He was at his desk, debugging, when someone called him from behind.
‘Hey, Masaharu. Check this out.’
It was a grad student named Minobe. He was sitting in front of a personal computer from Hewlett-Packard, his eyes focused on the display.
Masaharu came over and stood behind him, looking at the monochromatic image. On it were three square shapes above a longer, rectangular shape.
He had seen this before. It was the game they called Submarine. The goal was to sink your opponent’s subs as quickly as you could. You played by trying to guess your opponent’s location from coordinate data on three axes. If you took too long with your attack, your enemy might suss out your position first and sink you with a torpedo.
The game was something that the students and grad students in Lab No 6 had put together during their free time. All work was shared, from flow-charting the program to typing it in – an underground project for the whole laboratory that some of the students took more seriously than they took their own thesis work.
‘What about it? It’s Submarine,’ Masaharu said.
‘Is it? Take a closer look.’
‘Huh?’
‘See the pattern they’re using to show the coordinates? It’s different. Same with the shape of the submarine itself.’
Masaharu squinted at the screen, looking at the parts Minobe pointed out. ‘Hey, you’re right. Did one of the guys change the program?’
‘Nope. None of us, at least.’
Minobe pressed the button on the tape player next to his computer and took out the tape. He showed it to Masaharu. The tape had a printed label that read Marine Crash.
‘What’s that?’
‘Nagata over in Number Three loaned it to me.’
‘Where’d he get it?’
‘Take a look.’ Minobe produced a train pass out of his jeans pocket. He pulled a folded piece of paper out of the pass holder. It looked like something torn out of a magazine. Minobe spread it out on the table.
SELLERS OF ALL VARIETY OF GAMES FOR PERSONAL COMPUTERS
Below was a list of titles, all games, each followed by a simple explanation and a price. There were about thirty games in all. The cheapest were around one thousand yen, and the most expensive a little over five thousand.
Marine Crash was in the middle of the list, printed in a bold font with a comment next to it that read ‘* * * * Fascinating’. Three of the other titles were bold, but this was the only one with four stars. Apparently, Marine Crash was the star of the line-up, all sold by a company called Unlimited Designs. Masaharu had never heard of it.
‘So, what, they’re selling these by mail order?’
‘Yeah. I’ve seen them around. Never paid it much attention, but it sounds like Nagata’s known about it for a while. One of his friends actually ordered this Marine Crash, so he borrowed their copy and checked it out. Guess what? The game’s exactly the same.’
Masaharu shook his head. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘Submarine,’ Minobe said, leaning back in his chair with a squeak of metal, ‘is our original game. Well, OK, maybe not entirely original, since we based it on that MIT game, but the implementation was entirely ours. What do you think the chances are that someone else could have had the exact same idea, and make it in practically the same way?’
‘Not high. What does it mean?’
‘Someone in our group leaked Submarine to this Unlimited Designs place.’
‘No way.’
‘You got a better explanation? We’re the only ones with the program, and everyone’s real careful about lending it out.’
Masaharu fell silent. Minobe was right. The evidence that someone was selling a rip-off of their game was right in front of him.
‘Maybe we should hold a meeting,’ Masaharu said.
‘Good idea. How about after lunch? We get everybody’s heads together, we might figure something out. Assuming the person responsible doesn’t lie outright.’ Minobe frowned and pushed up his glasses with the tip of his finger.
‘I’m just having trouble imagining any of the guys selling out like that.’
‘You can trust them if you want, Masaharu, but one thing’s for certain: there is a traitor in our midst.’
‘I don’t know. What if it was leaked by accident? Somebody could’ve stolen the program from somebody when they weren’t watching.’
‘So, the thief wasn’t one of us, but someone close to one of us?’
‘That would make sense,’ Masaharu agreed, though he objected to the word ‘thief’. It wasn’t like they’d taken a wallet. This felt different, somehow.
‘Anyway, we’ll have to talk to the group,’ Minobe said, folding his arms.
Six people, Minobe included, had been involved in Submarine’s creation. All of them gathered during lunch break that day at Laboratory No 6. Minobe explained the situation, but no one had a clue how it could have happened.
One of the seniors in the group was talking. ‘I mean, no one in our group would have leaked it. If any of us wanted to sell it, wouldn’t they have gone to the rest of us first? You know, talk to the other guys, sell it together?’
Minobe asked if anyone had loaned the program to anyone. Three of the students said they’d let friends play it but none of them had left their friends alone with the tape long enough to copy it.
‘That leaves only one other option, then,’ Minobe said. ‘Somebody’s program was stolen without them knowing it. Think back, think hard. If it wasn’t one of us, then somebody we know gave or sold it to these jokers.’
The meeting ended and Masaharu returned to his seat to mull things over. There wasn’t even a chance anyone else had taken his tape. He always kept his copy of Submarine along with his other data tapes in his desk at home. On the rare occasions he took them out, he never let them leave his sight, not even at the laboratory.
More than the mystery, however, the situation intrigued him for an entirely different reason. Submarine was a program they had made as a lark, a game entirely for their own amusement, until someone out there had the idea that it could be sold and people would pay good money for it. What had started as a program had become a product. It was an entirely novel idea and maybe, he thought, it was a very good one.
Two weeks after his chat with Reiko, Masaharu was at the public library with his friend Kakiuchi, who was researching a paper. Kakiuchi was in the same hockey team at school. He was looking through old newspapers – archival editions with condensed print – when he started to chuckle.
‘Check this out,’ he said, pointing at an article. ‘I remember this. My parents had me standing in line every morning to get toilet paper.’
The article was from November 2, 1973. The photo showed at least three hundred people crowding into a supermarket north of Osaka for toilet paper during the peak of the oil shock. Kakiuchi’s research was on electrical power demand.
‘They lined up in Tokyo, too?’ Kakiuchi asked.
‘Yeah, though I think it was more about detergent there. My cousin said he used to get sent out on shopping missions.’
‘Yeah, look at this: a housewife bought forty thousand yen worth of detergent in a western Tokyo supermarket. Not your mom, I presume?’ Kakiuchi said with a grin.
Masaharu laughed. ‘Nah, we’d already moved by then.’ He’d been in the first year of high school that year, too busy adjusting to his new life in Osaka to pay much attention to the news.
He wondered suddenly what grade Yukiho had been in. He guessed she’d have been in fifth grade. He had trouble picturing her at that age.
Then he remembered what Reiko had said about Yukiho’s mother dying when she was in sixth grade. That would make it 1974. Pulling the May 1974 paper out of the stack, he spread it out on the table. He scanned the headlines: DIET ASSEMBLY IN SESSION, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION LAWS AMENDED, ADVOCATES FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS PROTEST THE EUGENIC PROTECTION ACT. There was a little bit about the Japan Consumer Alliance having paved the way for the f
irst Seven Eleven to open in Tokyo’s Koto ward.
Masaharu turned to the society pages, his eye travelling down the tightly packed text until he found a small article with the headline GAS POISONING DUE TO EXTINGUISHED FLAME?
‘The body of Fumiyo Nishimoto (age 36) was found in her Yoshida Heights apartment in Ōe, a district in Osaka’s Ikuno ward. Mrs Nishimoto was discovered by an employee of the real estate agency responsible for her building, who called an ambulance to the scene. According to a report by Ikuno ward police, the apartment was filled with gas at the time of discovery, leading them to conclude that Mrs Nishimoto’s death was due to gas poisoning. It is thought that a pot of soup on the stove had boiled over, extinguishing the flame and filling the apartment with gas without alerting Mrs Nishimoto.’
The story matched exactly what he’d heard from Reiko, except the paper didn’t mention Yukiho being there, probably out of consideration for her age at the time.
‘Find something interesting?’ Kakiuchi asked.
‘Yeah, kind of,’ Masaharu said, pointing to the article and telling him about his student.
‘Wow.’ Kakiuchi pulled the paper closer and read through the article himself. ‘Ōe, huh? That’s Naito’s hood.’
‘Really? He’s from over there?’
‘Yeah, pretty sure.’
Naito was a younger kid on their ice hockey team, one year behind them.
‘Maybe I’ll ask him about it,’ Masaharu said, taking down the apartment building name he found listed in the article.
It was another two weeks before he got around to talking to Naito, a short, skinny fellow with great skating skills, even though his weight made his body checks kind of a joke. Still, he was a nice guy who was always willing to lend a hand, which secured him a place of authority on the team.
By contrast, Masaharu had hardly come to practice since senior year began. And he had only started hockey in the first place because he was afraid he’d get fat sitting around programming all day and track didn’t appeal to him.
He caught Naito while the team was out training on the athletics field.
‘Yeah, the lady who gassed herself? I remember that. It was a while ago, though,’ Naito said. ‘It happened next to my house, actually. Well, not right next to it, but walking distance.’
‘So it was, like, the talk of the town?’
‘People knew about it, sure. Though what really got everyone’s attention were the rumours that it wasn’t an accident.’
‘You mean she did it on purpose? Suicide?’
‘Yep,’ Naito said, looking at him. ‘So what’s it got to do with you?’
‘It’s less me, and more a friend.’ He explained the situation to Naito.
Naito’s eyes went wide. ‘Wow. You’re teaching her daughter, then? That’s a coincidence.’
‘But what about these rumours? Why’d they think it was a suicide?’
‘I don’t know all the details. I was just in high school.’ Naito scratched his head, then his eyes lit up. ‘Wait, maybe that guy’d know something about it.’
‘What guy?’
‘The guy at the real estate agency I’m renting my parking space from. I remember him talking about the gas thing once. He was one of the ones who said it was a suicide.’
‘The article said it was a real estate agent who found the body. Think it might have been him?’
‘Hey, could be!’
‘Think you could find out?’ Masaharu said. He knew it was asking a lot of a guy he barely knew, but he was an upperclassman compared to Naito and the school sports teams took seniority very seriously.
Naito scratched his head again. ‘Sure, no problem,’ he said, giving Masaharu a nervous smile.
On the evening of the following day, Masaharu was sitting in the passenger seat of Naito’s Toyota Carina.
‘Sorry to put you through the trouble,’ Masaharu told him as they started rolling.
‘Hey, I don’t mind. It’s near home, anyway.’ Naito smiled.
Naito had been as good as his word about helping. When he called the estate agency the man there told him it wasn’t him but his son who’d discovered the victim of the gas poisoning five years before. His son was now running a new branch of the agency in Fukaebashi. Masaharu was holding a piece of paper with a simple map to the shop and a phone number.
‘So, you’re pretty serious about this tutoring thing, huh?’ Naito said. ‘I mean, that’s why you’re doing this, right? Finding out as much as you can about your kids?’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine ever going that far out of my way for a job.’
Masaharu didn’t say anything to dissuade him from his theory though, in truth, he wasn’t sure why he was doing this. Of course he understood the pull that Yukiho had on him. But that didn’t mean he needed to know everything about her. Masaharu was generally of the opinion that the past didn’t matter.
Maybe it was because he didn’t understand her in the present, he thought. They talked together like old friends and yet she seemed so distant. He didn’t understand why, and it aggravated him.
After a while they left the main road and went on to a side street where they found the local branch of Tagawa Real Estate right next to the freeway ramp.
Inside, a skinny man was sitting at a desk, filling in some forms. He looked at them as they walked in and asked if they were looking for an apartment.
Naito told him they were there to ask about the accident. ‘I talked to the guy at your branch in Ikuno and he said the boss here, Mr Tagawa, was the one who saw what happened.’
‘I’m Tagawa,’ the man said, looking at them a bit suspiciously. ‘That’s ancient history, though. What concern is it of yours?’
‘There was a girl with you when you found the body, right?’ Masaharu asked. ‘Yukiho Nishimoto?’
The man nodded warily. ‘Are you a relative?’
‘Actually, she’s my student. I’m tutoring her.’
‘Oh yeah?’ the man said. ‘Where is she these days? She was an orphan after her mother died, if I remember right.’
‘She was adopted by a relative. Her last name’s Karasawa now.’
The man nodded. ‘She doing OK? I haven’t seen her since then.’
‘She’s great. She’s a junior in high school now.’
‘Yeah, guess she would be. Time flies, huh?’
He took a cigarette out and put it in his mouth. Masaharu saw the box – they were Mild Sevens, one of the new, supposedly ‘lighter’ cigarettes. He was surprised a man this guy’s age would be so trendy.
‘She talk about what happened at all?’ Tagawa asked, blowing a puff of smoke.
‘Not much, just that you’d really helped her out,’ Masaharu lied.
‘Well, that’s true enough, but it sure was a surprise.’ Tagawa leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and began to tell them the story of how he discovered Fumiyo Nishimoto’s body.
‘Worse than finding the body was what came after,’ he said after finishing his story. ‘The police had all kinds of questions for me. They wanted to know how things looked when I entered the apartment. Did I touch anything other than the window and the stove, that kind of thing. They wanted to know if I touched the pot at all, or if the door really had been locked. It was a real pain.’