they seem to be able to check phone records and stuff with the Security Pods. They should be able to come up with something if they use them right."

"Sounds like you actually like the idea of a 'surveillance society.'"

"Not me! It's like 'Big Brother Is Watching You.'"

"Pretty much," said Toru.

THE AUDIENCE

There was some new information in the morning at Sasaki's press conference. He reported that another, smaller explosion had occurred just after the one that killed Prime Minister Kaneda, this one on a side street nearby. A car had burned and a concrete wall had fallen over. At first, it was thought that the damage had been caused by the blast from the remote-controlled helicopter, but the investigation had revealed that the explosion came from inside the car. A man's body was discovered in the driver's seat.

"There was a bullet wound to the head of the body. We are trying to get a positive identification now, but the driver's license recovered from the car belonged to Shingo Morita of Aoba Ward in Sendai. Furthermore, we have learned that Mr. Morita was a college friend of the suspect, Masaharu Aoyagi."

"Can you tell us what evidence led you to Aoyagi?" asked a reporter.

"An officer encountered a man behaving suspiciously in the vicinity of the textbook warehouse immediately after the explosion. While he was running an identity check, the man managed to escape. Several officers in the vicinity pursued the suspect, but he eluded them and is still at large. The owner of a liquor store was attacked some time later," Sasaki added. His face was nearly expressionless, though the hangdog eyes looked a bit strained.

"Anything else?" prompted another reporter.

"Several hours ago, we received a tape from the surveillance camera at a shop selling remote-controlled models here in Sendai."

"T he helicopter?" called another reporter. Sasaki nodded significantly.

"It shows a man purchasing a hcTicoj)ter like the one used in the attack . . . a man who bears a strong resemblance to the j)erson who tied from the scene of the second bomb."

"Was it Masaharu Aoyagi?"

"T he shoj)keej)er has identified him," Sasaki said. "Furthermore, according to our investigation, Aoyagi had a j)art-time job at the 'Fodoroki Pyrotechnics Factory in Sendai while he was in school."

"Todorcjki Pyrcjtechnics?" echoed another reporter.

"They make fireworks," Sasaki explained. "In other words, he would have s(jme familiarity with the use of explosives."

"Is that how he made the bomb?!"

"We're iHJt prepared to say at this time, but we are seeking the cooperation of Aoyagi's former employer."

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"Were there other factors that led you to Aoyagi?"

"Well," Sasaki said, as though throwing one last bone to the dogs, "there was the matter of a phone call we received from him." A clamor rose from the press pool. "Tm not at liberty to reveal the details, but he has been in contact with us by telephone and has confessed to the crime." He went on to announce that the police were relaxing the security measures around central Sendai to some extent and that transportation was beginning to function normally again. But the reporters had lost interest in highways and trains, their attention now focused on Aoyagi.

The program broke for a commercial. "Try our special bechamel sauce!" chirped a man clutching a frying pan and smiling from behind a thick beard. "From our kitchens to yours." He was a well-known chef from a fancy French restaurant that had a branch in Sendai. Toru was surprised to see him hawking sauce on TV, a sign, he thought, that the man was reaching the end of the line. Should have stuck to the restaurants, he thought indifferently.

The program picked up again after the commercial. Up to this point, the producers had little but the footage of the explosion to work with, but the addition of Aoyagi gave them new material. Old tapes from his days as a hero deliveryman were played one after another—with particular attention given to a brief scene showing Aoyagi gesturing angrily at a group of girls who had followed him on his rounds. He might have been chasing off a pack of dogs. T he camera lingered on his face, and at normal speed it appeared unremarkable enough, but the slow motion replay caught a hint of wildness in it. Even Toru could see that Aoyagi was good-looking, but it occurred to him that there was something menacing about him as well.

At this point, the coverage switched to a news conference hastily called by the senior staff in the delivery company where Aoyagi had been working. Everybody's getting in on the act, Toru thought. Next they'll be holding one to announce there weren't enough reporters to cover all the news conferences.

The proceedings began with the company president reiterating that Aoyagi had quit three months earlier and was no longer their employee. "But it would be a terrible shame if he is indeed involved in this incident," he concluded noncommittally. The manager who had supervised Aoyagi was asked whether there had been anything in his record that might have aroused his

THE fiUDIENCE

employers' suspicion. With apparent reluctance, he admitted that there had been some trouble. “What sort of trouble?" a reporter wanted to know.

“A number of packages were sent to addresses on his route but it was never clear where they'd come from; it seems the delivery receipts showed Aoyagi himself as the sender." The camera came in for a close-up of the manager's face, his serious e.xpression contrasting oddly with the cartoon cats on his tie.

“Aoyagi's name was on the receipts?"

“But we had no reason to think he had written them himself, so we assumed it was some form of harassment, that he was being targeted somehow."

“It never occurred to you that Aoyagi might have sent them?" asked a reporter. “You never had any suspicions?"

“We had no reason . . . ," the man mumbled, fidgeting nervously with his cat-tie. “It seemed too odd. ..." The reporters began firing questions at him, their tone growing increasingly insistent.

The cameras also cut repeatedly to shots of the front of the building where Aoyagi had been living. The police were searching his apartment, so the media were kept at bay for the moment, but the building was surrounded by photographers.

One of them had found a perch in an office building across the way and was probing the apartment with a telephoto lens, though very little could be seen through the crowds of police and crime scene investigators. The one thing he did turn up was a small photograph hung on the back wall of the room, and a pulse of excitement went through the T V studio when an enlargement of this image revealed it to be a portrait of Prime Minister Kaneda with a crude “X" drawn over his face.

“What could he have had against Kaneda?" somebody wondered aloud.

One of the men on the j)anel of experts, identified as a retired detective from the Metrop(ditan Police, spoke u|): “About a year ago, there was a campaign to relieve congestion in urban areas by prohibiting on-street parking, and Kaneda was a major supj)()rter. Maybe Aoyagi saw him as an enemy of delivery drivers who j)ark on the street in the course ol doing their job." T he other |)anelists seemed imj)ressed by this analysis.

It was unclear whether it was the same footage the |){)lice were using, hut the T V station also aired a taj)e from the security camera at the remote-control

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model shop. The picture was in black and white, but the face of the man coming up to the register was quite clear. He turned aside and kept his hand over his mouth—perhaps aware of the camera—as he paid for an Ooka Air Hover.

'There's no way to be absolutely sure, but there is a strong resemblance," said one of the commentators. He sounded absolutely sure. Torn, too, thought the man looked exactly like Masaharu Aoyagi.

There was also a report that Aoyagi had been eating a meal at a little tonkatsii restaurant one street off Higashi Nibancho Avenue not long before it happened.

"It was before noon, so the place was still empty. He sat right in that chair, eating lunch and watching TV." The owner, a man in a white jacket with thinning hair and glasses, glared at the chair as though it were somehow cursed. "They had a lot of stuff about Kaneda on the TV before the parade started, and it was a little creepy the way he kept griping about it. I had a bad feeling about him as soon as he walked in the door."

"And you're certain it was Masaharu Aoyagi?" pressed the woman holding the microphone in his face.

"You don't believe me? Of course it was. We give free seconds on rice, and twice he called me over to ask for more. Didn't leave a single grain in his bowl. Pretty weird, don't you think? Who has an appetite like that before he goes out and kills somebody?"

"But are you sure it was him?"

"What do you mean 'Am I sure?' I said it was, didn't 1? Wait a minute," he added, disappearing into the kitchen. When he came out, he was holding a credit card. "Here, have a look at this. He forgot it when he left."

The woman took the card and held it up for the camera. The name at the bottom read "Masaharu Aoyagi."

"What did I tell you?" said the shopowner. "He was muttering all sorts of crazy stuff about Kaneda. Seemed pretty weird to me."

"You should probably turn this over to the police," said the woman.

There was also a tape from the security camera in the parking lot of an apartment building somewhere. It had caught some suspicious activity the jiight before.

"I thought 1 heard glass breaking in another apartment," said a man who was apparently a resident of the building with his face blurred to protect his

THE fiUDIENCE

identity, "but when I looked out the window, I saw a guy opening the door of a car in the lot." The footage from the security camera was fuzzy, but it was clear enough to make out a figure moving from car to car and trying the doors.

"Looking for a getaway car," said one of the panelists.

"While the police are conducting their investigation, where is Masaharu Aoyagi and what is he doing?" said a serious-sounding voice as the screen was filled with a close-up of Aoyagi. Then they broke for a commercial.

Toru let out his breath, realizing that his shoulders had gone rigid and he'd been staring a hole in the TV. His roommate seemed to be coming up for air as well.

"1 don't get it," Hodogaya said. "Two years ago he was some minor celebrity, and now he's supposed to have done this?"

"Maybe he missed the spotlight. They made such a fuss over him for a while and then just dropped him. Maybe he wanted back in."

"Well, 1 feel sorry for Kaneda if Aoyagi killed him for a few more minutes on TV."

Toru nodded. He could see how a prime minister might prefer to be assassinated for political reasons or at least in some kind of conspiracy.

"But they'll wind this up in no time," Hodogaya said, as if watching the chess program on TV.

When the show returned after the commercial, there was an interview with a man who was filmed from the neck down to disguise his identity. His voice, however, had not been altered. "Right from the start, 1 thought there was something funny about that burglar story," he was saying. The caption explained that the man had lived next door to the starlet Rinka at the time of the break-in two years ago. " I he insulation in the building is |)retty good, j)retty soundproof, so 1 always wondered how he could have heard her screaming through the door. Seemed pretty unlikely to me. I always thought he set the whcde thing uj), tor some reason."

Back in tlie studio, the host aj)ologized lor allowing the account number to be seen when they had broadcast the |)icture ol Aoyagi's credit card. " I'he accfjunt has been deactivated," he said.

"And this just came in," he added. "We have received an im|)ortant piece (j 1 inlormation Iroin one ol our viewers." He went on to explain lluit a

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housewife in Izumi Ward had sent in footage that she had shot several months earlier at a riverside ball field north of the city. She had been recording a little league game there—the backstop, the kids in uniform, the opposing pitcher—when a remote-controlled model helicopter had suddenly floated up in the background, 'ds that a helicopter?" says a voice on the tape, apparently belonging to the woman shooting the film. At this point, the camera angle shifts, swinging down to focus on a man standing on the bank of the river, and zooming in on the controller he's using to fly the machine.

The man in the picture seemed somewhat nervous—and looked exactly like Masaharu Aoyagi.

"He was practicing," murmured one of the panelists as the tape ended. "That seems pretty clear."

Then they moved oii to an interview with a woman who was identified as working at a well-known chain restaurant. "He came in last night, sat down right there, and ordered some pasta." She spun around and pointed frantically at a table behind her. "When I went over to take his order, he was real grumpy and mean. Then a police officer showed up and things got out of hand."

"In what way?" asked the interviewer at the restaurant.

"He started throwing around chairs and breaking windows." The camera moved to a shattered pane of glass, while the reporter pretended he'd just realized the extent of the damage. The TV theatrics seemed a bit overdone to Torn.

The studio had also received a tape of Aoyagi's call to the police, which had just been released. The voice of the officer he had spoken to had been edited out, so the recording was a bit jumpy.

"This is Masaharu Aoyagi," a voice said. And then, "I did it."

T he TV station, ever prepared, had called in a voice-print expert, who claimed that the voice on the tape was identical to Aoyagi's from recordings made two years earlier at the time of his brief celebrity.

The special broadcast continued. Kaneda's deputy in the Liberal Party, Katsuo Ebisawa, held a news conference outside his official residence. He announced that he was assuming the position of acting prime minister, as the constitution required, and emphasized that the authorities were still in a fact-finding mode.

THE AUDIENCE

"My party is providing any information it can concerning Masaharu Aoyagi and cooperating fully with the police investigation/' he added.

"How?" a reporter shot back. He seemed almost surprised when Ebisawa began to answer.

"Letters slandering Prime Minister Kaneda have been arriving at our party headquarters for the past two months. Similar letters have also been mailed to the prime minister's residence. Masaharu Aoyagi's fingerprints have been recovered from these letters."

The uproar in the press pool forced Torn to pull off his earphones. He stretched, reached for his crutches, and stood up. Hodogaya had turned off his TV and was flipping through a manga. "Taking a leak?" he asked.

Toru nodded. "Sick of the tube?"

"Completely," said Hodogaya.

"This is just the beginning," said Toru, feeling sure there would be much more to come.

"They'll catch him soon enough. He's making a good game of it, but he's an amateur all the same." Hodogaya's tone made it clear that he was no amateur himself, and Toru knew that he was likely to launch into another dubious story of some exploit in the past; and sure enough, the next words out of his mouth came in the form of advice to the fugitive. "If it were me, I'd go underground," he said.

"Literally? Underground?" Toru was barely able to contain his laughter.

Hodogaya bristled. "Every city in this country has an underground system," he said, as though addressing a classroom. "Two systems, to be more exact: the sewers and the storm drains."

"Is this a long story?" Toru interrupted, starting out of the room. "Afraid my bladder won't wait."

When he'd finished in the bathroom, Toru decided to go down to the first floor to look around. 1 le found it easier now to navigate the halls on crutches. In the gift shop, he flipped through the weekly news magazines, but it was still too soon to have any coverage of the assassination. He read the sports |)apers instead.

Two young women stood next to him at the magazine rack. One ol them was carrying a basket ol Iruit, a gilt lor someboily they'd come to visit.

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"\ can't believe it," one was saying. "They let out this stuff bit by bit, but it looks bad. And 1 liked him a lot. 1 was still in high school two years ago, but I had a major crush on that guy, the delivery man."

"I did, too," said the other girl. "Everybody did."

Torn was curious to hear what they had to say about Aoyagi.

"I don't know anything about bombs," the first girl said, "but that stuff he did on the train's disgusting. Completely gross!"

"I know! I was so disappointed. It's worse than killing the prime minister!"

Stuff on the train? This was new to Torn. They must have been watching a different channel, saw some new wrinkle. He swung around on his crutches and headed back to his room.

"It was about two months ago. I was on my way to work, on the Senseki Line. It was evening, but the train was pretty crowded. I remember this woman near the window saying 'Please stop!"' Torn had changed the channel to find a young man in sunglasses speaking into a mike. "We were all staring at him, pretty sure he was one of those train mashers, and then a few stops before Sendai Station, the woman grabbed the man's arm and pulled him off the train. They argued for a while on the platform. I had the feeling I'd seen him somewhere, and then I realized it was that delivery guy."

When the interview was over, the announcer read accounts from other witnesses who said they'd seen a man who looked just like Masaharu Aoyagi being pulled off a train in a groping incident two months earlier.

Then a small, pale woman who looked like a secretary came on with pictures she'd taken on her cell phone of a man and a woman arguing on a platform. There was no doubt that the man looked a lot like Aoyagi. "While I was shooting these," the woman said, "another man came along to help the girl, and the first man ran off."

An actress on the celebrity panel sniffed in disgust. "So, he's a coward, too. Assaulting that poor woman on the train is bad enough, but then to run away! It's awful!"

"It certainly is," said the moderator, sounding somewhat less indignant. Then he paused and pressed his fingers against the mike in his ear. "It seems we have a report just coming in," he said. Tom swallowed and adjusted his earphones. "A man resembling Masaharu Aoyagi was spotted just moments

THE RUDIENCE

ago in the Kashiwahara neighborhood in Aoba Ward. Tlie police pursued him, but he commandeered a car and fled, driving the wrong way down a one-way street. The car collided with an oncoming vehicle and struck a wall, but the man escaped in another car. An elderly woman was knocked down when he drove off, and was taken to the hospital with minor injuries."

"If he's still somewhere in Sendai, they're bound to get him soon with all those Security Pods," observed one of the commentators.

"There's a report of another crash in Sendai last night, and while there's no confirmation yet, we do know that one of the cars involved was a police vehicle. It seems likely that incident involved Aoyagi as well."

Toru punched his remote and changed the channel. A woman he didn't recognize was reading another bulletin: "This just in: a woman reports seeing a man resembling Masaharu Aoyagi driving south on Route 4." The broadcast was produced by the national network, but most of the live reports from Sendai used local talent. The network shows had all been forced to link up with the Sendai stations and were broadcasting anything they could get their hands on.

Next was a man who said he'd spoken to Aoyagi just before the incident. He was middle-aged and unshaven, and aj^parently had a small delivery business. "1 used to run into Mr. Aoyagi all the time when 1 was out making deliveries," he said, adding the "Mister" despite the fact that he was twice Aoyagi's age. "T hen he turned up again yesterday morning. It had been a while, so 1 was glad to see him. He was with another man."

"Another man?" prompted the interviewer.

"Yes, that's right," he said. "He's in a lot of trouble, isn't he?"

"You feel sorry for him, do you?" said the reporter, sounding shocked.

"1 didn't say that," he j)rotested. "My j)ackages were wrecked, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do." It was unclear what this meant, but the man didn't seem j)articularly uj)set. In fact, he was almost grinning as he said it.

Another channel. This time it was a middle-aged woman with a surprisingly good figure. "He went that way," she said, pointing stage right. She seemed eager to tell her story. "A big man, with a big gun, going that way."

"And you're sure it was Aoyagi?" asked the reporter.

"I guess," said the woman. "But 1 was too scared to breathe!"

If the T V is this crazy. Torn thought, then the Intel iK*t must be a iiKidhouse.

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He was glad to be in the hospital where there were no computers, otherwise lie would have been following the story around the clock.

"New eyewitness account!" trumpeted an announcer toward evening. To loru, most of what they'd shown so far was junk, so he was amazed at their enthusiasm for each new dribble of information. But this time the clips were more impressive.

The video had apparently been shot a few hours earlier by a man who lived in the northern part of the city. It was looking down from a balcony and showed a group of men, some uniformed police and some apparently plainclothes officers, standing with their guns trained on two other men. T he arms of the man in front were pinned behind his back, with the second one holding a knife against his throat. A delivery truck was visible in the background.

"That's definitely Masaharu Aoyagi," said the announcer. "He's apparently taken a hostage!" Despite the shaky picture in the home video, he was quite recognizable. He could eventually be seen dragging his hostage out of sight down a narrow side street.

"The hostage was found later a short distance away, apparently unharmed," the audience was informed.

‘'And where the hell is Aoyagi now?'' was Hodogaya's own sarcastic voiceover.

"Probably already offed himself somewhere," Toru muttered.

"1 suppose they won't stop until he's dead."

"Game over," said Toru.

Hodogaya seemed finally to have lost interest in the television and was busy fiddling with his cell phone. When it rang a moment later, Toru wanted to remind him that they weren't supposed to use these things in the hospital, but Hodogaya hobbled out into the corridor.

Some time later. Chief Sasaki held yet another press conference, announcing that the investigation was moving toward a conclusion, but that the situation was nevertheless serious and potentially dangerous. "Masaharu Aoyagi is a desperate man," he said, staring into the camera. "Two people have died and five more have been injured during his attempt to escape." Someone broke in to ask whether the casualties were law officers. "No," said Sasaki. "They were innocent bystanders." At this, the reporters pushed forward, insisting on knowing who was to blame—blame being one of their specialties.

THE AUDIENCE

'Tast night, Aoyagi commandeered a car, crashed it into a police vehicle, and then tied on foot. T he body of a woman was found in the car."

"Was she killed in the crash?" asked a reporter.

"No," Sasaki answered. "She had been stabbed in the chest." More shouting from the press corps. "Therefore," Sasaki continued over the noise, "we have issued tranquilizer guns to the officers involved in the manhunt." The pressroom was suddenly quiet except for scattered gasps; Toru realized he had gasped himself.

There was something about the term "tranquilizer gun" that seemed brutish—Toru pictured a target painted on Aoyagi's back—perhaps because it equated a human being with a wild animal.

Toru knew from news reports that powerful narcotics had been developed for use in dart guns as a last resort, in response to the restrictions on the police using live ammunition. Though a culprit might be armed and dangerous, public sentiment still favored a nonlethal sedative over deadly force. So the research on these dart guns had been fast-tracked, and now that the tests had been completed and a quantity of them produced, the police apparently intended to use them on Aoyagi.

As if in support of this, the man Aoyagi had held hostage, who turned out to have worked at the same delivery company, said on television that "he's completely different from the guy 1 knew at work. 1 think he would have killed me. . . ."

At some point in the evening coverage, Toru glanced over at Hodogaya. His roommate had turned off his T V and sat there looking fed up.

"You give up watching?"

"It's getting pretty boring."

"You're right, the same stuff over and over."

Halfheartedly, Hodogaya mentioned something al)out a visitor—his usual ruse—then j)icked uj) his cell phone and headed outside. 1 le was gone for some time, and while he was away T(^ru felt an odd compulsion to keep watching, as if it were his resjjonsibility to keep track (jf developmefits lor their room.

They were now showing lootage ol an interview with Aoyagi's lather, aj)parently recorded earlier. The old man was s|)eaking into a microphone in trout (j 1 a house in a neighborhood irlenlilied as being in Saitiima I’relec-ture. He was small but |)()werlully built and he seemed br.iced against the

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onslaught of reporters. He looked tanned and healthy, his short hair and bushy eyebrows reminding loru somehow of a sailor. His answers were curt, to the point of being rude. Torn could understand a father's need to believe in his son's innocence, but at the same time it seemed a little ridiculous to insist he wasn't involved. But the little man went even further, urging his son on camera to keep running. The reporters seemed to disapprove.

Not surprising that Aoyagi would have a father like this. Torn thought in disgust. Between the two of them, they'd managed to piss off the whole country.

After the interview ended, they cut away for a while to coverage of various accidents and incidents around the city. A man who had kidnapped a baby was caught at one of the checkpoints; some characters who had been robbing people on the subway were arrested thanks to a tip from a witness; and the leader of a gang that had committed a murder in Tokyo several years back had suddenly turned up in a hotel in Sendai. None of these had anything to do with the Kaneda assassination, but it seemed that the arrests had been the direct result of information passed along by a tense and extra-vigilant public.

Later that evening in the smoking area, the middle school boy was holding forth again on his new pet theme: the tyranny of the surveillance society. "They know everything about everyone, thanks to those pods," he was saying. "They intercept every email and phone call, so they're solving all these other cases as a kind of side effect of the Kaneda thing." Torn wondered how a kid that young could get so worked up about it. It seemed the boy had also been following the news online. "And you wouldn't believe how many postings there are from people claiming to be Masaharu Aoyagi! But this isn't like looking for a needle in a haystack; they're hunting for this one guy and everyone knows exactly who he is and what he looks like. How tough can that be?"

Day Three

Torn awoke to someone tapping him hard on the shoulder—in fact, so vigorously that he found he was angry before he was fully awake. Floating just above him was Hodogaya's wrinkly face.

"What do you want?" he grunted. "And what time is it, anyway?" He was so groggy he could barely think.

THE AUDIENCE

"It's four," Hodogaya told him.

"In the morning?"

"Naturally."

Four o'clock was technically morning, but it was way too early to be awake. "It's still dark," he muttered.

Ignoring his protests, Hodogaya grabbed the remote from the bedside table. "Take a look," he said. "We're getting to the climax."

"What climax?" Toru said. He reached down to scratch under his cast, but stopped as he realized what he was seeing on the TV.

Fhe screen was filled with a shot of the Central Park, a large open space used for concerts and other events just across the street from Sendai City Hall. With no playground equipment or fences to block the view, the camera caught the whole park at once. The sky in the background was dark, a mottling of black and deep gray, showing that this was live—before dawn.

Klieg lights had been focused on the park, illuminating one area like a spotlight on a stage. The camera panned slowly along the buildings at the perimeter, and uniformed men with rifles could be seen lining the roofs, their telescopic sights trained on the bright patch.

Then the angle shifted to a reporter standing in the street some way from the park, apparently kept back by the police lines. " Fhe marksmen are waiting for orders," he said. The blades of a helicopter could be heard beating the air above him. This must have taken the shot of the rooftops. "Masaharu Aoyagi is reportedly coming here to surrender. And we've been kept at a distance since he has apparently taken another hostage."

loru was surprised to see how quickly things had come to a head. "What happened?" he asked Hodogaya.

"About an hour ago, the police announced that Aoyagi had contacted them to say he was going to give himself uj). He called the media as well."

"Why'd he decide to surrender all of a sudden? And why are they turning it into such a circus? I've never seen so many lights." Dozens of beams were trained on tlie park from the rooftops ot the surrountling buildings. ()ur taxes at work, he thought irritably. "A whole lot ol luss, and all those guns, lor one guy?"

"But they can't just shoot him, can they?" said Hodogaya. "Not on live 'I V. It's not a pul)lic execution."

"We're all watching if they do, that's lor sure."

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"They'd have a big stink on their hands."

"Which is why they've got dart guns. Not a public execution, a public sedation."

"Dart guns?" Hodogaya echoed, apparently hearing about this plan for the first time.

"They mentioned it yesterday; they're planning to use these new tranquilizer darts on him."

"Seems 1 missed something, too," said Hodogaya, sounding genuinely disappointed.

"Aoyagi's probably assuming they won't dare shoot him with all these cameras, but he never thought of darts."

"Poor bastard," Hodogaya sighed.

"You feel sorry for him?" Toru asked, but Hodogaya suddenly pointed at the screen.

"Look, is that a manhole cover?" A round shape was just visible on the ground near the center of the park.

"Could be," Toru said.

"I bet it leads to the sewers. There's a storm drain about six meters down."

"How do you know that?"

"I did a little research on the waterworks, for my old job."

"What job?" Toru asked, but without waiting for an answer he stuck the earphones back in—just in time to hear an announcer say that Aoyagi had appeared.

Then everything went suddenly quiet, as though the earphones had stopped working. A man had appeared out of nowhere in the park, his hands raised above his head. T hin and disheveled, he wore a black sweater over jearis. A disappointingly ordinary figure.

"So that's it," Hodogaya murmured.

Masaharu Aoyagi advanced slowly to the center of the park and stopped, then stared around the ring of buildings, as though staring down the barrels of the rifles trained on him. Perhaps it was tension, or exhaustion, but there was something of a wild-eyed dog in the way he looked.

As Toru reached under the edge of his cast to scratch, it struck him that the fun would soon be over—and that he would probably miss it. He had already forgotten where he'd felt the itch.

PART

THREE

TWENTY YERRS ERTER

When Prime Minister Sadayoshi Kaneda was assassinated in Sendai twenty years ago, the media reaction was unusually frenzied. This was natural enough given the circumstances, but in hindsight we can see the consequences of the lack of balance in this response. Newspapers and the networks fanned the flames of public outrage by relaying undigested police reports and endless unsubstantiated accounts from ostensible witnesses. Despite the fact that the evidence against Masaharu Aoyagi was never more than circumstantial, from the very beginning of the incident the media identified him as the assassin with astonishing certainty—or, rather, it would be astonishing if this kind of error didn't continue to occur with dismaying regularity today.

Just how astonishing their errors were became apparent to me as 1 began to research the events of that period in preparation for this account. Under normal circumstances, almost anyone is capable of seeing reason, respecting civil liberties, and playing the game straight. But in times of crisis, clear heads seem to be in short supply, and everyone gets swept up in the excitement.

Even now, decades after the event, the facts of the Kaneda assassination remain unclear. Findings were published by the investigatory commission established less than a month after the assassination by Prime Minister Ka-tsuo Ebisawa, Kaneda's successor, and headed by Supreme Court Justice Ukai, but the "Ukai Report" is a remarkably vague document that amounts to little more than a list of reasons why we don't know the full story.

Furthermore, since Ebisawa specified that all information gathered by the Ukai Commission, the police, and other agencies should be kept sealed well into the next century, further investigation is virtually impossible. There can

TWENTY YERRS LRTER

be only one conclusion: the government that sealed the evidence was determined the incident should be forgotten altogether.

No doubt the majority of the population now subscribe to the theory that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy organized by Ebisawa, who was Kaneda's number two at the time of the incident. A memoir published by Ebisawa's legal counsel caused a considerable sensation a few years back by hinting at his client's participation in the affair.

In his lifetime, Sadayoshi Kaneda was compared to the youthful hero of legend, Yoshitsune, while Ebisawa was known as his faithful old retainer, Benkei. It would certainly be a shock if it turned out that Benkei had orchestrated his master's demise, but given the political path he was pursuing and his deeply jealous nature, it isn't difficult to imagine that this was in fact the case.

Ebisawa split from the Labor Party, which had enjoyed a virtual lock on power in the postwar period, and established the rival Liberal Party. He then worked for many years as the leader of the opposition, prodding recalcitrant MPs through their legislative paces. And time after time he stood as the Liberal Party candidate for prime minister, in each case losing to his Labor Party rival, sometimes by a narrow margin and sometimes in a landslide.

Twenty years ago, however, opportunity had come calling. The Labor Party was self-destructing in the wake of much-needed but ultimately unpopular tax hikes. T he stage was set for a changing of the guard and with it, Ebisawa clearly believed, his chance to become prime minister. Just at this moment, however, a young politician, Sadayoshi Kaneda, emerged from Ebisawa's own party to hijack his ambitions. T he elder politician suffered a crushing defeat in the primaries, and even at this historical remove it isn't hard to imagine the bitterness he must have felt.

In public, Ebisawa took the high road, {^raising Kaneda as the new voice of a more youthful party and promising to support his run for prime minister and even serve as his dej)uty. But according to the lawyer's memoir, he was simultaneously passing along cam|)aign secrets trom the Kanetia camp to the Ealxjr Party leadership, l.bisawa was also said to be the source ol a story that came out in one ot the weeklies during the campaign, revealing that Kaneda's late mother had worketl in a bar and had died horn stab wounds during an argument with a customer. He seemed to have decided tlnit il lu* was to be relegated to the role ol kingiiKjker, il was belter to iinnoinl M.ikoto

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Ayukawa, his old rival from Labor, than to allow the upstart Kaneda to prevail. But better for whom? For the country? The people? For his party? No, said his lawyer, Ebisawa wanted revenge, pure and simple.

So by the same logic, when Kaneda eventually won the general election despite the sabotage, Ebisawa decided to take matters into his own hands, to eliminate his rival and thus succeed him as prime minister—or so the memoir suggests.

It is not widely known that the route for the prime minister's parade in Sendai that day was changed at the last minute, nor that the new route was decided by then-mayor Sachio Sato, a college classmate of Ebisawa's. When this information is combined with the fact that the textbook warehouse, which happened to be along the new route, was owned by Sato's sister, the conspiracy theory begins to seem plausible. And while the victory parade in Sendai was managed by the prime minister's public relations office, it is said that the original idea for the visit came from Katsuo Ebisawa.

An equally persistent theory, however, contends that the assassination was the work of the Labor Party itself, manipulated by a greater and more sinister power. Whenever something mysterious occurs in Japan, something happening behind the scenes, the fingers always point to the same culprit, the mastermind, the puppeteer: the United States. Such, perhaps, is the fate of the powerful.

Twenty years ago, japan was wrestling with the question of whether or not it should develop nuclear arms. A year before the election that brought Kaneda to power, the then prime minister Ayukawa came back from a meeting with the U.S. president and suddenly announced that he wanted to begin looking at the question of a domestic nuclear deterrent. Ayukawa was lambasted by the Liberal Party and the media, but he responded that he had never actually proposed developing an arsenal, merely that the issue be given due consideration. He wondered aloud whether a nation could govern itself or conduct diplomatic relations with others if it was unwilling to debate the difficult questions confronting it. And so a public debate was held.

But at the same time there were those who maintained that the idea of a nuclear japan was simply part of a new U.S. defense scenario, that America wanted an armed japan as one wing of its China strategy. Among the

TWENTY YERR5 LRTER

main proponents of this theory was Sadayoshi Kaneda. He gave voice to an uncomfortable feeling that was shared by most people at the time: namely, that American foreign policy in Asia had been muddled and inconsistent ever since the Pacific War, that the U.S. had no idea what to do with Asia, and that many of Japan's problems, including things as basic as the country's Occupation-imposed constitution, were the result of American ambivalence and misunderstanding. In the early days after WWll, the U.S. had sought to neutralize the Japanese threat through Article 9 of the constitution, in which the country renounced the right to military force. But when the Cold War began almost immediately afterwards, Japan was suddenly an important strategic asset; and while Article 9 remained in effect, the Americans urged the country to develop a military capability. Eventually, they began to campaign actively for the revision of the article itself.

Kaneda accused Ayukawa of being an American flunky, of encouraging a debate that was supposed to get the Japanese thinking for themselves but was actually just part of a larger U.S. design. He acknowledged that the idea of Japan rearming was a traditionally conservative one—and thus counterintuitive for a liberal politician—but he felt that any government that simply followed the lead of the U.S. would be a laughingstock not only to the Americans but to the whole world. "The United States has never had a vision for Asia," he insisted, "so it is incumbent upon us to chart our own course in matters relating to defense. To take this further, it seems imperative that we develop a credible nuclear deterrent." He also proposed that Japan take steps to upgrade its technical know-how in the areas of strategic data collection and surveillance, especially if it proved difficult to acquire a nuclear arsenal in the short run. In other words, he argued, more than an offensive capability, the country needed a fast, accurate system for gathering data on the military strategy and prejiaredness of other nations. T hese were measures that could be taken within the framework of the constitution; and while he supported strengthening the missile defense system, he felt it was wise to put resources into acquiring such technological advantages rather than an arsenal of ABMs. (T^rtainly, these kintls of innovations shoukl be within the reach of Ja|)an's tecTinological prowess. "We may not possess the brute force," he said, "but we can make ourselves indisiiensable it we possess the most accurate inlormation."

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Another fact revealed in the lawyer's memoir is that Kaneda decided soon after becoming prime minister that he would visit China and the Korean peninsula and hold talks aimed at resolving longstanding territorial disputes and demands for Japanese acknowledgement of its actions during the war. But he was not intending to make unilateral concessions, just open discussions; and he was often quoted as wondering why China, in particular, reserved such special animosity for Japan when it had suffered at the hands of other adversaries, such as the British during the Opium Wars, who had never offered any apologies to the Chinese.

He was convinced, however, that Japanese politicians, who tended to be all bluster at home, lacked both the interest and the resolve to conduct a successful foreign policy. It never seemed to occur to them that they should be seeking common ground with their counterparts overseas. "There are no statesmen among us," he was known to say, and for that view he no doubt incurred the wrath of Uncle Sam, at least according to those who hold with the second conspiracy theory.

Then, too, there are those who tend to focus on the site of the assassination: the city of Sendai. In other words, they believe he was eliminated by a powerful local bloc.

Kaneda scored a victory in the primary elections despite being younger than the other candidates and virtually unknown. Several factors contributed to this upset, including the above-mentioned tax reforms pushed through by the Labor Party. But perhaps even more important was Kaneda's good fortune that the first primary in the election season was held in his home district of Sendai.

Like the U.S. system, the general election for a prime minister is divided into two stages: primary elections within the Labor and Liberal parties to determine their candidates, and then a general contest for prime minister. The primaries are held region by region, with the party candidate getting the most votes claiming that region. When the voting is finished, the candidate who has won the most regional elections becomes the party's nominee.

Since the primaries are held sequentially, it was particularly significant that the first one was in the city of Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture. Sadayoshi Kaneda's early campaign was therefore conducted with the utmost care and

TWENTY YERR5 LATER

planning. He made the rounds of all the businesses and organizations in his district, attending countless events in the six months leading up to the primaries, giving hundreds of speeches, and generally making himself known to his constituency. From the outset, he offered a fresh, fearless, new face, combined with a winning speaking style, and he quickly gained the allegiance of voters in his own party and eventually even some of those who had traditionally supported Labor.

Furthermore, Kaneda's charisma and self-confidence must have rattled Katsuo Ebisawa, who was running as a senior member of parliament and the hea\^^veight in the contest. Ebisawa's campaign became mildly hostile, asking voters whether they could really trust such a young, untested candidate, but this tactic backfired and ultimately strengthened Kaneda's position. Negative ads are a part of any campaign, but voters apparently took offense at a commercial that juxtaposed a particularly snooty-looking picture of Kaneda with one of an elderly, bedridden man. What the Ebisawa campaign did not foresee was that the negative reaction would be directed at Ebisawa as the source of the commercial rather than at Kaneda. Apparently, in the Sendai race, this was enough to tip the balance in Kaneda's favor.

Needless to say, a victory by a young unknown over the man who had been the face of the Liberal Party was big news, but in terms of the larger campaign, it was just a single, local win. Still, this local win proved decisive in Kaneda's victories in both the primary and general elections, victories that were driven in large part by almost accidental media attention.

Quite by chance, the victory in Sendai occurred just at a moment when there were no other newsworthy events. Fhus, the morning talk shows and the noon news hours were hapj:)y to have Sadayoshi Kaneda to fill their slots. Of course, once T V latched onto the story, Kaneda's name recognition shot up and he won the next local election. As the wins piled up, the media dubbed him "a breath of Iresh air," the coverage became still more intetise, and ultimately it had a siKm'ball elfect. T he best analogy is perhaps Jimmy Carter's (jvernight ascent in American |)olitics. You could say, in eltect, that it was the comlnnation ot the early win in Sendai and the power ol the mass media that were behind Sadayoshi Kaneda's rise to the ollice ot |)rime minister.

Kaneda's principal t)ackers in the Sendai priniiiry were the Physicians Asso-ciatifui and a grouj) ot piit)lic casino owners. And lliougli llu* point was never

SI

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emphasized, it is common knowledge that the leadership of the doctors group consisted of a number of men who had known Kaneda in college, while the casino owners included several who had been at middle school with him. An interview in a weekly photo journal given just before Kaneda announced his candidacy by one of the casino owners attracted a lot of attention. The man had insisted that while his middle school teachers had given up on him early on in life, his classmate, Kaneda, had always been there for him. Ironically, the combination of the sober, mannerly Kaneda and the roughneck casino owner struck voters as refreshing rather than unsavory.

But a third and widely credited theory is that these two groups of supporters, the doctors and the casino owners, turned against him after the election and arranged his dispatch. The theory gained particular currency when it came out that shortly after becomirig prime minister, Kaneda had begun studying health-care reform with his Liberal Party colleagues in parliament and that he had discussed budget reductions for public casinos with Katsuo Ebisawa in the same period.

This was certainly not a question of Kaneda betraying former allies. Well before the campaign, he had focused public attention on issues such as the deplorable working conditions in emergency medicine and the shortage of gynecologists; and he may genuinely have felt the need for more centralized control over issues ranging from the location of regional clinics to doctors' salaries. At the same time, business at public casinos had been on the increase and they had begun to show substantial profits. Thus, he seemed intent on cutting budget support to the casinos and using the savings to fund health-care reforms.

Still, it is possible to imagine that those special-interest groups who supported him in the primaries might—fairly or unfairly—have felt used and betrayed, arid decided that Kaneda had bitten the hand that fed him. A writer who interviewed one of the casino owners some six months after the assassination quoted him as saying that the prime minister "just didn't get it."

There were a number of other theories as well. One holds that Kaneda's girlfriend, Hikaruko Kobayashi, went to the Labor Party and begged them to make an example of him for refusing to properly acknowledge her. Another maintains that he was eliminated by a group that saw him as hopelessly

TWENTY YERRS LRTER

unsympathetic to gay causes. In the end, however, other than the fact that Kobavashi committed suicide after the assassination and that Kaneda did once fire a secretary who was known to be gay, there is no credible evidence to support either notion.

Ultimately, however, our inability to get to the truth of the case after all this time is due in large part to the fact that so many of those who were involved are now dead. As the years have gone by, a number have died of natural causes, but several—too many, some would say—died in other ways.

Most notable, of course, is the suicide of his lover, Hikaruko Kobayashi. Two months after the assassination, she was found hanged in a hotel room in Fukuoka. There was no note. Later it was revealed that her apartment in Tokyo had been ransacked, and her sister maintained that the diary she'd kept was missing.

Hideo Okura, who was covering the parade on the day of the assassination, was stabbed to death in broad daylight on a busy street less than a year later. A broadcast reporter for a local TV station, he was the one who first insisted he'd seen someone on top of the textbook warehouse. The Ukai Report concluded later that it was Masaharu Aoyagi on the roof of the building flying the remote-controlled helicopter, but Okura had told a local magazine that the man he'd seen bore no particular resemblance to Aoyagi.

Yuzo Ochiai, the owner of the model shop, has also died. A nondescript man in his late fifties, he owned a small store on the south side of town that sold various remote-controlled gadgets, including, it was said, the one Aoyagi had used. In the wake of the assassination, the networks broadcast the surveillance tape from his shoj) suj:)posedly showing Aoyagi purchasing the helicopter. Six months after the incident, Ochiai struck a divider on the freeway and was killed instantly. The investigation revealed that his blood alcohol level was elevated, though Ins family insisted that he did not drink. In the c(jurse of my own research, 1 have learned that Okura's description of the man he saw on the root closely resembles Yuzo Ochiai.

Junko Kusumi, a waitress at Nokkin, a chain restaurant in Sendai, is another witness who died soon alter the incident. A man robbing a convenience store where she was shopping was accnsetl ol hilling her on Ihe head with a hammer, though when he was arrested later Ik* denied any knowledge

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of her murder. At the time of Kaneda's assassination, junko Kusumi had appeared on T V saying that Aoyagi had broken a window and threatened the customers at her restaurant. But according to a friend who was interviewed after her death, Kusumi had regretted making her statement. She had apparently said it was the police who had used violence and made threats.

Tsuyoshi Kubota's name should certainly be included in any list of interesting players in the case. He was in his mid-thirties at the time, and busy committing a series of robberies in homes around Sendai. Two years before the assassination, he happened to have chosen a budding young celebrity named Rinka as his next victim but was caught in the act and apprehended by Masaharu Aoyagi, who had been making a delivery to Rinka. Given his extensive criminal record, Kubota was sentenced to seven years in prison but was paroled after five. It was barely a footnote in the weeklies, but Kubota was killed in a fight on the street less than two weeks after he got out of prison. It was said that he spent much of his sentence, however, boasting that he would kill Aoyagi when he got the chance.

Ai Kurata also died less than two years after the assassination. Around the time of the incident, reports surfaced that Aoyagi had molested a young woman by that name on a commuter train in Sendai. She died in a drunkdriving acciderit along a mountain road on the Oshika Peniiisula, going over a cliff after failing to negotiate a curve. Another woman, Koume Inohara, was in the passenger seat and was also killed, but strangely there seemed to be no previous connection between the two. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were both heavily in debt.

T here have also been persistent and intriguing rumors regarding Tsuneo OkoLichi, a college friend of Kaneda's who was said to have supported him behind the scenes during the election. Twenty years ago, Okouchi was director of the Sendai Hospital Center, and it was learned later from an internal complaint filed at the hospital that he'd had some sort of dealings with the police during the incident. The reason for this was never revealed, but there were rumors that the bodies of two people who had died under suspicious circumstances were processed in the hospital's morgue as though they had

TWENTY YERR5 LRTER

been patients. Okouchi had clearly taken measures to conceal these activities from public scrutiny. There was, in addition, a magazine report that two of the doctors who had assisted in the disposition of the bodies committed suicide soon afterwards. Okouchi later became head of the Physicians Association but died recently of liver cancer.

If we give any credence to the conspiracy theories, then there is no doubt that these deaths form an interesting pattern. Ichitaro Sasaki, the assistant division chief in the Security Bureau who coordinated the search for Aoyagi at the time, has also died by now. He retired shortly after the incident and effectively disappeared. It is said that he opened a flower shop in a small town north of Sendai, and that over time he came to look even more like an aging Paul McCartney. There has been, of course, considerable speculation as to why he dropped out of public life and refused to speak about the case.

The most common explanation has to do with a fact that was learned only after the commotion had died down: that his son was in a serious car accident in Tokyo during the hunt for Aoyagi. Though the son survived, it was said that the event forced Sasaki to weigh his career against his family and that he chose the latter.

T here are those, however, who contend that Sasaki stumbled across some highly sensitive information in the course of the investigation. During those three days—or, strictly speaking, two, as the chase ended on the morning of the third—the Security Pods picked up information from every corner of the city. That data has never been divulged, but there is no doubt that an extraordinary number of j)hone and email messages were recorded and analyzed and nearly as many j)ictures were taken of the general public, implying that someone gave tacit approval for a massive invasion of privacy.

Normally, this kind ot infringement of civil rights would cause a strong backlash, but given the circumstances it is |)robably understandable that lew objections were raised. .Most peoj)le would have felt insulatetl, since the data ccjllected was ostensibly focused on Masaharu Aoyagi and those associated with him. But the rumors surrounding Sasaki's retirement point out that he had access to all the data, and there is s|)eculation that somewhere in this sea of information he uncovered a national secret of some kind. T his line of reasoning holds that it was consitlered unsafe lor him to rein.iin on tlie

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police force and that he was offered early retirement and a generous pension in exchange for his silence.

There are still others who say that the strain of those few days exhausted and broke him, forcing his retirement, or even that he had his face altered with plastic surgery and is still out there somewhere pursuing the truth about the assassination. According to the latter camp, the man running the flower shop was someone else again, who had undergone an operation of his own.

CTn the face of it, these theories seem utterly absurd, but my research revealed that they were fueled by rumors about a certain plastic surgeon who died ten years ago. He had originally done work for celebrities in Tokyo but had retreated to Sendai, supposedly due to suggestions that he was not properly licensed. The rumors stemmed from reports about something he said on his deathbed: apparently a photo of Ichitaro Sasaki had appeared on the TV—perhaps as part of a special on the tenth anniversary of Kaneda's death— and he is said to have murmured that he, too, had been involved in the incident. It was inferred from this that Sasaki had undergone plastic surgery, but a more likely explanation is that he was referring to work he had done on Rinka, the actress Aoyagi had rescued two years prior to the assassination.

Mamoru Kondo, a detective who worked on the investigation with Sasaki, also retired less than a year after the incident. According to an account in his diary, which was made public on the Web by his family after his death, Kondo had objected to a gag order and suppression of evidence concerning an illegal search that had been conducted on an associate of Aoyagi's, and he had clashed with his superiors in an attempt to ensure the safety of the man in question. For his trouble he had been forced out of his job. The authenticity of the diary has been questioned in many quarters, but one can't help wondering whether Kondo's intervention didn't save Aoyagi's friend from being permanently hushed up.

Finally, there was some discussion on the Internet about the fate of Detective Taro Matsumoto of the Miyagi Prefectural Police. It seems that he had been devoting his off-duty hours to a personal investigation of the Kaneda assassination, and that his interest in the affair had been sparked by a posting he had read on an Internet bulletin board during the incident that had been

TWENTY YERR5 LRTER

signed "Masaharu Aoyagi." Of course, any number of people claiming to be Aoyagi had popped up on the Net during those three days, but Matsumoto felt that a few of these messages could not be easily dismissed, and he pursued his investigation based on these online leads.

Whether due to his superior skills as an investigator or his superior imagination, Matsumoto had developed a pet theory that there had been another intended scapegoat for the crime, and that Aoyagi had only been pressed into service after the original candidate suddenly died of heart failure on the Sendai subway that morning. In other words, according to Matsumoto, the plot was so elaborate that it included several possible fall guys. Matsumoto died from his injuries in a taxicab accident ten years ago.

.At present, when so many voices that might have spoken about the incident have been stilled, we can only speculate as to the true facts and wonder what we might learn if Masaharu Aoyagi could come back to tell us what happened to him. 1 must confess that 1 paid a visit to his grave in preparation for writing this report, but needless to say, the dead do not give up their secrets.

Only one thing is certain: that no one now believes what so many of us did twenty years ago when the media stirred up such a frenzy and hounded .Masaharu Aoyagi as the murderer of Prime Minister Kaneda. But we will never know what Aoyagi thought and felt for those forty-eight hours of frantic flight.

S7

PART

FOUR

THE INCIDENT

Masaharu Aoyagi

At 11:00 A.M.; Masaharu Aoyagi found himself walking past a line of secondhand computer shops in the neighborhood to the east of Sendai Station. When he caught sight of a truck parked by the side of the road ahead, his expression relaxed into a smile.

"What are you grinning about?" His companion, Shingo Morita, was wearing an orange down jacket. He had been sensitive to the cold ever since their student days, and there was no doubt that the November wind had a bite to it. But if you brought out the down coat now, what would you wear in February when the cold really set in?

"1 used to see that guy when 1 was driving." As they approached, the man stacking boxes in the back looked up. Aoyagi glanced at his watch. "Right on time, as usual, Maezono," he said. "Some things never change."

"Been making this stop forever," Maezono nodded. "Same time, same place." His face was wrinkled, and Aoyagi knew he must be well into his fifties, but he looked ten years younger in his dark blue uniform—perhaps because he stood ramrod straight as he lifted the boxes. "No rest for the weary."

"Can't complain about that, can you?"

"Back when you were on TV all the time, 1 thought you'd take away all my customers," Maezono said, running his hand through his short, graying hair. His eyes were deep-set, like knots in a gnarled log. The boxes under the tarp on the back of his truck were neatly stacked. "But now I've got so much work, 1 even do evening deliveries." He sighed. "Have to hurry to catch the show 1 watch at nine."

"As regular with the TV as you are with the boxes!" Aoyagi laughed.

THE INCIDENT

"Guess you could say that/' Maezono grinned. "My run is out in the suburbs. I'll drop it off early and I should still make it home in time."

"Must-see TV," Aoyagi chuckled. "See you later," he added, sensing that Morita was getting impatient.

"You should try to be less conspicuous," Morita said as they walked away.

"Why? What do you mean?"

"I mean, you should be less conspicuous."

"Is this the voice of the forest speaking?" Aoyagi laughed.

"It is indeed. A peaceful, lakeside forest."

When they had first met at college more than ten years earlier, Shingo Morita had explained that the character in his name—"mori" for "woods"— meant that he had a special affinity for this type of scenery, and that from time to time he could hear it "speaking" to him. He'd repeated the claim often, and when his friends teased him, asking what the forest was telling him, he told them with a straight face that it revealed the future. "I know what's going to happen," he used to boast.

"You're psychic?" some girl would ask him at a party—for it was always in a crowd that he made this claim.

"Well, I suppose you could say that," Morita would answer, puffing out his chest a bit.

"So what did you want to talk about today?" said Aoyagi, changing the subject. Morita had called a week earlier to ask if they could have lunch, saying he had something important to discuss. "It's important for you.” It seemed an odd thing to say after all this time.

"Does it have to do with what happened on the train?" Aoyagi had asked. T wo months earlier, while riding inbound on the Senseki Line, a woman had accused him of groping her, though he had never laid a hand on her. Goinci-dentally, it was then that he had also run into Morita for the first time since graduation.

"It dcK-s," Mcjrita said.

Ar)yagi had all tlie time in the world to meet an okl triend, living as he was (Jii his unemployment check. Nevertheless, he couldn't imagine what Mrjrita might have to say.

"What's wrong with this?" he asked as Morita marched by another leslauianl.

()i

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part of a big chain. They hadn't agreed on a place to eat, hut maybe Morita liad something particular in mind.

"It's full," he said.

"How do you know without checking?"

"1 know."

"The voice of the forest?"

"You guessed it."

"Same old Morita," he murmured.

"People don't change."

"I suppose you're right," Aoyagi conceded. "That guy we ran into, Mae-zono, is exhibit A."

"How so?"

"Well, he's self-employed and his whole business is regular customers—pick up something at the same time and place every day and deliver it somewhere else at the same time and place. But he's famous for his schedule between jobs—every driver in the business knows where to find him: from 12:30 to 1:30, he's having lunch and then taking a nap under a pedestrian bridge near where 1 live; at 4:00, he's reading magazines at a bookstore out on the highway; at 6:00, he's having dinner, always at the same place. He's always on time, never varies his routine. We used to set our watches by his truck."

"The joys of the regular life?"

"Maezono says that getting through his day on schedule gives him a sense of accomplishment, like putting together a model exactly according to the instructions."

T hey had come to a fast-food place and Morita paused. "This okay?" he said. Aoyagi had no objection—fast food was about right in their case. They went in and ordered at the counter, then climbed to the second floor carrying their trays. The room was empty but they sat at the very back.

"Still giving these places the professional once-over?" Aoyagi asked.

"Not really," Morita laughed. "Not anymore." There was a hint of nostalgia in his voice.

"1 wonder if the Society for the Study of Adolescent Eating Habits is still in business?" Aoyagi said, giving the full name of the club they had founded during their undergraduate days here in the city.

THE INCIDENT

"The Friends of Fast Food?" Morita corrected. "I doubt it. Even in our day, it was only you, me and Higuchi, and Kazu." Morita used their nickname for their friend, Kazuo Ono, who was a year behind the other three in school.

"1 heard that Kazu went out recruiting after we graduated and rounded up a bunch of new members," Aoyagi said.

"But 1 don't think it lasted long after that. 1 guess there wasn't really anything very exciting about going around town keeping track of all the new menu items at fast-food places. 1 can see why no one kept it up."

"How can you say that? You were the driving force behind it."

"Youthful exuberance," Morita said, folding over a French fry and stuffing it in his mouth. Aoyagi recognized the old habit, and Morita seemed to realize what he'd just done. "1 guess the way we eat never changes either," he said. "What do you think man's greatest strengths are?" he asked suddenly.

Aoyagi grunted noncommittally and bit into his hamburger.

"Trust and habit," Morita said.

"Rust an abbi?" Aoyagi repeated, his mouth full now.

"You haven't changed either," his friend said, pointing at Aoyagi's lunch. He had eaten around the edges of the bun, leaving the center for last—just the wav he alwavs had.

y y

"This isn't much of place, though," said Aoyagi, as he folded the wrapper from his burger. "1 suppose you can't take off points for having an old guy working behind the counter, but he didn't even look up when he took our order. And that's weird, too," he added, |)ointing at the security camera on the ceiling above them. "It's not even aimed at anything."

"T he place gets a C or a D," Morita said, reviving their old rating system. "And the 'Sj^ecial of the Day'—C at best. Don't think I'm hurrying back for that."

Aoyagi studied his friend as they talked. He'd let his hair grow since they'd graduated, which suited him, but there were dark circles under his eyes. "You kiKJW," he said, "1 didn't think ycni were in Sendai."

"Sorry. 1 kitid ot lell out ol touch."

"When my New Year's cards started coming back, 1 Figured you'd moved. But 1 guess 1 never thought we'd lose track ol each other so soon."

"There was just a lot ot stulf going on." Morita stirred his drink with his

straw.

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"What kind of stuff?"

"You and Haruko breaking up, you saving that girl and getting famous, you ..."

"Tliat was all my stuff," Aoyagi interrupted. "Was it really my fault?"

"After that, I was busy working in Tokyo and it was hard to stay in touch. But you could have called me, especially when you and Haruko split up. You must have needed a shoulder to cry on."

"1 did call," Aoyagi broke in, "but your phone had been disconnected."

"CTh. 1 guess 1 had a lot going on then, too."

"Well, I really did call," Aoyagi said.

"And you really don't give up easily."

"You just didn't answer." Aoyagi laughed, worried things were getting too heavy. "Are you still working in Tokyo?"

"I've been at the Sendai branch since last year."

"I guess I never figured you for the business type." And he certainly didn't look the part, with his hair that long. On the other hand, his friend had always had a way with words that would have been useful in the business world.

"Turns out Tm not," said Morita. He bent another fry in half.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I always know how a deal's going to turn out."

"The voice of the forest?"

"Naturally. So I always know what the other guy is going to do, whether I can make a sale, whatever—I know everything ahead of time. It's a big advantage, but it kind of takes the fun out of it. You end up just going through the motions. Still, I always did everything exactly by the book. Know why?"

Aoyagi was about to say no, when the traditional answer to the familiar question popped into his head. "Because you're a pro," he laughed.

"That's right," nodded Morita. "A pro. I wonder how old Todoroki is, anyway. Still churning out fireworks, you think?" How many times when they'd worked at his factory had they heard Todoroki say he did this or that because he was "a pro"? "And do you suppose his son ever came back to work for him?"

"Who knows?" said Aoyagi, picturing Todoroki's bearlike face. "But tell me, Mr. Morita, does that voice from the forest really still speak to you?"

"It really does."

THE INCIDENT

'Then why haven't you ever considered a career in gainhling?"

He was quiet for a moment and Aoyagi thought he suddenly looked older, and a bit sad. "You don't believe in this power of mine," he said at last, "but it got you out of that scrape with the woman on the train."

Aoyagi groaned, remembering the incident two months earlier. "Now that you mention it, how did you end up there that day?"

"My powers," said Morita, sounding serious. "I just happened to be on that train, but in another car. T hen, one stop before Sendai Station, it hit me— someone 1 knew was in trouble. So 1 got off and looked around, and there you were—sort of hard to miss, actually, facing off with that half-crazed banshee. And somehow 1 just knew that she was trying to frame you as a groper."

"You even knew 1 hadn't done it?"

Morita nodded. "The powers, my friend. But why were you on that train?"

"Because of a weird phone call," said Aoyagi. The police had called his house that dav to sav that his driver's license had been found on the beach at Matsu-shima. He'd gone to check his wallet and found that it was, in fact, missing.

"How did it get to Matsushima?" Morita asked with a laugh.

"How should 1 know?" He had been genuinely puzzled since he hadn't been anwhere near the place in years. "But 1 decided I should go get it." The whole chain of events still seemed improbable.

"And the groping thing happened on the way back?"

"You mean the frame-up."

"Tm afraid you were guilty the moment the 'victim' grabbed your arm for a citizen's arrest. Try going to the police with her hand on your arm to prove your innocence. T hey would never let up till you confessed."

"1 see what you mean," said Aoyagi.

"It didn't matter that she was lying. An accusation is as good as a conviction these days. T hat's why 1 grabbed you and dragged you out of there."

Aoyagi remembered the sound of the woman's voice crying out on the train. He had ikj idea it had anything to do with him until he turned to look at her. A chill ran straight down his back when she grabbed his arm. "Keep your hands oil me!" she had screamed. 1 le didn't know what she Wiis tiilking about, but he could teel himsell blush and start shaking anyway.

"There's something a little too nice, too easygoing about you—nuikes |)eoj)le want to take advantage of you," said Morita.

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'"Was she trying to take advantage of me?" Aoyagi could still see the woman's thick makeup as she faced him on the platform. There was something of the hustler about her, but the anger in her eyes had seemed genuine. "Do you think maybe 1 did it?" he asked Morita.

"Well, did you?" his friend shot back, pointing a French fry at him.

"No. But in the years since we last met, I might have turned into a major creep. . . ."

"But that didn't happen," said Morita, without waiting for him to finish. "When we were in school, didn't you always say the one thing you couldn't stand were assholes who felt up women on trains? You were full of the milk of human kindness when it came to snotty teachers, sexist jerks, and those shitheads who forget to return adult movies to the video store—eveii that slasher who killed people behind the station didn't seem to bother you much. But you could never abide a regular old groper. Or did 1 get it wrong?"

"Well, 1 don't remember about the slasher." Aoyagi forced a smile. He also didn't quite buy the part about adult videos. "My dad couldn't stand guys who did that kind of thing. Maybe I got it from him." He frowned, remembering that his father had once attacked a man who had been caught groping a woman and nearly kicked him to death. "Or maybe I've changed in the last eight years."

"From a guy who can't stand gropers . . . into a groper yourself? I suppose anything's possible, especially with erratic types like you." Aoyagi couldn't tell whether he was serious or not. "Maybe the shock of breaking up with Haruko turned you against all women, and you started molesting them in your need for revenge."

"A bit too plausible for comfort," Aoyagi said.

"By the way," said Morita, changing the subject again, "when I was working in Tokyo I ran into Kazu on the subway. He's the one who told me you two had split up. Shocked the hell out of me."

"I was pretty shocked myself," said Aoyagi.

"She dumped you, I suppose."

"How did you know?"

"The forest. But I could have guessed aiiyway. And she's married now, with a kid," he added.

"The forest tell you that, too?" Aoyagi's eyes were open wide.

"No, 1 ran into her," Morita said. His tone was offhand. "Last year, just

THE INCIDENT

after I got back to Sendai, at a department store near the station. She was with her husband and their little girl. And the funny thing is, she's still Haruko Higuchi."

"What do you mean?"

"She married a guy named Higuchi."

"You're kidding."

"She saw me first," Morita continued. "She came up and introduced me to her husband. He said she talks about the old college days all the time. Seemed like a nice guy to me."

"I've never met him," said Aoyagi. "I didn't even know his name."

"Curious?" Morita asked.

".About what?"

"How you stack up against him."

"No, let's not go there," said Aoyagi.

"I'd call it a draw." His eyes narrowed. "He has qualities you don't, and you've got some he doesn't. He seemed a bit wide-eyed and clueless, maybe."

"The type who knows how to share a chocolate bar?"

"Chocolate bar? Yeah, maybe so. Actually, he reminded me a little of you. . . ."

"So, did you get me here today just to make fun of my love life?" Aoyagi stuck his lip out, pretending to pout. "It's been six years since Haruko and 1 broke up. It's ancient history."

"Well, then," Morita said, leaning forward, "how about that Rinka. Did you do it with her?" His tone was neutral but the intentness in his look made Aoyagi wince.

"Are you serious?"

"But you were her knight in shining armor, you came to her rescue. Didn't she owe you something? I'm sure ycni got friendly. So, did you do it?" This was the same old .Morita, getting all worked up at the mention of a woman and wanting to know everything in detail. In reality, though, he had been scjmething of a late bloomer himself; shy as anything when left alone with a girl, usually not even getting around to holding hands by the end of a dale.

"Of course we did it. hots," said Aoyagi, grinning and looking down at his lap. Morita let out a whooj).

"Seriously?! What's it like, with a showbiz lype?"

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"Can't you tell by looking at her? We went at it all night, and she kept screaming 'I'm dying, I'm dying!"'

Morita's eyes grew wide. "1 never thought you had it in you!"

But then Aoyagi hurst out laughing. "It was a computer game," he sputtered. "A martial arts game, and when her guy was on his last legs, she'd scream 'I'm dying!"'

Morita looked stricken. "You are so fucking boring," he muttered.

"Nothing happened. She was always busy with TV shows and interviews, but she finally asked me over for dinner to thank me. We played computer games a few times."

"You were always too serious," Morita said.

"Some things never change. I was a serious driver, too."

"But you quit?"

"I didn't want to make trouble for the company."

"Seems to me you were their best advertisement."

"There was some trouble," Aoyagi said, scratching the side of his head.

Masaharu Aoyagi

It had started about six months ago. He had been out in his truck making his rounds as usual when his cell phone rang. First it vibrated, then the light came on, and finally the tone—it always felt like having a small animal in his pocket. He thought it might be from one of the houses where he'd just left a "delivery attempted" notice.

Easing down a narrow, one-way street, he turned left at the intersection and pulled over. Then he took out the phone and answered it.

"Is this Aoyagi?" a man's voice said.

"Yes, who is it?" The sudden intrusion of an unfamiliar voice reminded him how it had felt when the whole world—or at least the TV audience—seemed to be watching him: the sick stomach, a tightness in his cheeks. He had truly hated all the attention, his role as "man of the hour." And to make matters worse, the whole thing had happened just as the company was putting

THE INCIDENT

all its management systems online, including information about the drivers' routes and work schedules, and even their cell phone numbers. Access had supposedly been limited to employees and the drivers who contracted with the company, but somehow the system had been hacked and Aoyagi's profile became public knowledge.

Occasionally someone would wait for him along his route or, more often, call his cell phone. They all had something to tell him—ranging from friendly messages of support to accusations that he was a "cocky bastard." Either way, he found dealing with them exhausting, so he was relieved when the TV shows had gradually begun to move on from his story, and the calls had slowed and stopped. It worried him to think that this might be another one after all this time.

"Who is it?" Aoyagi asked again.

The man asked a question instead of answering. "How long are you going to keep working?"

"Until nine or ten o'clock, if I've got something time-sensitive," Aoyagi said without thinking. There was a cold laugh at the other end of the line.

"No," the voice said. "1 meant, when are you going to quit your job?"

"Quit?"

"If you don't quit soon. I'll be very unhappy. And when I get unhappy, 1 can make lots of trouble." Then the phone went dead. Stunned, Aoyagi had sat staring at the blank display.

"What the fuck? What kind of threat was that?" Morita stabbed yet another V-shaped fry at him as he spoke.

"At first I thought it was just a crank call," said Aoyagi.

"It wasn't?"

"T hey kept coming. He called to threaten me, then he called the company to tell them to fire me. Still, 1 managed to ignore it until tilings started happening with my deliveries."

"What things?"

"Well, tor one, they suddenly increased, a lot."

"Doesn't sound like a problem—business booming."

Aoyagi llattened the little box that had held his I'rench hies. "An unbelievable number ot jiackages starting coming to aildresses on my route, all

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with similar handwriting and all from somewhere in Tokyo. But the weird thing was that my name was written in as sender on every one of them."

"Could have been someone else with the same name," Morita suggested, but he was beginning to frown. "It's possible. But what was in them?"

"Nothing much—candy, sake—but the people getting them had no idea where they were coming from, and it seemed creepy having my name on them. The company didn't know what to do."

"I see what you mean. It's a bit too elaborate—and expensive—to write off as a prank."

"And a bit too scary."

Morita scratched his head. "Curiouser and curiouser. But it still wasn't worth quitting over."

"The guy on the phone said that worse things would happen if I didn't quit. Of course, the company reported everything to the police."

"So, again, you didn't have to quit."

"No, I suppose not," Aoyagi admitted. Despite the threats, no one had asked him to go, there had been no need to give in.

"So?"

"To be honest, I think I'd been looking for the chance to get out."

"Something of a pattern with you, it seems," said Morita.

Aoyagi realized how much he enjoyed sitting here after all these years, listening to his old friend's categorical, if slightly ill-informed, opinions.

"There was a guy on my route named Inai," he said.

"Sounds like the first line of a limerick."

"Maybe," said Aoyagi. "Anyway, this Inai was never ever at home. He was constantly ordering stuff by mail, but he was never there when I showed up to deliver it. The crack in his door was always stuffed with delivery notices."

"So?"

"So one day this Inai really did disappear. He left a note on the door saying that his packages should be left with the building manager and that he'd be back 'at some point.' It seemed pretty odd."

"'At some point'? What was that supposed to mean?"

"1 realized that most of the stuff I'd delivered there was from sporting goods stores or travel agencies. One of the other drivers told me later that he was probably getting ready to go off on some kind of adventure."

THE INCIDENT

Morita grinned. ''Adventure? What was he, a cub scout?"

"The thing is, ever since Inai took off for parts unknown, Tve been thinking I should do the same," said Aoyagi.

"You always were pretty suggestible," Morita laughed. "Maybe you just needed something more exciting than driving a delivery truck."

"Maybe. Tve certainly felt as though Tve been drifting, not qualified for anything."

"What, in particular?"

"I don't know. Something, anything." His tone grew more insistent as if to cover his embarrassment. "An\wvay, 1 told the boss 1 didn't want them harassed on my account and 1 quit."

"The asshole who was calling you was probably one of Rinka's fans," said Morita.

"Td have thought so, too, if it hadn't been so long since the whole thing happened." There had been some contact with people who were clearly obsessed with her soon afterwards, but most of them had just wanted to thank him for helping "their Rinka." He'd been almost favorably impressed by this brush with the world of fandom.

"Then maybe it had something to do with the groping thing," said Morita. "You're a good-looking guy, serious, responsible. Then you became a hero overnight. Who wouldn't be happy to see you arrested for groping some woman on the train? What's more fun than watching the golden boy screw up?"

l or a moment, this scenario almost made sense. Maybe the mystery of the lost license in Matsushima was somehow just another piece of the puzzle. "And is this the forest talking again?"

"No, this is me." Morita took a deej) breath and glanced at the clock on the wall. "Ready to go?" he said.

"Where to?" Aoyagi asked, hoping they might finally be getting to the reason .Morita had wanted to see him.

"Not the west side ol the station. T here was a huge crowd, rocjds blocked off."

"for Kaneda's j)arade," said Aoyagi.

"Did you want to go have a look?"

"No, not really." He'd been imj)ressed by what he'd seen ol Ktinecki on TV, but iKJt enough t(j want to brave the crowd. He hadn't even remembererl to v(jte on election tlay. "Tm just glad I don't drive anymore. It's a pain when

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they start blocking off streets, and the whole city goes to hell if you can't use Higashi Nibancho."

"Unfortunately, that's exactly where we're going."

"Why?"

"That's where my car's parked. We can talk when we get there." Mystified, Aoyagi followed him down the stairs and out into the street. From behind, he could see that his friend was beginning to go gray.

h

Masaharu Aoyagi

Several months earlier, Masaharu Aoyagi had stopped his truck and glanced over at the list on the passenger seat. He had all the deliveries memorized, but it was always worth double-checking. The guy who had shown him the ropes when he'd first started driving had always said that you were more likely to make a mistake when you were quite sure you wouldn't. His instructor, Iwasaki, wore his hair slicked straight back, and though he was only a year or so older than Aoyagi, he'd been married with a kid by the time he was twenty and was building a house now. Still, he had a teenager's passion for rock-and-roll, and he was always saying how he was going to "rock the world." He really meant it. He also liked to point out that the "iwa" in his name meant "rock" in English. "It's Destiny," he insisted.

Once the training period was over and Aoyagi got his own route, he didn't see much of Rock Iwasaki. But he did run into him from time to time when the drivers went out drinking together. Iwasaki would invariably bring his guitar along, even for karaoke, and start in on a Beatles riff without being asked. It had always made Aoyagi happy to see someone enjoy himself so much.

Iwasaki used the word "rock" in response to just about any situation he encountered, good or bad. When he was given a particularly dumb assignment or an unpopular route, he'd mutter "This does not rock"; but if something good happened—a raise for the drivers, for example—you'd hear him practically shout "That rocks!"

But Rock Iwasaki had also taught him a lot of things during the training

THE INCIDENT

period that had stuck with him. Some of them were technical aspects of the job—the right way to carry boxes or use a hand truck—but others had more to do with attitude. "You've always got to show up at the door with a smile on your face," he used to say. "And never let on that a box is too heavy or the weather's too hot. That's why they call it the service sector!" Still other lessons were more like warnings: "Driving your truck when you're dead tired is like playing with a loaded gun. Stay alert, stay alive!" And once Rock had shown him the butterfly knife he kept in his glove compartment—"You never know when one of these will come in handy." The blade didn't look as if it was meant for peeling apples.

Aoyagi had also seen him stop his truck out of the blue, hop out the door, and tell a guy in a suit walking along the street to watch what he did with his cigarette. "You flick that around," he said, leaning in on the man for emphasis, "and it's going to end up in some kid's eye." He'd said later that his daughter had nearly lost an eye from somebody's discarded cigarette.

On more than one occasion, Iwasaki had spoken of the dangers of hip-hop music. "It just doesn't rock," he insisted. Aoyagi had found this particular prejudice a bit odd, but he recalled that Morita had once said much the same thing. Aoyagi had just confessed that he had started to like hip-hop. "How can you listen to that crap!" Morita had said. At the time, it had struck him as strangely conservative, but today he felt nostalgia even for his old friend's idiosvncrasies.

Aoyagi got out of the truck and retrieved a small box from the back. He checked the shipping label—Hasama House, Apt. d()2, 2-8-21 Higashi Kamisugi, Aoba Ward, Sendai—and tucked the box under his arm. "1 bet Inai's not in again today," he murmured, as if humming to himself.

A man in a yellow uniform was just coming out the door. "How's it going?" he said as he sj)otted Aoyagi. He worked for another delivery company, but his route must have been similar to Aoyagi's since they kept bumi)-ing into each other. The guy was in his late forties, with a tlaughter about to take the higti school entrance exams, Aoyagi remembered.

"N(jt bad," he said.

"1 leaded tor Inai's?"

"N(jt in again, 1 supj)ose."

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'Tor quite a while, according to the note."

"What note?"

"The one on his door. It says to leave his deliveries with the manager."

"So he's off on a trip?"

"Better yet, an 'adventure,' according to the note."

"So Inai's an adventurer?" said Aoyagi, as the other driver headed back to his truck. He went in and took the elevator to the third floor to check the note. It sounded ridiculous, and yet something about reading it made him feel good. When he went to drop off the package, the building manager scowled at him through his beard.

"I'll take it," he said, "but I don't know what the fuck to do with this stuff, or when this guy's coming back."

"He didn't say?" asked Aoyagi.

"He paid a year's rent in advance, so it may be a while."

With a murmur of surprise, Aoyagi put the box down in front of the man.

"You know the fire extinguisher outside Inai's door?" the manager asked abruptly. He still sounded grumpy.

"I think so," Aoyagi replied, remembering that he'd seen one just a moment ago.

"Well, he's got a spare key taped to the bottom of it. Go put this in his apartment." He picked up the box Aoyagi had just deposited on his desk.

"He won't mind?"

"Who gives a shit? And do me a favor, take this with you," he added, handing him the package the other driver had just left. It was unusually light. "It's darts," he said, pointing at the shipping label. "Says so right here."

"You mean, like the game?" Aoyagi asked.

"Do you know, like, some other kind?" Aoyagi didn't mind the sarcasm, but winced when the manager threw an imaginary dart somewhere near his head: "You'd think he could have waited until this shit had arrived."

"Maybe he decided to go in a hurry. By the way"—the question had been on his mind since the other driver had mentioned Inai's trip—"did you see him when he left?"

"On his way out the door? Yeah, I saw him. He was carrying this huge backpack."

"How did he look?" At this, the manager finally eased up a bit.

THE INCIDENT

"You know, now that you mention it, he looked like a kid heading off on a field trip, all excited, shining eyes. Like a big kid."

Aoyagi took the boxes up to Inai's apartment. When he got back to his truck and was starting the engine, he found himself wondering whether things might have been different if he'd been more like Inai, if he'd let himself set out on some adventure. Maybe if he had, she might not have left him.

h

Masaharu Aoyagi

Six years earlier, Aoyagi had finished his route and gone to Haruko Higuchi's apartment instead of going home. He was planning to stay over, since the two of them had a date to see the first showing of a new movie the next day. When he opened the door, she stuck her head out of the kitchen to greet him. He had been coming here since their student days and felt almost as much at home in her apartment as he did in his own. He even had his own space in the shoe cupboard in the front hall.

"1 ordered pizza," Haruko said as she came and sat down on the rug.

She'd had problems at work, she told him at some length. "Just because 1 came up with the idea, my boss refuses to support it," she explained.

"I'm sure it's not because it was your idea."

"T he costs would be practically nothing, so why does he insist it show a profit immediately?"

"You're right, that doesn't seem fair," he agreed. The T V was on low; everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves as usual.

"I'll run the bath," Haruko said eventually, getting u|). As she ditl so, Aoyagi noticed a bar (jf chocolate on the little table next to them.

".Mind if 1 have some?"

"HcTj) yourself," Haruko called back from the bathroom. Aoytigi tore off the j)aj)er and carefully broke the foil-wra|)j)ed bar in hall. "T hey were giving tfiem out at the office," sfie said as she came back into the room.

Aoyagi looked down at the two jiietes of chocolate. He luid tried to iiuike tfie halves even, but the break was jagged. He compared Hr* pii'ces lor a

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moment and then lield out the one in his left hand to Haruko. Instead of taking it; however, she stopped and her face darkened as she stared down at it.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

She took a few short breaths. "I've been thinking," she said, her tone bright and a bit manic, "that maybe we should break up."

Aoyagi winced. "Here," he said, as if he hadn't heard, holding out the chocolate again.

"I've been thinking about it for a while."

"What are you talking about?"

"I saw you just now. After you broke the bar, you checked to see which half was bigger and you gave that one to me."

"I guess," he said, nodding. There was no reason to deny it.

"I've always liked that about you, how careful you are, and thoughtful." From her tone it was somehow clear she didn't think she shared these qualities herself. She took the piece of chocolate from him and quickly broke it again. The resulting halves were even more jagged and unequal, crumbs everywhere. "Take it," she said, holding out half to him. He looked up at her. "Meaning, this is more me. Meaning, Tm fine with a little less careful—a lot less, in fact. I'm not going to get mad if my half is a bit smaller. We've been together a long time, ever since graduation. You don't have to handle me with kid gloves. Don't you see?"

"Just because we're sleeping together doesn't mean we can't be nice to each other," Aoyagi protested.

"That's not what I mean!" Exasperation was creeping into her voice.

"All this over half a bar of chocolate?"

"Over your insisting on me always getting the bigger half, over your even noticing there is a bigger half."

"And that hurts your feelings how?"

"I know it doesn't make sense," she said, frowning now.

"This isn't about the chocolate, is it?"

"You know it isn't. Do you remember something you said not long ago about your job, now that you're used to the route? You said that one day is starting to blend into the next, that you can't tell the difference between yesterday and tomorrow anymore."

"I was tired, I might have felt that way at the time."

THE INCIDENT

"But it's the same with us. We're too used to each other. We've been together too long, and we're too comfortable. We're too willing to settle for things the way they are."

"Now hold on," Aoyagi tried to interrupt.

"It's as though we're here in the same room but not really together anymore.”

"Now wait," Aoyagi said, waving his piece of chocolate at her. "Where are you coming up with all this? You're talking, but you're not making any sense."

"We're like an old married couple—and we're not even married yet." Haruko let out a little laugh. "It's not fun anymore."

.Aoyagi suddenly thought of the trip they had made to Yokohama just last month. They'd spent a lot of time searching for a restaurant the guidebook had recommended, but when they hnally got there, they were so badly treated they were tempted to walk out. In the end, though, they decided to take their revenge by ordering every item on the menu, lingering endlessly over each course, and monopolizing the table as long as they possibly could. They knew it was a pointless protest, but they had laughed about it later. Had the fun already stopped by then? Exactly when had it stopped?

"You know I've been playing that game again," she said, glancing over at the aging computer in the corner of the room. She had hauled it out of the closet not long ago and taken to playing a game she had loved in college.