Birthday (7 page)

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

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

Sound: Hiroshi Toyama.

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

Next came the names of the cast.

The Girl in Black: Aiko Hazuki.

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

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

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

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

Ml—Theme song.

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

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

many footsteps, the noise of a crowd.

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

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

Play button—on.

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

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

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

Without meaning to, Toyama spoke her name.

March 1966

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Sada. It's you."

Sadako Yamamura stood in the doorway blankly.

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

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

"I'm afraid."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toyama stopped it and rewound it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Most playhouses have 'em."

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

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

"No, there's another one."

"Another what?"

"Altar."

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

But that was the only one he knew of.

"Where?"

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

There couldn't be an altar here.

He started to get up.

She giggled. "Startled?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The baby's coming.

In a flash, Toyama understood.

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

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

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

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

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