Shinya Kashiwagi, a former newspaper reporter, quit the industry three years ago and now works as a part-time writer for a local paper. His life is colorless and empty—until one morning when a news alert catches his attention: four young women have disappeared within a week in a neighboring prefecture. Police dismiss it as runaways. The media ignores it. But Kashiwagi's instincts flare. He discovers the connection: all four disappeared women were linked through the same construction company, Rok
The Gray Reporter's Chain of Testimony - The Contours of Regret, The Unwritten Article
Stone-gray regret settles like sediment at the bottom of a man's chest, and giving that thing a name is something Ishida Kenichi had long since abandoned.
It was only once that Ishida Kenichi opened his mouth.
But that single utterance——"That girl... it was never an elopement"——poured the weight of forty-three years into Kashiwagi's entire body in an instant. The sound of withered leaves beneath his feet on the slope of the return path still lingered in the depths of his ears.
The second-floor guest room of the inn "Mitarashi-so."
Beyond the window, the Mitarashi River flowed quietly, mirroring the winter dusk, while the Aoryo Plateau on the far bank slowly sank into twilight. Winter's sun sets early, and the afternoon light had already tilted low, drawing long shadows across the guest room's floor. On the desk lay documents spread since the previous night. Copies of employment records that had been isolated in the secretarial office of Rokugatsu-do Construction. A chronological table organizing seven or more confirmed instances of the same pattern. The date of the embankment construction project's commencement in 1963 and the date of the missing person report——the eleven-day gap between them. The fact that the site of the branch house was now a materials storage yard for Rokugatsu-do Construction. And three words written on a slip of paper that an employee had silently pressed into his hands in the building's corridor——"Mitarashi River," "Old Weir," "1963."
Kashiwagi Shinya opened his laptop.
A new document appeared on the screen. He attempted to write the opening of the article. His fingers rested on the keyboard.
They did not move.
It was the same posture as three years ago——that recognition rose through him with the sensation of his own body. Kashiwagi had not been consciously recalling the article he had begun writing in the Society Section of the Toyo Hochi newspaper. But the moment his fingers stopped on the keyboard, the tactile memory of that night three years past returned to him. That night too, his fingers had stopped like this. And in the end, he had entered the command to delete the entire folder.
Kashiwagi drew his notebook closer.
He attempted to organize the reasons he could not write. The absence of evidence——Ishida Kenichi's single utterance could not become testimony. Fear——the threatening letter lay within his notebook. And one thing more. The fact that the same question from three years ago still existed there, creating a certain kind of void. That threefold void, Kashiwagi inscribed in pencil in his notebook.
The moment he finished writing, the room's fixed telephone rang.
He picked up the receiver, thinking it might be an invitation to dinner from the innkeeper, Domon Yoshie.
"Is this Kashiwagi Shinya?"
The instant he heard that voice, Kashiwagi's posture straightened.
Amagasaki Ryuichiro——the third-generation head of the Amagasaki family. Former chairman of Rokugatsu-do Construction, current honorary advisor. A seventy-eight-year-old man of immense influence in the political and financial circles of Mukuge Prefecture. The quality of the voice differed from when they had met in the seventh-floor reception room of Rokugatsu-do Construction's headquarters. That voice had been clothed in controlled dignity. But what now reached him through the receiver was something else entirely——the surface veneer stripped away. A voice that had been held down under the weight of sixty years——it took Kashiwagi's auditory sense mere seconds to identify it as such.
"...Yes, this is Kashiwagi."
"I understand Ishida met with you."
It was a tone of assertion. He spoke as though it were a given that he knew of the investigation's progress——that implication seeped beneath the words in an instant. Whether it was contact from Ishida or surveillance of the estate grounds, Kashiwagi quietly processed either possibility. Either way, this old man already knew.
"Ishida is a man who has guarded many things for a long time."
Ryuichiro's voice continued slowly.
"What we buried——"
There was a brief silence.
"——I told myself it was to erase the facts. But now I know that was a lie. I believed it was to prevent further wounds. Yet four women disappeared. The same thing happened again, within the very thing I sought to protect."
Kashiwagi, holding the receiver, analyzed the structure of the old man's words. It was not a threat. Nor was it persuasion. This took the form of a confession——it took several seconds to reach that judgment. But after judging, another question came. Was it an expression of sincerity? Or was he disclosing emotion as a final means to stop the investigation? That judgment would not come.
The very impossibility of that judgment might be the deepest part of this old man's words——that recognition formed slowly within Kashiwagi.
"Regret, you see,"
Ryuichiro said. Both exhaustion and age mingled in his voice.
"cannot be rewritten. That is all there is to it."
Then the line went dead.
He had demanded nothing. He had promised nothing. Only the word "regret" remained behind.
Kashiwagi set down the receiver. Beyond the window, the sound of the Mitarashi River's waters came. Distant, low, as though from a place unrelated to this room. The intuition that the old man's voice contained genuine regret, and the intuition that he must still write, coexisted in Kashiwagi's chest without canceling each other out.
＊
He contacted Maho thirty minutes later.
"Could we meet at the library after it closes? There is something I wish to discuss."
He conveyed only that reason.
The Local Materials Room of Hinomori Municipal Library——a reinforced concrete two-story building seven minutes' walk south from Hinomori Station, adjacent to the Citizens' Park along the Mitarashi River——had only a single fluorescent light on during the night after closing. The spines of stacked materials softly sank their outlines into shadow beneath that weak illumination. The microfilm reader's power was off, and the scent of old paper filled the room's air quietly.
Maho was already seated, waiting. Her long straight hair, tinged with pale purple, hung quietly in the fluorescent light. Her bright, clear green eyes narrowed for just an instant as they met Kashiwagi's face, as though attempting to read something there. A small mole on her left wrist was visible in the gesture of her hands folded before her chest. She, who ordinarily carried a notebook everywhere, had left it on the desk tonight, unopened.
Kashiwagi sat in the chair across from her.
"Ryuichiro called me."
Maho's expression did not change. Only her posture tilted slightly forward——a preparation to receive what would be said.
Kashiwagi recounted the contents of the call. From the change in the old man's voice's quality to the structure of the words he had spoken. The phrase "I told myself we buried it to prevent further wounds, but I now know that excuse was a lie when four women disappeared," he reproduced as accurately as possible.
After Maho finished listening, she did not answer immediately.
Her lips moved as though quietly repeating within her mouth the expression "buried regret" that Ryuichiro had used. A silence filled the materials room——a silence that seemed to weigh that heaviness. Outside, the sound of the Mitarashi River's waters reached faintly to the window.
"Do you believe that person truly regrets?"
Maho's question was quiet and gentle. She was not accusing. Only asking.
Kashiwagi attempted to answer. But before the words came, something else emerged from his mouth.
"May I tell you about something from three years ago?"
Maho nodded. She did not speak. That was enough.
Kashiwagi began to speak. About the article he had begun writing in the Society Section of the Toyo Hochi newspaper. It was investigative reporting on irregularities connected to a local public works project. Evidence was accumulating. But pressure came midway. The editorial leadership postponed publication. Kashiwagi neither protested that decision nor attempted to take the story to another outlet. In the end, he deleted the entire folder. His fingers, resting on the keyboard that night, remained motionless for a long time. And when they moved, they entered the command to delete.
"I may have yielded to fear. I may have yielded to submission to the organization. I may have fled from self-loathing. Even after three years, I do not know which."
His voice held no emotion. He simply placed it there as fact.
"That state of judgment-inability has kept me suspended all this time."
Maho did not interrupt. She did not organize his words. She simply received them. Her green eyes remained on Kashiwagi's face, but there was no urgency in her response.
The silence deepened.
Then a sound echoed from the corridor.
A vacuum cleaner. A custodian was apparently conducting night cleaning, and the machine's low rumble approached slowly from down the hall, passed before the materials room's door, and receded again.
Both of them were drawn slightly back to reality at once.
Maho let out a small laugh. She understood this was not a moment for laughter, but the sound was so divorced from the room's atmosphere that she could not stop it. Kashiwagi's mouth corners moved slightly as well——a grimace too brief to be called such, merely an instant's softening.
That breath of space cracked the weight of the moment just slightly.
After a time, Maho spoke. Her voice was quiet, yet possessed a certain core of certainty.
"Kashiwagi's regret and Amagasaki's regret seem to share a similar structure."
It was not an accusation. Nor was it consolation. It was placed there as an observation.
"Both took the form of inaction——of not writing, not conveying. And both share the danger that this inaction, over time, becomes rewritten into a narrative of protection."
Maho did not continue. She herself understood that was enough.
Kashiwagi remained within the weight of those words for a time.
Rewritten into a narrative of protection.
Until now, Kashiwagi had understood what he had done that night three years ago as "yielding to fear." But perhaps that understanding itself had already been a conversion into a narrative. The interpretation of inaction born of fear had functioned as a narrative that justified Kashiwagi's suspension for three years. So too with Ryuichiro——the narrative of preventing further wounds had justified sixty years of time.
And within that narrative, four women had disappeared.
Something moved within Kashiwagi. It was not emotion. It was something akin to a certain conviction that came at the end of accumulated logic, settling quietly.
＊
He returned to the second-floor guest room of "Mitarashi-so" around nine o'clock that night.
The hallway's lights were dim, and the wooden floor softly absorbed the sound of Kashiwagi's footsteps. He entered the room and turned on the light. On the desk, investigation fragments lay unchanged from the previous night. Copies of employment records. A chronological table. The eleven-day gap. The now-vacant site of the branch house.
Kashiwagi took his smartphone and opened his contacts list.
Toyo Hochi newspaper, Society Section——there was the number of a former colleague from the workplace where he had resigned three years ago. His name was Hasegawa. He had been Kashiwagi's contemporary at the company and had continued to handle investigative reporting longer than anyone else in the Society Section. Kashiwagi had not contacted him once since his resignation. Had not been able to, would be more accurate.
Kashiwagi was acutely aware of the limitations of publishing as a contributor to the Hagino Daily News. The incident lay outside the paper's circulation area. Structurally, the article could not stand without formal testimony from Ishida Kenichi. The vulnerability of a local paper under pressure. Only the investigative reporting format of a national newspaper was a medium equ
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