The Ginza Ghost Read online

  Several months earlier, reports had started spreading, originating with the crew of a freight ship which had barely avoided running aground on the reefs. The reports claimed that the light of the Shiomaki Lighthouse would sometimes act erratically, especially on nights with dense fog. Normally, the lighthouse sent out a beam of bright light every fifteen seconds, but on such occasions, it would sometimes only send out a light every thirty seconds. Now, it is the Inubō Lighthouse, several hundred miles further south, which sends out a light every thirty seconds, so steamships making the troublesome trip back from the northern seas through persistent fog could be fooled by this eerily erratic light. If they’d move starboard in their joy at having reached Cape Inubō, they’d immediately run into the underwater rocks and reefs and get sucked into the maelstrom. Sailors are a superstitious lot. Whether the terrible rumour was true or false, it started getting into the heads of sailors and it wasn’t long after that—about one month ago—that on one particularly foggy night a freight ship did indeed hit the underground rocks. It had sent out dozens of distress calls, repeating its report on the anomaly going on at Shiomaki Lighthouse, but the ship eventually disappeared completely. The incident had become public, and the Shiomaki Lighthouse had been given a serious warning by the authorities.

  Shiomaki Lighthouse was a third class lighthouse under the direct control of the Ministry of Communications. It had two keepers, and—including their families and others—six people altogether were living there. One of the two keepers in particular was an extremely trustworthy employee, reliability personified. Jōroku Kazama was almost sixty and lived there together with his daughter Midori. His serious nature, which reminded people of an old warrior, attracted much respect. And what made the old keeper even more reliable was the fact that he was a fervent believer in science, and unlike many of his age, did not believe in the supernatural. Even when the warning from the authorities came, he only answered curtly:

  ‘We have a rotation shift to guard the lighthouse each and every night, so there is no way a thing like that could have happened here. It was probably an unfortunate trick of the light caused by a flow of thick sea fog, or a large flock of migratory birds inside the fog that reflected the light. But now it has grown into a larger story, making everyone suspicious of us.’

  Yet, despite the stern old keeper’s declaration, a distinctly bizarre incident had just occurred at Shiomaki Lighthouse.

  The light had at first been sent far out into the grey fog every fifteen seconds, as normal, but then it suddenly turned into an eerie continuous beam of light for about two seconds, then vanished into the ominous darkness. All we could make out was the occasional low, heavy boom of the fog horn through the relentless roar of the sea.

  We made our way quickly as possible to the tip of Cape Shiomaki and, just as the outline of the gigantic, thirty-metre high white tower loomed out of the fog, we suddenly saw two men appearing silently in front of us out of the darkness. They were Mitamura, the wireless radio operator, and Sano, the attendant.

  ‘Oh, it’s you….’ The small attendant called out and ran towards us as soon as he recognised us.

  ‘I’m so glad you came.’ Radio engineer Mitamura immediately started speaking. ‘Our radio has broken down, so I couldn’t contact anyone. We were about to come over to the laboratory.’

  From the strangely nervous behaviour of these two men, I imagined that something out of the ordinary had happened. As we walked together towards the lighthouse, Mitamura started to explain.

  ‘It’s Mr. Tomida, the lighthouse keeper who was on night watch tonight… something horrible has happened to him. It’s really unbelievable. Mr. Kazama will explain it in detail to you.’

  The attendant, who had been trailing behind us, suddenly muttered unexpectedly.

  ‘It finally appeared….’

  ‘What appeared?’ asked Director Azumaya. The attendant shook his head several times, as if to disavow his own words.

  ‘A-a… ghost appeared…’

  2

  We passed through the concrete gate and entered the well-lit grounds of the lighthouse. The three small living quarters to the right and the wireless radio cabin to the left were all brightly illuminated, but darkness had enveloped the top of the lighthouse, which stood in the centre of the grounds, facing the sea. Reflecting the light of its surroundings, the white figure of the lighthouse appeared to be floating faintly in the darkness, resembling the lines of a female sumō wrestler. At the foot of the lighthouse stood the old lighthouse keeper Kazama, reminiscent of General Nogi[xiii] with his greying beard, who was trying to calm down a pale, middle-aged woman. When he saw us, he had the attendant Sano take the woman to the living quarters and then turned to us.

  ‘That’s Tomida’s wife Aki. She is in a terrible mental state, so I can’t show her the place where it happened until she has calmed down. I really can hardly believe it.’

  As he was speaking, old Kazama tried to light a candle, but because of his trembling hands, he had to strike several matches to get a flame.

  I had met with him a couple of times before, but this was the first time I had seen him shaken like that. There was no hint of the unbending old warrior to be seen. He stepped out in front of us, the flame on the candle still flickering, and as he quietly opened the entrance of the lighthouse, he turned to us again.

  ‘…A-anyway, please come see what has happened.’

  Director Azumaya, radio engineer Mitamura and I followed him into the gloomy stairwell. As soon as we were all inside and the door had closed behind us, the lighthouse keeper suddenly came closer and whispered:

  ‘…This is the first time in my long life I have seen a ghost….’

  I felt my whole body freeze to hear the usually sanguine Kazama talk like that.

  ‘…I’ll explain everything right from the beginning,’ said the old man, as he led us up the dark, steep spiral staircase. His voice reverberated against the high inner wall and an indescribably creepy whisper of an echo repeated after him.

  ‘…I wasn’t on watch tonight but Tomida had been helping out with the wireless radio during the day, and tired as he was, he’d sometimes doze off. And then there are the rumours, and my insolent daughter has not been in a good mood tonight, so with all that on my mind, I just couldn’t fall asleep. Then, about an hour ago, I was finally about to doze off when I suddenly heard the loud noise of glass breaking from high up. And at almost the same moment, I heard a powerful, metallic noise, as if a machine were breaking down. I sat up in dazed shock for a moment, but then I realised that if the noise had come from above, it could only have come from the lighthouse, and I hurried anxiously out of my living quarters. I gazed up, and all I could see was total darkness: the light from the lantern room on the top of the tower was out. Before I knew it I had cried out at the top of my voice to Tomida, who should have been up there in the lantern room. There was no answer, but I could feel the earth rumble from the foot of the lighthouse. I realised something terrible must have happened so I made my way over to the lighthouse, where I met up with Mitamura, who like me had quickly left his wireless radio cabin.’

  Here, the old lighthouse keeper stopped to take a breath. The spiral staircase was starting to seem almost like an optical illusion and was getting on my nerves. Mitamura, who was standing behind us on the spiral staircase, added:

  ‘Yes, both Mr. Kazama and I heard that creepy noise. And when we arrived at the lighthouse entrance, we heard a low, but absolutely hair-raising groaning voice—it must have been Mr. Tomita—and the groan wasn’t even over when we heard that indescribable voice of a ghost….’

  ‘The voice of a ghost?’ asked Director Azumaya, very intrigued.

  ‘Yes, it was definitely a ghost. There’s no way it could have been the voice of a human being! …It sounded as if it was laughing and crying at the same time… Yes, yes, like one of those toy balloon flutes.’

  ‘There are migrating birds which have a similar cry,’ observed the old
lighthouse keeper.

  ‘They might be similar, but they were still quite different. It’s more accurate to say it resembled the cry of a rutting cat.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, you’re right.’ Kazama dropped the topic. ‘Anyway, I had Mitamura go back to the wireless whilst I continued up the staircase with the candlestick in my hand. And when I finally arrived in the lantern room at the top—which also serves as the night watchman’s room— I witnessed the most terrifying sight….’

  ‘A ghost?’ asked the director.

  ‘Yes. It had made its way inside by breaking those thick glass panes surrounding the lantern room with a gigantic rock.’

  At that moment, Mitamura cried out and pointed to the steps of the staircase up ahead of us. Illuminated by the weak light of the candle, I could see a pool of dark blood which had flowed down the steps. I held my breath. Without exchanging a word, we entered the lantern room, where we saw for ourselves the violent traces left by the monster.

  Large glass panes enclosed the room all round, but there was a big hole in one of the panes facing the dark sea. Cracks had spread out from the hole in all directions like a spider’s web. A chilly sea wind caused fog to flow in through the hole, causing the candle flame to flicker. A gigantic triangular lamp holding a large Fresnel lens stood right in the centre of the small, cylindrical room. Part of it had been heavily damaged, and it appeared that petroleum gas was leaking out of the dark mouth of the burner, because I could hear a faint hiss. Large gears—a characteristic of these revolving lighthouses—were set in the frame of the massive lens, which rested on top of a cup-shaped mercury bath. The gears were connected in turn to a sophisticated rotation device, but that had been smashed to pieces. A weight should normally have been suspended down the shaft located right in the centre of the lighthouse—to provide the rotating force for the lens—but the rope had broken.

  But the truly atrocious image which caused me to avert my eyes was that of lighthouse keeper Tomida’s body, which was lying beside the broken machinery. Blood had spewed out in all directions, the eyeballs looked about to pop out of the head and it resembled nothing so much as a flattened meatloaf on which rested a wet rock.

  ‘…It’s horrible… that’s a very large rock,’ said Director Azumaya.

  ‘I’d say it probably weighs forty or fifty kan,’ said Mitamura. ‘I doubt that even two big men could have carried it all the way up here. And to be able to throw it thirty metres up, through the glass pane, from the edge of the sea… only a monster could have done that.’

  ‘So what about that ghost you saw?’ The laboratory director turned to old Kazama. The lighthouse keeper grimaced.

  ‘…As I explained, just at the very moment I entered this room, I saw that horrendous fiend dive into the sea from that platform outside, on the other side of those broken glass panes. It looked like a terribly large boiled octopus, wet all over, red and squashy….’

  ‘An octopus?’ Director Azumaya cocked his head.

  ‘An octopus has suckers, so it could have climbed up here,’ I said, half-joking. But the director shook his head.

  ‘No, in waters such as we have here, where there’s a cold current, you might find some giant Pacific octopuses with sizes starting at two, three metres, but you’d hardly call them red.’

  I turned my gaze to the linoleum floor, where I could see the traces made by the monster. Besides the many fragments of glass and the sea of blood, I could also make out some slimy fluid substance which had been spilt here and there on the floor, from which came an indescribably foetid smell which was pervading the room.

  3

  ‘I just don’t understand.’ After a while, Director Azumaya gave up. ‘I have no idea what happened. But we at least have these facts.’ He unfolded his arms. ‘If we combine the report of the night guard at our lab with your story…. First, this rock smashed the pane of glass and landed inside the lantern room, destroying the lens and the rotation machinery and crushing Mr. Tomida. At that moment, the rotation of the lens ceased, stopping the movement of the beam of light, but the light soon went out anyway because of a problem with the gas pipe. Next, the rope attached to the rotation machinery snapped, and the weight—which provided the rotating force—fell all thirty metres down the central shaft, causing the ground to tremble on impact, after which Mr. Tomida cried out for the last time. And then, to cap it all, at that moment, a monster appeared, making that terrifying cry and excreting the creepy fluid here… I confess I have no idea what to make of it all.’

  ‘I’ve never in my life experienced anything like it!’ exclaimed Kazama.

  The director turned to address him. ‘So what did you do when you came upon this horror?’

  ‘I was shocked of course, but I decided to go back down, and on my way I met Mitamura here coming up.’

  ‘The wireless radio wasn’t working,’ explained the radio engineer.

  Kazama continued: ‘The antenna set between that iron pole over there and the railing in front of the glass pane here had been broken by the rock. So we split up again. I went downstairs to wake up Sano, while Mitamura went up to the lantern room. But we had to do something, so after some deliberation, I sent Mitamura and Sano to your laboratory to get help.’

  ‘I see. I’m afraid we haven’t been of much help,’ said the director, starting to become practical again. ‘But we can’t leave things as they are. Mr. Kazama, could you prepare the back-up lens right away, without touching the evidence in the room? It’s pitch-dark outside at sea now. Mr. Mitamura, can you repair the antenna and restore communications as quickly as possible? We’ll help too.’

  The two men hesitated for a moment, but, as if lured by the sound of the waves, they started descending the lighthouse stairs. Director Azumaya and I took another look at the disorderly room, while we tried to keep calm.

  Nothing had prepared us for the important discovery we made. In a shadowy corner of the room, we found a dull hatchet with dark blood on the blunt blade.

  The expression on the director’s face changed and he crouched down to take a closer look at Tomida’s body. It didn’t take long for him to discover a fatal wound above the right ear, which appeared to have been freshly made by the hatchet. He stood up.

  ‘From the way the blood from this wound has set, I’d say it was made first and therefore it’s the true fatal wound. So, by the time the rock crashed through the glass, lighthouse keeper Tomida was already dead. But that means that the cry heard after the noise made by the crashing rock was not made by the deceased. This changes everything.’

  ‘Then what was the source of the ghostly cry?’ I blurted out.

  He didn’t respond and seemed lost in thought. Then he started to talk again.

  ‘Listen, I think that first of all we need to work out where this huge rock came from. I don’t see any barnacles or sea snails clinging to it anywhere, though there are plenty of those creatures in the seas around here. That means that the rock was lying somewhere above the high water line. But judging from how damp it is, it obviously didn’t come here from the mountains, either. Why don’t we take a little walk outside, to look at the area of high tide?’

  And so we went down to the water’s edge at the base of the lighthouse.

  There, the sharp wind blowing from the dark, foggy ocean showered us with spray from the waves. At a spot just beyond where the waves were at their most violent, we came upon several similar rocks, all wet from the spray.

  Between two of the rocks I unexpectedly discovered a length of thick rope going down to the sea. When I reached for it and pulled, the rope gave, so I started rolling it in. It was pretty long. After a while, I reached the end, only to find that a thin piece of cord had been tied to the end of the rope. I pulled on the cord, which also turned out to be quite long. When I had finally rolled the whole thing up, I remarked to the laboratory director in wonder: ‘How odd.’

  He had been staring at my peculiar catch the whole time, and now declared: ‘Things are becoming very
interesting. We’ll have to consider this new discovery very carefully! Let’s ask them what they were using it for.’

  So saying, he took the rope from me and started walking back to the lighthouse grounds, which we reached just as Mitamura was exiting the storage cabin in front with a bundle of wires. Director Azumaya asked him point blank:

  ‘Is this rope yours?’

  ‘Yes. We have several of them in the storage cabin. Oh, but there’s a thin cord attached here… Where did you find it?’

  The director didn’t answer. Instead, he looked up at the dark sky above us, and asked: ‘The height of the lighthouse up to the floor of the lantern room is thirty metres, I think? Could you please check the length of the rope?’

  Mitamura used a tape measure and announced:

  ‘…The rope and the cord are twenty-six metres, each.’

  ‘Twenty-six, you say? Wait….’ Director Azumaya stared up at the dark sky again. ‘Mr. Mitamura, what is the weight of the rotating lens?’

  ‘I’d guess it’s easily one ton?’

  ‘One ton. One ton equals slightly more than 266 kan. Then the weight that’s lowered into the thirty metre shaft at the centre of the lighthouse—the weight that serves as the force which rotates the lens—that thing must be quite heavy too.’

  ‘Yes, it’s at least eighty kan. It’s like a gigantic stone mortar. It descends the shaft slowly, and once it reaches its lowest point, we wind it up again.’

  ‘I see. When did you last wind it up?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘So the weight should still have been high up in the shaft tonight.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you very much. Oh, do you mind if I smoke a cigarette there in the wireless radio cabin?’ asked the director. He dragged me inside the cabin and closed the door. ‘Listen, I think I’m on to something. But first I want to test my theory out on you.’

  4

  Director Azumaya sat down on a nearby chair, lit up a cigarette and started to talk.