President Tsuburaya rose, crossed to the bookshelf, and drew a yellowed folder from the top shelf. He opened it and slid it across the table to the Deputy Commissioner of the Agency for Cultural Affairs.
Inside were dozens of photographs and hand-drawn sketches, the pages gone brown and curling at the edges, some marked with faded labels, others annotated in ballpoint with dates and place names.
"This is Heaven Lake, on Changbai Mountain. My father and a survey team saw the legendary lake monster there."
President Tsuburaya tapped the first black-and-white photograph.
The image was badly blurred. You could make out huge ripples heaving across the water's surface, and at the center of them a dark protrusion, irregular in shape, like part of some creature breaking into the air.
The Deputy Commissioner stared at the photo, started to say something, and thought better of it.
President Tsuburaya turned another page.
"The Himalayan Yeti. Nineteen fifty-three, shot by a British climbing expedition. My father obtained a copy through a friend."
The photograph showed enormous footprints in the snow, spaced in a neat line, running off toward the distant peaks. A trekking pole lay beside them for scale; each print was two or three times the size of a human foot.
"And the Loch Ness Monster. The Ainu giant bear. The Lagarfljot Worm. The Mothman of West Virginia. The Antarctic sea creature, the Ningen…"
President Tsuburaya turned the pages one after another.
Every photograph, every sketch, carried an annotation. Date. Location. Witness. Recorder. Some were in fountain pen, the ink faded to brown; some in ballpoint, the blue still sharp; some in pencil, the strokes so soft you had to lean in to read them.
The Deputy Commissioner's eyes followed the moving finger, from one photograph to the next, one line of writing to the next. His face began to shift — cautious at first, then puzzled, then vaguely strained, before settling into an expression that defied description.
As for why…
"These things… if I'm not mistaken, they're all rumors. Very widely circulated ones."
It was no exaggeration. Buy a magazine off any roadside stand, open to the front matter or thumb through to the color spreads in the middle, and you'd find write-ups on more or less every mysterious creature the president had just named. The weeklies that specialized in strange phenomena ran an unsolved-mysteries column in every single issue. The Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, crop circles, the Yeti, the Mothman… It all sounded perfectly coherent. But like Ultraman, every adult basically knew it was a con.
"And this so-called Antarctic sea creature, the Ningen — that one's pure conspiracy-theorist invention."
He wouldn't presume to speak for the rest, but the Ningen had only surfaced within the last few years, born on the 2ch forums.
The Ningen was supposed to be a colossal humanoid organism inhabiting the Antarctic, its skin smooth and white, reportedly twenty to thirty meters long, and widely alleged to be the product of a secret Japanese government genetic engineering program.
In truth, it had started as one short post about an unidentified creature sighted in Antarctic waters. Users piled on embellishments, someone photoshopped a forum reaction image, and out of that the Ningen's likeness was born. A few occult magazines picked it up, and it was promoted into one of the world's unsolved mysteries. Every scrap of evidence for its existence had been traced back to image manipulation, its design lifted wholesale from a 2ch reaction image — fiction from beginning to end.
"After all, our government hardly has genetic engineering that advanced, let alone the means to ship the results to the Antarctic without a single person noticing."
The Deputy Commissioner looked at President Tsuburaya and shrugged, a note of resignation in his voice.
He would have been delighted for the Ningen to be real. If it were, it would mean Japan's technology outstripped the entire world. Unfortunately, Japan simply wasn't capable of that.
"'Ningen' is only a stand-in name for an unidentified organism in the Antarctic. I don't believe it's a secret genetic engineering product of our government. Neither did my father."
President Tsuburaya shook his head, and his tone turned graver still.
He lifted his eyes to the man across from him. The faraway quality was gone from his voice now; what remained was a heavy, settled certainty.
"But in my father's name, I give you my word: the unidentified creature in the Antarctic genuinely exists. And not only that one. All those unknown creatures people dismiss as gossip and punchlines — none of them came out of thin air. Many are things my father saw with his own eyes when he was young and traveling half the globe. Things he faced down at the cost of nearly his life, and barely escaped alive!"
The Deputy Commissioner offered nothing in reply. He adjusted his glasses and studied President Tsuburaya coolly, as though checking whether the man was still in his right mind — whether he meant a single word of it.
President Tsuburaya held his gaze, solemn and earnest, sincerity plain in his eyes, and went on recounting his father's past.
"Even as a young man he was obsessed with the life hiding in the corners of this world. He forced his way across the frozen lake on Changbai Mountain, climbed above the snow line in the Himalayas, chased the dark currents of Loch Ness. More than once he nearly left his life somewhere along the way. And it was precisely because of all that that he was able to make Giant Monster Varan, Rodan the Sky Monster, Mothra, Ultra Q — every one of those kaiju films and tokusatsu series."
Little by little, the Deputy Commissioner's face turned grim as well.
"Which is to say…"
He had extracted something of real value here, and he didn't want to accept it. He would far rather President Tsuburaya had simply started believing his own stories. Otherwise, this world was more dangerous by an order of magnitude than the meager handful of secrets he'd been let in on.
"Exactly! Those premises that look like pure flights of fancy were never fabricated out of nothing. My father took the horrors he had seen — things humanity has no power whatsoever to resist — and broke them apart, through tokusatsu, into stories an audience could bear to watch!"
President Tsuburaya nodded hard, affirming the words the Deputy Commissioner had left unsaid.
"I don't know whether my father ever saw the original Ultraman. But in Ultraman Tiga, episode forty-nine, 'The Ultra Star,' the actor playing my father has a line — We need a hero, Kinjo. A hero is necessary! A hero! I was the one who asked for that line to be written in. Because my father said those words to me once, and they were the whole reason he created Ultraman in the first place."
"He had seen too many terrible creatures. He knew how dangerous this world is, how small human beings are — and he knew it most keenly after he had taken the monsters he'd witnessed himself, and the ones he'd only heard others describe, and set them down on film and television. Faced with beings that words like good and evil cannot begin to contain, he felt despair. So my father created a hero named Ultraman. It was a prayer made in the face of that despair. He hoped that when those creatures came for humanity, a hero called Ultraman would truly be there to protect us."
President Tsuburaya turned his head toward the Ultraman figures arranged on the shelves, and something particular colored his voice.
Longing. Hope. Yearning. If only Ultraman were real.
"So if that Ultraseven from last night truly is a hero by the name of Ultraman — if he truly is a Giant of Light who came to protect humanity — then my father's spirit in heaven must be overjoyed."
The Deputy Commissioner and the two close-protection officers raised their heads as well, looking toward the Ultraman figures on the bookshelf.
Sunlight came in through the window and settled over the models, striking off them in a faint glow.
The folder lay quietly on the low table, the yellowed photographs and hand-drawn sketches inside it like so many silent witnesses.
A long time passed before the Deputy Commissioner spoke.
"Thank you, President Tsuburaya. I'll report everything you've told me exactly as you've told it."
He got to his feet and bowed slightly.
President Tsuburaya rose as well, and bent at the waist in return.
At the family restaurant, Amamiya Rin scooped up the last mouthful of curry, laid the spoon across his empty plate, and took a sip of water.
Tomie had finished ahead of him and was working her way through the dessert she'd just ordered — a strawberry parfait, the tall glass packed with ice cream, whipped cream, strawberries, and cornflakes. Calories held no terror for her, and she ate the sort of thing no one on a fitness regimen would dare touch with unhurried delight.
Outside, the sun had grown fiercer, glaring off the glass curtain wall of the building opposite in a sheet of white. The air conditioning hummed, holding the heat of the day out beyond the windows.
Amamiya Rin leaned back against the padded booth and let his gaze drift over the other customers. The students who'd been debating Ultraman were gone. The young mother with her son had paid and left too, their table taken now by an elderly couple eating soba in silence.
He took out his phone to check the time.
The screen lit up, and a missed-call notification jumped out at him.
Three of them.
His thumb swiped the screen open and he skimmed the list.
One from Indou Ranko, placed at nine twenty the previous evening.
Two from Mamiya Yuka, at ten twenty and eleven thirty that same night.
Bad luck all around — every one of them had come in while he was unreachable.
There were four text messages waiting as well, all from Mamiya Yuka.
[Amamiya-kun! Things are a little bad over here. I still can't tell whether there's actually a vengeful spirit or an evil god involved, but Editor-in-Chief Sayama and his wife are dead. Suicide. Their mental state was in terrible shape beforehand.]
[Amamiya-kun, I think I've stumbled into some kind of conspiracy. The senior colleague I'm working with might be a problem.]
[Amamiya-kun, I'm on Mount Ikoma, in the Kinki region…]
The third message broke off, unfinished.
[It's all right, nothing happened. I'm still following the investigation.]
The four texts hadn't been spread over much time. The earliest had come in a little after three the previous afternoon, while he was busy; he'd glanced at it, judged there was no real danger in it, and let it go. The last had arrived around three that morning, as if to tell him the crisis behind the two apparent cries for help had already passed.
Amamiya Rin's brow drew together, a thoughtful cast settling over his face.
"What happened?"
He said it under his breath. So much time had gone by — a full century, more than a century — that although he still remembered who Mamiya Yuka was, the details of whatever she'd been mixed up in had blurred badly.
What he did remember was that Mamiya Yuka had a real gift for courting death. Occult reporter by trade, with a folklorist for a teacher and Kazumi Junya, the policeman who investigated paranormal cases, among her acquaintances. Reckless by nature, too. The supernatural didn't frighten her; it drew her in. He'd warned her several times about how dangerous these incidents were, and she'd seen with her own eyes a victim dissolved by the Apology Demon's power — and none of it had been enough to knock the death wish out of her.
Still, on the face of it there didn't seem to be any real problem. Probably.
He thought so, anyway. That didn't stop the worry.
He kept staring at the message that had cut off. Mount Ikoma. The Kinki region. She'd still been texting at three in the morning, which meant she could still move, still use her phone at that hour. But that abrupt break in the middle of a sentence kept snagging at him.
"Hey. Could you not space out on me while we're on a date?"
A voice cut across his thoughts.
Annoyed. Massively annoyed. First the knockoff, and now women she'd never even heard of! Nobody had come along to interrupt when the knockoff went out with Rin, so what gave them the right to interrupt hers, one after another after another?
Tomie glared at Amamiya Rin, radiating enough temper to raise the temperature of the room.
Her fingers were clamped around the ice cream spoon, the knuckles gone pale. Her other hand pressed flat on the tabletop as she leaned forward, a tiger crouched to spring.
Amamiya Rin lifted his head and met her eyes.
Her face was very close to his, eyes wide and round, lips pressed into a hard line. Sunlight slanting in through the side window laid faint shadows across her cheek, sharpening that furious expression into something genuinely fierce.
The commotion caught the attention of the other customers, and heads began turning their way.
The elderly couple set down their chopsticks, eyes moving back and forth between the two of them. Behind the counter, a server looked up with a cloth still in hand, clearly unsure whether to come over.
Amamiya Rin was silent for a second. Then, without hesitation, he set the phone down and turned it face-first against the table.
"Sorry."
He nodded, and there was no other word for his manner but clean and immediate.
"That was on me. I shouldn't get distracted when we're out on a date."
Tomie blinked.
She'd been braced for a few rounds of argument. She'd even mapped out getting physical with him — driving him down to his knees and from there straight into a hotel room. She was fairly confident that at that particular level of force, Amamiya Rin wouldn't bother fighting back at full strength.
Instead he'd simply admitted fault, and she found herself with nowhere to put any of it.
"You…"
Tomie started to say something, then swallowed it back down.
In the end she gave a short huff, dropped back into the booth, folded her arms, and turned to sulk at the window.
"Hmph. Good that you know it."
Watching her like that, the corner of Amamiya Rin's mouth curved just slightly.
In any case, he had a location. Mount Ikoma, Kinki region. And the message had said Mamiya was still shadowing her investigation; calling or texting her out of nowhere might land her in trouble.
Even if something really had gone wrong, knowing where Mamiya Yuka was meant a rescue was possible. There was no reason to spoil Tomie's mood over it now.
That was how Amamiya Rin worked it out.
____
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