t had been raining most of the evening, the kind of thin, autumnal drizzle that wasn’t enough to warrant an umbrella, but quietly dampened hair and clothes until you were drenched. Yet, occasionally, breaks would appear in the grey clouds above, offering glimpses of the night sky. The foxes will be holding a wedding tomorrow, Masaharu thought, recalling something his mother always said when the weather was odd like this.

He’d stashed a folding umbrella in his locker back at the university, a fact he only remembered after he was through the front gate, by which time it wasn’t worth the trouble of going back to retrieve it. He’d only get wetter.

Masaharu glanced at the hands of his favourite quartz-crystal watch. It was five minutes after seven – he was late. He knew she’d forgive him for not showing up on time, but that was beside the point. The fact of the matter was, he couldn’t wait to see her.

He held a newspaper over his head to keep the rain off his hair. The previous year he had taken up the habit of buying a newspaper on the day after the Yakult Swallows won a game. He was still a Swallows fan, even though the last time he’d lived in Tokyo was in high school. Sometimes he felt like he’d been born a fan. He even remembered watching games way back when they were still called the Atoms.

Last year the Swallows had won a miraculous league victory under Manager Hirooka. But this year, it was as though they were an entirely different team. By September, they had already established themselves at the bottom of the rankings. This meant Masaharu was buying fewer papers. It was a bit of good luck that he happened to have one today.

He reached the house several minutes later, pressing the doorbell beneath the nameplate that read Karasawa.

Reiko Karasawa answered the door. She was wearing a purple dress, its thin fabric making her aging body seem painfully bony. On his first visit, back in March, she’d been wearing a dark grey kimono that suited her nicely, but since the start of the rainy season in early summer she’d switched to wearing dresses. Masaharu wondered if she’d go back to kimonos when the winter came.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said when she saw him. ‘I just heard from Yukiho. She’s tied up with preparations for the school festival and says she’ll be about thirty minutes late.’

‘That’s no problem at all,’ Masaharu said, a bit relieved. ‘I’m just glad I’m not late.’

‘You’re always very punctual. I just wish some of that would rub off on Yukiho,’ Reiko said.

Masaharu smiled and glanced down at his watch, muttering to himself about having some time to kill.

‘Oh, you’re not waiting out there,’ Reiko said. ‘Please, come in. I’ll get you something cool to drink.’

She invited him into the living room on the first floor. The room had originally been a traditional Japanese-style room, with tatami mats, but with the addition of a few pieces of rattan furniture Mrs Karasawa had converted it to a Western-style sitting room. Masaharu had been in here once, six months ago, and never again since.

His introduction to the Karasawas had come via his mother, who was one of Reiko’s tea ceremony students. Reiko’s daughter, Yukiho, a junior in high school, was looking for a maths tutor, and Masaharu, an engineering undergrad with a strong math background, was looking for extra income after his last student passed his college entrance exams. The timing was perfect, and the money was nice – though Masaharu soon found that just the chance to be close to Yukiho was enticement enough.

Reiko brought him some barley tea in a glass cup – another relief. The last time he’d been invited to the sitting room she’d made him green tea in a traditional bowl and he’d sweated buckets, having absolutely no idea of the proper way to drink it.

He picked up the glass. His throat was parched, and the cool tea felt good going down.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Reiko apologised again as she sat down across from him. ‘I don’t see why she can’t just leave early.’

‘Oh no, it’s fine, really. I think it’s important for students to spend time with their friends, especially in high school.’ Masaharu hoped the sentiment sounded appropriately grown-up.

Yukiho Karasawa attended the Seika Girls High School, which put her on the fast track to attend the attached Seika Girls College. If she could maintain a good GPA, she’d be able to matriculate with only an interview. Depending on which department she wanted to get into, however, admissions could be tough. Her choice, English Lit, was one of the most competitive, so in order to ensure she got in she had to be at the top of her class in every subject. She had accomplished this in everything but maths.

‘Looking back on it, I really feel we made the right choice getting her into Seika,’ Reiko said. ‘That way she can actually enjoy her senior year instead of struggling through those horrible exams they have to take in public school.’ She picked up her own barley tea with both hands.

‘Absolutely,’ Masaharu agreed. He felt that the exam regimen was needlessly brutal, and often shared his feelings with the parents of those he’d tutored before. ‘I think that’s why a lot more parents are taking the private school option, even as early as elementary school.’

‘As well they should. I’ve advised my nieces and nephews to do the same. Even if they have to test to get into a school, better to get through that early, I say.’

Masaharu nodded, then a thought occurred to him. ‘Yukiho didn’t switch over to private until middle school, did she.’

Reiko was quiet for a moment, a contemplative look in her eyes. The moment stretched until Masaharu began to worry he might have touched on a sore subject. Finally she looked up at him and said, ‘If I’d been there when she was still in pre-school, I might have advised her mother to consider it earlier, but of course I didn’t even meet the child until she was in second grade or so. Not that she was really in a financial situation to attend a private school in those days.’

Masaharu had heard that Yukiho was not Reiko Karasawa’s natural daughter when he first took the tutoring job. Yet the subject of her real mother and Yukiho’s adoption hadn’t ever come up. He now found he was curious to learn more.

Reiko must have sensed this because she said, ‘Yukiho’s real father was my cousin. He died in an accident when she was very little, and her mother had trouble making ends meet. She was working at least two jobs and I think it was very challenging for her to raise a child at the same time.’

‘What happened to her mother?’ Masaharu asked, and immediately regretted it.

A dark cloud had come over Reiko’s face. ‘She died in an accident, too,’ the older woman said quietly. ‘Yukiho was in sixth grade at the time. Yes, it was in May, as I recall.’

‘A traffic accident?’

‘No.’ Reiko shook her head. ‘Gas poisoning.’

‘Gas?’

‘She put a pot on the stove and fell asleep. Apparently, the flame blew out, and she succumbed without ever waking. I think… she must’ve been very tired in those days.’ Her thin eyebrows drew together in sorrow.

Masaharu had heard of similar stories, though a switch in recent years to natural gas had dramatically reduced the chances of carbon monoxide poisoning.

‘I just wish it hadn’t been Yukiho who found her. To think of the shock that poor girl must have had.’ She shook her head, a pained expression on her face. ‘It was a tragedy.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. He realised he had probably already asked more than he should on the subject, but found that hearing the story had only piqued his curiosity. He debated letting the conversation die, but with Yukiho out of the house, this might be his only chance. Taking a sip of his tea, he quickly asked, ‘Was she alone when she found her?’

‘No,’ Reiko said, without looking up at him. ‘The door had been locked, so she had to go get the real estate agent to open it for her. They went in together.’

That must have been an unlucky day for him, too, Masaharu thought, imagining the man’s shock at finding the body, and realising the girl he was with was now an orphan.

‘I can’t imagine losing all of my family to accidents,’ he said.

‘None of us can, which is probably for the best. I went to the funeral and Yukiho was there, clinging to the coffin as though she could stop her mother from leaving, the poor girl. I’ve never heard her cry so loudly since.’ Reiko’s eyes closed as her thoughts went back to that day. ‘When I saw her there, I knew I had to do something.’

‘Is that when you decided to adopt her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she have no other relatives?’

‘To tell the truth, I never spoke much to her mother, and was never that close to her family. But I saw Yukiho many times before her mother died. She would come by herself to visit me here.’

Masaharu wondered why Yukiho would go by herself to a relative’s house, especially one who wasn’t close to her mother. He was about to ask,when Reiko told him she’d first met the girl at an observance for her late father.

‘We only spoke briefly, but when she heard I was teaching the tea ceremony she seemed very interested. She asked so many questions that I invited her to come visit some time and see for herself. I think it was only a few weeks later that she actually came, much to my surprise. I hadn’t been entirely serious in inviting her, you see. It’s not many young girls who want to learn the tea ceremony. But she seemed genuinely interested and I thought I could use the company, living alone as I was, so I began teaching her, half for fun at first, you understand. She started coming every week, on the bus, all by herself. She would drink my tea and tell me about things that happened at school. In time, I came to look forward very much to her visits and missed her on the weeks she couldn’t make it.’

‘So she’s been learning the tea ceremony since elementary school?’

‘That’s right. It wasn’t long afterwards that she showed an interest in flower arrangement, too. She was watching me put together a vase and would occasionally help out with a flower or two. She even wanted me to teach her how to put on a kimono.’

‘Sounds just like finishing school,’ Masaharu said, smiling.

‘Quite right. Of course she was only a child, so it was a kind of play for her, I think. She even copied the way that I spoke. When I told her I was embarrassed, she said that if she only listened to the way her mother talked at home, her own language would be “lower class”, so she was visiting me to polish it up. Can you imagine?’

Several things were adding up for Masaharu as he listened. He now had an explanation for Yukiho’s elegance – the way she moved, the way she talked – so unusual for a high school girl. It impressed him that her refinement wasn’t forced on her, either. She’d sought it out herself.

‘Now that you mention it, she doesn’t really have a strong Osaka accent, does she.’

Reiko smiled. ‘Like yourself, I grew up in the Tokyo area. She seemed to like my own lack of an accent.’

‘I can appreciate that. I’ve never been very good at sounding like a local, either.’

‘I think that’s why she likes talking with you. She says she doesn’t want to catch a bad accent from the other people around her.’

‘Funny to hear that coming from someone who was born here.’

‘Well, she’s never been proud of where she’s from.’

‘Oh. Well, that’s too bad, I suppose.’

‘As long as she’s proud of who she is,’ Reiko pressed her lips. ‘That said, there’s something which does trouble me. She’s spent so much time with an old lady like myself, I worry that it might have sapped away at her liveliness. I wouldn’t want her to go wild, of course, but a little bit of spreading one’s wings is necessary. If you ever get the chance, do take her someplace. Try to get her out of her shell. She needs that.’

‘Me? Are you sure?’

‘I’d rather it be someone I can trust.’

He smiled. ‘Right, well, I’ll think of something.’

‘Please do. I think she’d enjoy that.’

Reiko didn’t say anything more for a while, so Masaharu took another sip of his tea. It was not a boring conversation – far from it. It was clear that her foster mother did not know everything there was to know about her daughter. Yukiho Karasawa was not as old-fashioned as Reiko seemed to think, nor as well behaved.

One event stuck out in Masaharu’s mind, something that had happened in July. The two-hour lesson was over and they were drinking coffee and chatting. Masaharu always talked about life at university at these times. He knew she liked to hear about that.

They had been talking for about five minutes when the phone rang. ‘It’s someone from some English speech contest,’ Reiko said, calling her to the phone.

‘Right,’ Yukiho had said, and gone down the stairs.

It was about time for him to leave, so Masaharu had finished his coffee and gone downstairs to find Yukiho talking on the phone in the hallway, a serious look on her face. A bit hesitantly, he waved to indicate he was leaving and she waved back, her expression changing quickly to a smile.

‘So Yukiho’s going to be competing in an English speech contest? That’s impressive,’ Masaharu said to Reiko when she saw him to the door.

‘If she is, this is the first I’ve heard of it,’ Reiko had said.

As per his usual Tuesday routine, Masaharu had gone to a ramen shop near the station and ate a late dinner. He was just tucking into some dumplings and watching the little television in the shop when he happened to look up and see a young woman walking quickly along the road outside. Masaharu stared – it was Yukiho.

There was something unusually urgent about her as she stepped out into the street and hailed a taxi.

It was already ten o’clock. Something must have happened, he thought.

Worried, Masaharu used the phone in the ramen shop to call the Karasawa residence. The phone rang several times before Reiko picked up.

‘Is something the matter?’ she asked, when she heard his voice. She sounded more startled than concerned.

Masaharu hesitated. ‘Um, is Yukiho there?’

‘Certainly, would you like to speak with her?’

‘What? She’s right there?’

‘No, she’s up in her room. She had some club event she has to get ready for tomorrow. They’re meeting very early in the morning so she went to bed early. But I should think she’s still awake.’

Masaharu thought for a moment. ‘No, that’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to her next week. It’s nothing urgent.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. You should just let her get to sleep.’

‘Right. Well, I’ll tell her you rang tomorrow morning.’

‘Yes, thank you. Sorry to trouble you this late at night.’ Masaharu hung up quickly. His armpits were damp with sweat.

So Yukiho’s sneaking out of her house late at night… to go where? He wondered if the phone call she’d received before he left had something to do with it and hoped his call hadn’t blown her cover.

Yukiho phoned the next day.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘you called last night? I had some club stuff this morning and went to sleep really early. What’s up?’

‘It’s not a big deal,’ he said. ‘I just thought something might be up and called to check in on you.’

‘Oh? What sort of something?’

‘Something that would have you hailing a cab at ten at night. You looked worried.’

This made her skip a beat. When she spoke again it was in a low voice. ‘You saw me?’

‘From the ramen shop, yeah,’ Masaharu said, chuckling.

He heard her sigh. ‘Thanks for not telling my mom.’

‘I didn’t think it would go well for you if I did.’

‘No, it wouldn’t have. Not at all,’ she said, laughing.

‘So what happened? I’m guessing the phone call you got has something to do with it.’ He judged from her tone that whatever it was, it hadn’t been anything too serious.

‘You’re a sharp one,’ she said, lowering her voice again. ‘Actually, one of my friends attempted suicide.’

‘What? Really?’

‘She got dumped… I don’t think she even really thought about it that much. Anyway, me and a couple of her other friends went to see her. I just didn’t want Mom to worry about it.’

‘Yeah, I can see why. How’s your friend?’

‘Fine, thanks. I think just seeing us helped a lot.’

‘Good to hear.’

‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? Wanting to die just because of a boy?’

‘That I have to agree with.’

‘Anyway,’ Yukiho said, brightening, ‘please don’t tell my mom?’

‘The thought never crossed my mind.’

She had thanked him and hung up.

Masaharu shook his head, chuckling to himself as he thought back to that day. The Yukiho on the phone had been so different from the one in lessons, the Yukiho her mother thought she knew. It’s hard to know what’s really going on inside some people, he realised, especially young girls.

Don’t worry, he wanted to tell the woman in the rattan chair across from him, your daughter isn’t as hopeless as she seems.

He’d just finished his barley tea when he heard the front door open.

‘Sounds like she’s home,’ Reiko said, standing.

Masaharu stood behind her and checked his reflection in the sliding glass doors leading to the garden. Idiot, he thought to himself, what are you so nervous about?

For his undergraduate thesis, Masaharu was working on an implementation of graph theory in robot control systems at Laboratory No 6 of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Northern Osaka. Specifically, he was trying to get a computer to interpret three-dimensional objects using only unidirectional visual input – to see and understand the physical world through a pair of robotic eyes.

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 first 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.’

‘Was there something strange about the pot?’

‘Not that I saw. They were saying that if the soup had really boiled over it would’ve made more of a mess on the stove. Of course, it must have boiled over, because it put out the burner, right?’

Masaharu tried to picture the scene in his mind. He’d left a pot on the stove too long when he was making instant ramen once or twice and it had made quite a mess.

‘Still, it sounds like the girl’s doing well. If she lives in a home that can hire a private tutor and all. That’s good. She had it pretty rough with that mother of hers.’

‘Was there some kind of problem?’

‘Yeah, poverty. Mrs Nishimoto definitely didn’t have an easy life. She had a job working at some noodle place and it was pretty tough for her just to pay rent. They’d always be behind a few months.’

Compared to Masaharu’s own experience, this was like hearing about life on another planet.

‘Maybe that’s why that kid always seemed older than her years. More aware, you know? I don’t even think she cried when we found her mom lying there.’

‘Really?’ Masaharu looked at the man’s face, remembering what Reiko had said about Yukiho sobbing at the funeral.

‘What about the rumours?’ Naito asked. ‘Weren’t people saying it was a suicide?’

‘Yeah,’ Tagawa grunted. ‘There were some things that made it suspicious, I guess. I remember the detective talking about it.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well, they said something about Mrs Nishimoto taking cold medicine – about five times the normal amount, based on the wrappers they found in the trash.’

‘Was that enough to kill her?’

‘No, but the cops said that she might’ve taken it to fall asleep. You know, turn on the gas, take some sleeping pills? But it can be hard to get sleeping pills, so she went for the cold medicine.’

‘Desperate times,’ Masaharu said, nodding.

‘She’d got into the alcohol, too. There were three open jars of sake in the garbage – the cheap stuff you get out of vending machines. And she supposedly wasn’t a big drinker.’

‘Right.’

‘That, and the window,’ Tagawa said, growing more talkative as the memories surfaced.‘Somebody thought it was strange that everything was locked up tight. There weren’t any ventilation fans in the kitchens in that building, so if people cooked something, they usually opened the windows.

‘But,’ Masaharu said, ‘it still could have just been an accident, right?’

‘Sure, which is why they didn’t investigate the suicide theory much. They didn’t have any smoking gun, and there were other ways to explain the cold medicine and the sake, like what the girl said.’

‘What did Yukiho say?’

‘Just that her mom had a cold that week and that she’d sometimes drink sake when she felt a chill. The detective still thought it was too much cold medicine to explain away, but there’s no way to really know without being able to ask her. And the big thing is, if it was a suicide, why would she bother putting soup on the stove? Anyway, they decided it was an accident, so that’s that.

‘The police said that if we’d found her thirty minutes earlier, she might have been saved. Think about it – thirty minutes. That’s just bad luck. Whether it was suicide or an accident, you got to think she was destined to die that day.’

Long, slightly chestnut-coloured hair fell down across Yukiho’s face. With her left hand, she brushed it back behind her ear, but a few strands remained. Masaharu wanted to kiss her pale white cheek. He’d wanted to since his first day with her.

She was working on a problem, trying to figure out the equation of a line formed by the intersection of two planes. Her mechanical pencil flew across the page.

‘Done,’ she said, well before time was up. Masaharu carefully checked the formulae. Her writing was precise, each number and symbol a work of art in miniature.

‘Good job,’ he said, looking back up at her. ‘Perfect, actually. I can’t find anything to complain about.’

‘Well,’ she said, smiling, ‘that’s a first!’

He chuckled. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it seems like you’ve got the general idea about dealing with coordinates in space. If you can do this one, everything else is just a variation on the same pattern.’

‘Sounds like a fine time for a break! I just bought some tea.’

She stood and left Masaharu to sit by her desk and look around the room. He was never really sure what to do with himself while he waited. What he wanted to do was poke around, open her little drawers, pore through the notebooks on her shelf. Even a minor discovery, like what brand of cosmetics she used, would be progress. Yet the thought that she might catch him stayed his hand. He didn’t want her to think badly of him.

He’d actually brought a magazine for just this sort of moment – a fashion magazine he’d seen on the stand that morning at a shop by the station – but he’d left it down in his duffel bag on the floor below. He’d been using the bag since his first year in hockey club and the years were showing so it stayed near the entrance while he was tutoring.

His eyes wandered to a small pink radio sitting in front of a bookshelf. A few cassette tapes had been stacked next to it. He scanned down the labels: Yumi Arai’s ‘Off Course’ – all pop music and pretty new. The sight of the cassettes reminded him of something else: the stolen Submarine.

They still weren’t any closer to finding out how the game had got leaked. Minobe had even tried calling the company from the ad, but that hadn’t got him anywhere.

‘I asked them where they got the program from and they just said they couldn’t answer any questions. It was a woman on the phone, so I asked her to pass me to one of their tech guys, but he was no more help than she was. I’m guessing they were guilty and just didn’t want to admit it. I bet they stole their other games, too.’

‘What if we just showed up on their doorstep?’ Masaharu suggested.

‘Doubt that would help,’ Minobe said, shaking his head. ‘We start whining about stolen software, they won’t even let us in.’

‘What if you brought a copy of Submarine and showed it to them?’

Minobe shook his head again. ‘What proof do we have that Submarine is the original? They could just say we copied their Marine-whatever game.’

Masaharu wanted to pull his hair out. ‘But then there’s nothing to stop them from stealing more programs!’

‘Exactly,’ Minobe said. ‘We’re going to need copyrights for these things before long. That’s what my friend over in the law school said. I asked him how much money we could get if we could prove our program was stolen and he said nothing – not without any copyright laws on the books.’

‘Great.’

‘I still want to find out who did it,’ said Minobe, then he added, in a cold voice, ‘and make them pay.’

Minobe suggested that they write up a list of everyone they had shown Submarine to, or talked about Submarine with. ‘Someone would’ve had to know about Submarine in order to want to steal it,’ was his reasoning. Everyone came up with every name they could think of and before long they had a list several dozen names long. There were other people at the laboratory, friends from school clubs and teams, friends from high school, and others.

‘One of these people must be connected in some way to Unlimited Designs,’ Minobe said, sighing as he scanned the long list of names.

Masaharu understood his sigh all too well. He was doubtful they’d find anything like a direct connection. The program could have been passed from person to person dozens of times before it reached the company selling it. Unless they got very lucky, it would be nearly impossible to trace.

‘Well, the place to start is for each of us to talk to the people we spoke about Submarine with. Someone’s bound to come up with a lead.’

For his part, Masaharu had hardly mentioned Submarine to anyone, less out of security concerns and more because he never imagined anyone outside his department would be interested in something that was essentially part of his research. Besides, without fancy graphics, the game wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as something like Space Invaders.

In fact, the only time he’d ever shown the game to anyone was when he’d talked about it to Yukiho one afternoon when she asked him what he studied at the university. He’d begun by telling her about his thesis work but soon realised that image analysis and graph theory wasn’t that interesting to a junior high school student so he brought up the game. It worked well. Her eyes lit up the moment he mentioned it.

‘Making a game sounds like fun,’ she’d said. ‘What kind of game is it?’

He wrote a picture of the Submarine screen on a piece of paper and explained the game to her. She listened very intently and said she was impressed he’d made something like that by himself.

‘Oh, it was a group effort,’ he’d told her, though not before feeling a rush of pride.

‘But you understand how it works, don’t you?’

‘Sure, mostly.’

‘See? Impressive.’

Masaharu felt something stir in his chest, a reaction to her gaze on him and her praise. The feeling that came from someone like her respecting his achievements was intoxicating.

‘I’d love to try it sometime,’ she’d said.

This, he felt, had to happen, but as he explained to her, he didn’t have his own computer and couldn’t take her into the lab. She seemed disappointed.

‘What I need is a rich friend with a computer,’ he joked.

‘A computer’s all you need to play the game?’

‘And the tape with the program on it.’

‘The tape? What kind of tape?’

‘It’s just a regular cassette tape, except it holds data, not music.’

She seemed fascinated and asked if he could show her one some time.

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but it just looks like a regular cassette tape. Like the ones you have.’

‘I’d still like to see it some time.’

‘Sure thing.’

Fully expecting to disappoint her, Masaharu brought the tape with him the next time he came.

‘Wow, it really is a regular cassette tape,’ she said, looking at the tape in her hand.

‘Like I said.’

‘I never knew you could use these tapes for something else like that,’ she said, handing it back to him. ‘You should put that in your bag right away. I’m sure it’s very important.’

‘Hardly that important,’ he said, though privately he thought it really was. He went back downstairs to put the tape in his duffel bag by the door.

This was the extent of Yukiho’s contact with the program. Neither of them had mentioned it again. Nor had he mentioned their exchange to Minobe and the others. The idea that she’d stolen the program was laughable – in fact, he’d never even considered the possibility until now.

Of course, had she been of a mind to, Yukiho could easily have taken the tape out of his duffel bag that day. All she would have had to do was pretend to go to the bathroom and sneak down to the ground floor. But what would she do with it then? Stealing the tape wouldn’t be enough. If she didn’t want him to notice, she would have to duplicate the tape within the two hours of their lesson and return the original to the bag. Possible, if she had the equipment, but he knew she didn’t own a personal computer and making a duplicate data tape wasn’t as simple as copying your friend’s tape of pop music.

Though it was an amusing pastime to imagine her as the thief, Masaharu thought as the door opened.

‘What are you grinning about?’ Yukiho said as she walked in with two teacups on a tray.

‘Oh, nothing,’ Masaharu said. ‘That smells nice.’

‘It’s Darjeeling.’

She put the teacups on the desk and he took one and took a sip a bit too fast, spilling a little on his jeans as he tried to set down the cup.

‘Well, that was dumb.’

He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, dislodging a folded piece of paper, which fell out on the floor.

‘Are you all right?’ Yukiho asked.

‘I’m fine. It wasn’t much.’

‘You dropped something.’ She picked the paper off the floor, but when she looked at it, her almond eyes went wide. ‘What’s this?’

She held the paper out to Masaharu. It had a hand-drawn map and a telephone number with the words ‘Tagawa Real Estate’ below.

Oops.

‘Tagawa Real Estate? In Ikuno?’ she asked. Her earlier good humour seemed to have vanished.

‘No, not in Ikuno,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s in Higashinari ward. See here, it says “Fukaebashi”?’ Masaharu pointed at the map with his finger.

‘But that must be a branch of the one in Ikuno. I’ll bet the son of the owner opened that.’

‘Huh, no kidding.’ Masaharu tried not to let his bewilderment show on his face.

‘Are you looking for an apartment?’

‘No, I just went with a friend.’

‘Oh.’ Her eyes had a faraway look to them. ‘I’ve just remembered something strange.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Tagawa Real Estate, the original one in Ikuno, managed the apartment building I lived in as a child. I used to live there, you know, in Ōe.’

‘Really?’ Masaharu tried to focus on his teacup, not meeting her eyes.

‘Have you heard about when my mother died? My real mother, I mean,’ she said, her voice calm and somehow deeper than usual.

‘Uh, no, I haven’t,’ he said, shaking his head.

She chuckled. ‘You’re a bad actor. I know you know. The other day, when you talked to my mom for a long time, she told you then, didn’t she.’

‘Well, OK, maybe a little,’ he said, setting down his cup and scratching his head.

Yukiho took a couple of sips of her own tea and breathed a long sigh of steam.

‘May twenty-second,’ she said, ‘was the day my mother died.’

Masaharu nodded silently.

‘It was a little cold that day. I wore a cardigan my mother had knitted for me to school. I still have it, you know – the cardigan.’

She glanced over at the dresser in the corner. Masaharu could only imagine what painful memories it contained.

‘It must’ve been quite a shock,’ Masaharu said, immediately regretting saying something so bland.

‘It was like I was dreaming – a nightmare, of course,’ Yukiho said, an awkward smile flashing briefly across her lips. ‘I went to play with some friends after school that day. That’s why I was a little late getting home. If I hadn’t gone to play, I might have been home an hour earlier.’

Masaharu understood what she was trying to say. That one hour had changed her life.

Yukiho bit her lip before continuing. ‘When I think about that —’

Masaharu tensed, hearing the tears in her voice. He thought maybe he should pull out his handkerchief, but didn’t dare move.

‘Sometimes, I feel like I killed her,’ she said.

‘You should never think that. You didn’t come home late on purpose, Yukiho.’

That’s not what I mean. My mother had it very hard those days. She was giving up sleep to work. That’s why she was so tired that day. I think if I’d been more helpful, if she hadn’t had to work so hard…’

Masaharu held his breath as he watched a large tear trace a path down her white cheek. He wanted more than anything else to hold her. I’m an idiot, Masaharu cursed himself. Because ever since talking to Mr Tagawa at the estate agency and hearing about what had happened, a horrible thought had been growing in the back of his mind.

The unusual number of cold medicine packages, the sake cups, the locked window – everything pointed towards suicide. The only thing that didn’t make sense was the pot that had boiled over – boiled over, but not enough to leave a mess, according to the police. Not enough to put out a burner.

Maybe it had been a suicide, but then someone had come by and spilled soup out of the pot in order to make it look like an accident. The one who could have done that was Yukiho. She could have spilled the soup then opened the cold medicine boxes and the cups of sake.

Why make it look like an accident? Because she was afraid of what people would think? Yet the scenario raised another frightening question. If Yukiho had returned home earlier, before coming with the estate agent, had her mother already been dead at that time? Or could she still have been saved? Hadn’t Mr Tagawa said that had they been there thirty minutes earlier, they might have been able to save her?

What if the young Yukiho had, upon walking in on her own mother on the brink of death, seen not tragedy, but opportunity? What if, in her weekly visits to Reiko Karasawa’s house, Yukiho had realised that if something ever happened to her own mother, she could rely on this elegant lady to take her in?

The thought was not a place Masaharu wanted to linger long. And yet there was something grimly compelling about the scenario. He couldn’t get it out of his head.

Now, seeing her tears, Masaharu chastised himself for having such a twisted mind. This was a human being sitting before him, a real, vulnerable girl. She could never have done something so cold.

‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t think that. You wouldn’t want your mother to be sad where she is now.’

‘I just wish I’d had a key,’ Yukiho whispered between sobs.

‘It was just bad luck.’

Yukiho shook her head and stood, going to her school uniform where it hung on a hanger in the closet. She pulled a key out of the pocket. ‘That’s why I always keep a house key with me now,’ she said. She held the key up to show him.

‘That keychain looks ancient,’ Masaharu said.

‘It is. I’ve had it forever. Except, that day, I forgot it at home.’

As she put the key back in her pocket, her hand brushed against the closet door, making the tiny bell on her keychain ring.