Mistress koharu, p.8
Mistress Koharu, page 8
Kicking things off, the editor said that he wanted to name this gathering the “Paranormal Activity Research Committee” and begin convening regularly, once every two months. He intended to take what he learned from their discussions and apply it to the pages of the magazine. The assistant editor added that today’s plan was to discuss occult activities that had been on TV, and she explained that they would be recording their entire conversation. Then the discussion began.
Aside from the six members of the group sitting around the table, two additional men joined as “observers,” and Chikako prepared an additional small table for them.
The first man to speak was an older accountant who had a firm in Suginami Ward. He began by mentioning his hobby of diving and his interest in aquatic life, then asked if any of them had happened to have heard of the megalodon before, before launching into an explanation of the giant shark species and the rumors that it still exists.
A species of shark said to have lived approximately 1.5 million years ago, megalodons were about ten to fifteen meters long. A monster shark close in size to a whale.
Throughout the twentieth century, theories that various cryptids were actually surviving megalodons circulated from time to time, such as in 1918, when something resembling a giant shark was spotted in Australia, and again in 1954, when a tooth ten centimeters long was found piercing the hull of a ship. However, definitive evidence that the species still roamed the oceans was yet to be discovered.
“I used to watch Animal Planet on satellite TV quite frequently, and in November of 2013 they aired a program called Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives. I’m not really a fan of documentaries, but I thought this one was deeply fascinating, not the kind you see every day …”
At the beginning of this documentary ran a sensational warning bound to raise the hopes of any viewers: “The following program contains graphic images. Viewer discretion is advised.” The story begins with footage recorded on April 5, 2013, of the sinking of a charter ship.
The ship was lost in the deeps off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, and not a single body of those who had chartered the fishing boat was found. In the footage recovered from the accident, one of the female passengers can be heard screaming, “Oh my God! A shark!”
Marine biologist Colin Drake was invited to survey the area in hopes of finding the truth behind this tragedy, and the Discovery Channel film crew were allowed exclusive access to film his expedition.
Ten days after the incident, on April 15, a shark lookout watching the sea with binoculars witnessed movement on the surface of the water off the cape, seemingly waves produced by the thrashing of a whale. She photographed and recorded the scene with her telephoto lens, and later, when she checked the video, she noticed behind the thrashing whale a dorsal fin of approximately 1.8 meters in height breeching the water.
In the show, Drake discovers a black and white photograph of a very similar dorsal fin, said to be taken seventy years earlier by a crewman on a German U-boat as it was leaving the Cape of Good Hope, and he compares these two images to videos and photographs of a whale carcass in Hawaii taken January 21, 2009. He raises the question of whether a megalodon could have been the culprit in all these incidents.
One after the other come clips that had to have been real, such as footage captured on November 20, 2012, by the Brazilian Coast Guard, when, attempting a rescue by helicopter on stormy seas, the shadow of a fish more than eighteen meters in length appears in the water beneath them. Then, the documentary reaches its climax with Drake, attempting to capture this elusive monster, boarding a research vessel and heading out to where the charter ship had met its end.
“However, after The Monster Shark Lives aired in America, doubts were raised about whether it was or was not a documentary, and ultimately it was revealed to be fiction. Drake and all the rest were actually actors, but since it was done so skillfully and put together like a documentary, even I bought it completely.
“The public’s faith in Animal Planet was shaken, and people started doubting everything. They’d see polar bear families suffering from global warming and wonder if it wasn’t fake news.”
The middle-aged man sitting next to the accountant, who had introduced himself as a high school teacher, then said, “I once watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel about levitation, and I’m still not sure if I should trust it.”
The Supernaturalist was an adventure documentary which followed Dan White, an American with a twenty-year career as a magician, to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, where he went to investigate rumors of monks with supernatural powers who live in the Himalayan Mountains.
Led by a shaman named Hizbaba, they head east by plane to an “unnamed mountain village.” From there they travel by foot into unexplored regions of the mountains, but White is abandoned by Hizbaba after the shaman receives a message in his dreams telling him to turn back. White is left with no choice but to travel alone to the “orange monastery” he is told of by a sadhu, a Hindu holy man.
Upon finally arriving at the monastery, White tells an old monk that he heard the monk could levitate, and the monk initially refuses to cooperate, saying, “Your magic is fantastic, but we are not the same. This is Buddhist meditation.” Impressed by White’s stubborn passion, however, the monk eventually agrees. “I will try one time. I need you to move back. If you stay close to me then my energy doesn’t work.”
The monk sits in a semicircle of candles, the wall behind him checkered with prayer flags, and begins chanting a mantra.
Being a magician, White questions the monk’s request for them to step away, later commenting that there must have been something behind him he didn’t want them to see, but still he backs up four or five meters away from the monk. He then witnesses the monk rise from the ground and levitate at a height of about two to three centimeters.
“There’s no wires. I don’t see anything. Isn’t that crazy,” he said, and then, turning to the cameraman who was filming the monk, “Can you believe this?” It seemed he still could not dismiss the possibility that this was all a trick.
After completing his performance, the monk says to White, “And remember this. Keep your mind open and always continue to learn.”
His eyes staring off somewhere in the distance, the high school teacher said, “I wonder if his levitation looked more real than that famous photo of Asahara Shoko’s. The monk looked a bit like the Dalai Lama.”
A department manager of a life insurance company, who up until that point had simply been nodding along, listening, then spoke up. “It folded quite some time ago, but do you all remember the magazine Sharaku?” He looked around the group.
“It was published by Shogakukan, and I’m pretty sure Shinoyama Kishin supervised editing. They ran color photos there of levitation, maybe in the mid-eighties? They hired expert trick photographers and had them investigate everything thoroughly. I remember there was a caption from the editor, a comment saying that this is no scam, they’re really floating. There was a bearded man in lotus position, pretty high up, at least a meter off the ground, floating there in that picture.”
And then, one of the observers, a skinny older man, covered his mouth with his hand and began speaking.
“That must have been Naruse Masaharu. I’ve still got a copy of his book, Levitation. It had quite a reputation at the time. ‘He’s not jumping, humans have finally overcome gravity,’ they all said. There were eight frames of photos showing the process of his levitating, and I think they even ran in Shukan Bunshun. After Asahara’s cult’s Tokyo subway sarin attack, the media couldn’t cover these kinds of topics anymore, but Naruse’s still running a yoga studio in Gotanda.”
By now, the atmosphere had grown more relaxed, and a man who said he had worked as a piano tuner at the Kawai instrument production facility for thirty years shared his story of visiting Café Anderson in the small town of Kawatana-cho in Higashisonogi-gun, Nagasaki Prefecture. This shop, known for its “Four-Dimensional Parlor,” got its popularity from the owner who performs feats of psychic ability, and because the place is such a hot spot and can seat only thirty people, reservations need to be made at least two months in advance.
The piano tuner had seen the owner on TV startling customers by guessing their birthdays, so he made a reservation and took his wife and kids. The man explained that he was also a magic researcher, and after going into great detail about what kinds of tricks the owner had arranged around the restaurant, he said, “You can watch the psychic performance for free—the shop doesn’t charge for anything but what you order off the menu, so it feels like a real good deal. And the beef curry was only 788 yen anyway. When customers go home, they want some sort of memorabilia from the place. That’s probably where he makes his money. A signed spoon bent with his telekinesis costs three hundred yen. And based on what I saw, each person bought three on average.”
Since there were no other customers, Chikako listened in and enjoyed these otherworldly conversations. She began to take notice of one of the observers, a young man who had not spoken and simply sat there, looking up at the others when they spoke and drinking his shochu with water.
He had showed up with a heavy-looking camera bag hanging from his right shoulder and a tripod in his left hand, and though he was surely not even 170 centimeters tall, he must have weighed over one hundred kilos. Chikako worried that her folding chair would meet its end in agony, crushed under his weight.
Giving a slight bow to the assistant editor when he arrived, he spent the rest of the event in complete silence, then after the meeting was over, he moved to one of the circular counter seats and began drinking bourbon on the rocks.
When Chikako tried speaking to him, he initially seemed shy, but she soon discovered that once he got drunk, he suddenly became arrogant and naively talked about the profits of his family business with stupid directness, giving concrete numbers.
He introduced himself as Kondo Tatsuya. He was thirty-one, single, and the heir to a Chinese restaurant chain that had its original store in front of Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station on the Hanzomon Line. Despite graduating from a photography school, he hadn’t gone into the industry. Instead, he worked at his father’s shop and was a “toritetsu,” one of those train geeks always taking photos in and around train stations. He bragged that he owned every issue of Atlantis from the time its publication had begun.
Thereafter, he began coming to see Chikako every Wednesday, the day of the week his family restaurant was closed, and he intended to join the next Paranormal Activity Research Committee meeting in June as well.
There were at least four or five other men who visited the bar just to see Chikako, but no matter how many times Tatsuya visited, he never once tried to seduce her. He had a habit of staring up at her face or neck whenever Chikako was not paying attention to him. She was used to those sorts of stares from her time training as a bartender in Ueno-Hirokoji, but occasionally she felt the forcefulness and persistence of his gaze to be threatening.
What was more, his eyes were a bit too far apart and the outer corners sloped downwards, which made her associate his gaze with that of an amphibian or reptile, both of which she hated. Occasionally he would send a small shiver down her spine.
2.
Akira wanted to show Koharu the sea.
They would go by his trusty Land Cruiser, and he figured when he had to step away from the car, he could hide her in a sleeping bag, so he purchased one with a center zip at a camping goods store called Kandahar in Ogawamachi. Since the zipper in the middle went all the way down to the bottom of the bag and could be opened in either direction, it would be easy to take her in and out of the bag. It was perfect for hiding her full body.
One Sunday in June, Akira woke up early and went out to the balcony with the front of his pajama shirt open. The early summer sun had just come up and was beginning to shine from beyond the roof of the Leopalace across the park. After stretching as he squinted into the sun, he put on some coffee, ate a breakfast of a single piece of toast and yogurt, returned to his bedroom, and began preparing Koharu.
This would be her first outing. He dressed her in the French tricolor—a red cache-coeur blouse of a cotton-linen blend over a white, sleeveless cotton shirt, with white suede wide-leg pants, and a bright blue raincoat. He fastened a simple platinum choker around her neck and a platinum bracelet on her left wrist. On her feet, he put white lace-up Nike Air Zoom Pegasus sneakers.
And as though it was made just for her, Koharu fit perfectly in the sleeping bag. Akira pulled up the zipper over her head, picked her up like he was lifting a surfboard, and carried her through the hallway, down the elevator, and through the building’s entrance; he managed to get her all the way to the car without meeting anyone. He sat her down in the rear left car seat, unzipped the sleeping bag down to her waist, and placed round sunglasses on her. If he needed to shield her from view, he would just have to close the zipper.
At the Kandabashi Interchange, he entered the Inner Circular Loop Expressway, and after passing through Shiodome, merged onto Expressway Route 1 Haneda Line at Hamazakibashi Junction. Morning light still drifted over the Tokyo Bay, flowing as smoothly as the traffic.
“Look. That suspension bridge, that’s Rainbow Bridge,” he said to Koharu, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.
The car ran parallel to the monorail heading to Haneda, and then, at Oi Junction, Akira merged onto the Bayshore Route. They passed through the Haneda Airport North Tunnel, the South Tunnel, the Tamagawa Tunnel, and the Kawasaki Fairway Tunnel, before speeding across the manmade islands of the Keihin Refinery, Higashi Ogishima, and central Ogishima at one hundred kilometers per hour.
White smoke rose from the smokestacks of the thermal power plants and the distillery tower at the oil terminal. The dark mountains of the materials yard of JFE Steel closed in on them, and on both sides of the road, multilayered chains of belt conveyers connected the blast furnaces with the steel rolling, sintering, and pressing factories.
“It’s like a giant fortress, isn’t it? We’ve still got to cross Tsurumi Tsubasa Bridge and Yokohama Bay Bridge. There, at the edge of the container yard are those tall skinny gantry cranes, right? People call them giraffes.”
Koharu whispered, “Giraffes.”
Once they started on Yokohama-Yokosuka Road at the Namiki Interchange, all that was left was to head south down the spine of the Miura Peninsula.
About an hour and a half after leaving Nishi-Kanda, Akira’s Toyota Land Cruiser arrived at the Uraga Interchange. They exited the highway, and Akira took them all the way to Cape Tomyozaki in search of a spot where they could look out over the Uraga Channel. However, all the good parking spots were claimed by the marina, and not only were the parking lots full, they were all members only. After travelling further up the cape, they found an abandoned lot where they could see out over everything. There was a sign reading city marina verasis parking lot 2 (free), and it was quiet, not a person in sight.
Akira drove to the edge of the lot, parked facing the ocean, and rolled the backseat windows all the way down. The pleasant breeze played with Koharu’s hair, and she blinked two or three times.
Placing his hands on the fence, Akira looked out over the Uraga Channel. His gaze took in the enormity of a passenger ship weaving among the other boats. Leisurely, it departed the Tokyo Bay and headed out to sea. A cabin cruiser then appeared from its shadow and approached the marina. The body of the boat was off white, her hull was deep blue, and on her side was written viking 48 convertible. Before docking at the berth in the marina, she turned 180 degrees, and when she showed her back to Akira, he could make out her name. Anastasia.
Two men appeared on the deck. The short and stout one picked up the moorings, and the other, average in height and skinny, held his smartphone to his ear. Someone from the marina staff jumped onboard and shook both their hands.
Akira closed the windows and set off towards Yokosuka. In about fifteen minutes they arrived at Yokosuka Harbor Shioiri Pier; Akira closed the zipper of the sleeping bag and laid Koharu down on the back seat. He entered the boat terminal and bought a 1 p.m. ticket for the “Cruise of YOKOSUKA Naval Port.”
It was Sunday so virtually all of the boat tours were full. This cruise offered a deck-top view of the various battleships docked at the American Yokosuka Base and the Maritime Self-Defense Force base.
As they passed by the escort ships Murasame and Ikazuchi, which Akira was told had just returned from a mop-up operation involving pirates in the Somalian seas, the naval men on the decks stopped their work to wave at the passengers on the tour. The guide pointed front starboard and told them they could see Berth 12, serving the US Navy. It was 410 meters long, the longest of any military berth, able to fit an aircraft carrier. Nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was expected to dock there in early October.
The tour boat weaved between sportsboats, aegis cruisers, and submarines for forty-five minutes before completing its journey by returning to Shioiri Pier.
After disembarking, Akira headed to the main drag, Dobuita-dori, and at a restaurant called Tsunami ordered their famous 227-gram Navy Burger with a drink and fries, which he took back to his car.
“Sorry for keeping you,” he called out to Koharu, wrapped in her sleeping bag, before lifting her up, unzipping her, and leaning her against the right rear window. He started the car, headed east down Kaigan-dori, and pulled into the parking lot of Maborikaigan Park. Right before their eyes was a white sand beach and the sea, illuminated by the full force of the afternoon sun.
