site 47: Sarai Hashigami

The sun was about to set, and the sky was starting to turn purple.

When I opened the door to Café☆ Blue Moon, where I was supposed to meet Yuta Gamon, it was already past five.

It was my first time in the place. The interior design seemed very adult. Not the kind of place a high schooler would choose. Between the decorations and the faint smell of tar, it was less like a café and more like a café bar.

I came up with several hypotheses about the connection between Yuta Gamon and this place, but I decided it was a waste to spend valuable brain memory on something like that and gave up halfway.

There were three other people in the room, besides the owner.

A man and two women.

The man was Yuta Gamon. He was sitting in a corner seat, and had his hands wrapped around his knees for some reason.

One of the girls was Miyuu Aikawa. I’d met her earlier. She was the one who’d told me about Yuta Gamon.

When our eyes met, she looked surprised, then stood up and gave me a little bow. I nodded to her.

As for the other girl...

I didn’t know her, and yet...

“Poor Sarai-kyun! ♪ Poor Sarai-kun! ♪”

P-Poor Sarai-kun?!

For some reason this woman sympathizing with me was sitting next to Yuta Gamon, so I figured she was with him, but...

Now she was dancing around the shop. Looking at her, I lost all confidence in my analysis. That’s how hard it was to read her actions.

I wasn’t sure if she was part of Kirikiri Basara, or maybe she was just an employee here at Blue Moon. That would only make sense if the place included a service where the employees danced for the customers, though.

...It was immediately clear, however, that this wasn’t that type of place.

If she was taking pity on me, that meant she knew my dad was dead. But that didn’t tell me who she was.

As for Yuta Gamon, he was glaring at me angrily.

“What is it? I’m sorry I’m late, but I’d already been scheduled to work, and I told you that over the phone.”

“...”

Gamon said nothing. Instead he just pouted and looked away. He was acting just like a child, but—

“You look pale. Something bad happened because I was late, didn’t it? But I wasn’t the direct cause of whatever it was, so you can’t bring yourself to blame me. Is that it? Did the police question you or something?”

Gamon’s whole body twitched.

“H-How...”

“It’s obvious.”

Holding your knees, psychologically speaking, means you’re trying to protect yourself. At least, that’s what one theory says. It’s the same thing pill bugs do.

In other words, despite the fact that Gamon was waiting at the place he’d specified, he was so afraid he felt the need to protect himself. And Gamon’s biggest fear was that he’d be arrested for Isayuki Hashigami’s murder. The only reason he’d agreed to meet me here, knowing that he might run into the police, was that he wanted proof of his innocence — in other words, a clue to the real killer.

Which meant he’d made a bad call. On his way here, or perhaps while he was waiting, someone from the police had made contact with him.

“That detective knew me. It wasn’t a coincidence. He was here because he was after me. But for some reason, he didn’t arrest me. Either he let me go, or he’s hoping I’ll lead him to something.”

“...”

Evidently he hadn’t been asked to go the station.

It was quite possible.

Just like I’d decided Gamon wasn’t the killer, the police — or perhaps only part of the investigative team — might have reached the same conclusion.

It was still strange that they didn’t even question him, though.

“Um, what’s this about a detective?” Aikawa seemed confused.

“Huh? Um... No, we’re just talking about how there’s so many police officers around Kichijoji lately.”

From the terrible excuse he was giving her, it didn’t look like Gamon had told her about his witnessing my father’s murder.

“A-Anyway, tell me about the CODE riddle that was hidden on the ceiling.”

He probably wanted to change the subject, because he turned to me.

That’s right. That was why I came here today.

“Hey, if there’s four of you here, can you at least order something? Gamota never orders anything but water!” The bartender, a very heavily muscled man, was twisting his body back and forth as he spoke. It was pretty disgusting.

“F-Forget it! The mystery! Tell me already!” Gamon sounded irritated.

“Fine. I’ll get started.”

Me, Aikawa, and the girl who’d started dancing — she said her name was Narusawa — each ordered something. Then I put a piece of paper on the table. Gamon and the rest all looked at it.

It was a photo of all the holes in the ceiling of my father’s study. Gamon had taken it yesterday.

Just like he’d said, there was a message from my dad there.

I’d succeeded in decoding it last night. It would’ve been incredibly difficult to solve this mystery from scratch. But once you knew that it was rows of letters, it wasn’t that hard at all. This was my father’s dying message.

I’d only waited to tell Gamon this morning because I’d forgotten.

“Boards with all these holes like the ones on the ceiling are called pegboards. You’ve seen them used on the walls in music rooms, I’m sure.”

“They block sound, right?”

I shook my head in answer to Aikawa’s question. “They don’t block sound. They absorb it. They reduce the rate at which sound emitted in the rooms is reflected, and allow a sound-absorbing material behind the pegboard to absorb it.”

“Huh? Then those holes don’t exist to shut out sound from the outside?”

“They might work to do that a little, but that’s not their real purpose.”

“Wait, isn’t it actually really rare to use something like this in a house?” Gamon’s eyebrows furrowed as he spoke.

“Yeah. My dad wasn’t a musician or anything. There was no sense in using a pegboard in the study. By the way, this pegboard was put in when he did a sudden remodeling of the study a year ago. He didn’t remodel anything else in the house. When I asked him why at the time, he dodged the question.”

Thinking back, that was probably when my dad went from denying the Occult to saying it existed.

“Then Dr. Hashigami put that pegboard in to hide a message from the start? Isn’t that kind of crazy?” Gamon asked.

I was about to tell him that only idiots and amateurs jumped to conclusions like that — but I stopped. I didn’t expect any kind of intellectual discourse from a high school student running an aggregator blog.

“There were about forty thousand holes on the ceiling...”

“What?! You counted them all?” Gamon’s eyes went wide.

It was kind of amazing how he could get surprised at every little thing.

“I would never do something so inefficient as count them all individually. All you need to do is count the number of rows, and the number of holes in a row. It took less than fifteen minutes.”

Gamon didn’t seem satisfied with my answer. He was still glaring at me.

“Right, right. Sorry. So what was the message hidden in the holes?”

“Just like you said, they were encoded letters.”

“CODE! ☆ CODE! ☆ DYING? DINING? KITCHEN! ☆” Narusawa seemed unable to keep up with the conversation, so she was interrupting at irregular intervals. The word “inappropriate” probably didn’t exist in this large-breasted woman’s dictionary.

I decided to ignore this mysterious creature.

“Well, basically, the whole ceiling was covered in letters.”

“Letters on the ceiling?! That’s really surprising!” Gamon wanted to look good for Aikawa, so he kept interrupting, too. “Did you hear that, Myu-Pom? It was my idea that they were letters! Even Zonko told me I was smart!”

“Wow, you’re amazing, Gamo!”

“Who’s Zonko?” I asked. Was he talking about some other girl?

“Right, right. Zonko is this radio.” Gamon showed me the bag he had slung over his shoulder. Inside was a very old-looking radio.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, this thing talks all the time.”

“Gamo, are you talking about that again...?” Aikawa seemed bothered.

Evidently Gamon was delusional. This wasn’t a surprise. I’d had that feeling already. And actually, “talking” was what a radio was supposed to do...

I decided to ignore Gamon’s words, just like I was ignoring Narusawa’s. Japanese people had the bad habit of interrupting stories and dragging out meetings.

I tapped my fingers lightly on the photo of the pegboard.

“More specifically, it was using a format called Baudot code.”

“Baudot code?”

Everyone looked confused.

“It doesn’t surprise me that you haven’t heard about it. It was a form of letter encoding used as a storage medium for PCs over 50 years ago.”

“A storage medium? You mean like a hard disk?”

“Old computers used a kind of paper tape called punch tape to record data by punching five rows of holes.” It was used as a means of read/write storage for computers, but before that, it was used for telegraphs. It had a long history.

Evidently there were also versions that used six or eight rows instead of five, but I’d been able to decode my father’s message using the five-row version.

“Hey! Hey! I saw that in an old movie, maybe!” Narusawa had been spacing out with drool oozing down the side of her mouth, but suddenly she jumped up and began to do little hops. It seemed she was able to form a mental image of punch tape in her head.

“So you punch holes in tape... then the holes on the ceiling were...?!”

“It’s the same thing as binary. You can either leave a hole open, or close it. If it’s open, it’s ‘0.’ If it’s closed, it’s ‘1.’ And then you just treat it as Baudot code. For example, ‘00011’ is ‘A,’ and ‘11001’ is ‘B.’” I used my right hand to count in binary.

“I see. Or not. I don’t get it.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. By using this code, five dots can be converted into a single letter.”

“Man, that sounds like a pain in the ass. So you need to look at fifty dots just to get ten letters?”

Gamon had actually pointed out something intelligent for once.

“That’s right.”

“So what was the message on the ceiling?” Aikawa seemed worried as she motioned for me to continue.

“That’s right. That’s what’s important.”

“Imp? ☆ Or Tant! ☆”

“Fine. I’ll get started. I’ll tell you. It was... names.”

“A name?” Gamon stood up in shock. “It wasn’t ‘Ririka Nishizono,’ was it?”

“Who’s that?”

“Huh? It’s not her?”

“It wasn’t a single individual’s name, actually.”

I paused for a moment — and then took a deep breath before speaking very carefully.

“It was the names of 256 people.”

I could hear everyone gulp.

Everyone in the room had reached a single conclusion, and fallen silent.

“I took a random section and decoded it, only to get the name ‘KAMATA NORIYUKI.’”

“Who’s that?”

“No idea. There were others, like ‘USUI SACHIKO’ and ‘SHIRAYAMA TORU.’”

“U-Um?!” Aikawa leaned forward, more eager than she’d been a moment ago.

“Was one of the names ‘Chizu Kawabata’?”

“Is that someone you know?’

“...Yes. My best friend.”

“I’m not sure. It would take a long time to decode all the names.”

“I see...” Aikawa’s shoulders were slumping.

“Wait, why didn’t you decode them all? Even if it takes time, it’s still worth doing, right?” Gamon sounded angry.

“The decoding is a simple task. There’s no reason for me to do it. Now that I’ve come up with the interpretation algorithm, anyone can do the rest. Any idiot, I should say. Why don’t you do it?”

“...Grr...”

“Instead, I chose to spend my time on a series of letters that I found more inexplicable.”

“An inexplicable series of letters?”

“Yes. After every one of the 256 names, there was a ten-character series of strange letters. I thought about it all night, and didn’t come up with an answer.”

“I see...” Gamon suddenly had a nasty grin on his face. “So the famous Sarai’s throwing in the towel... LOL!”

“I haven’t thrown in the towel. I just haven’t had time to finish analyzing the problem.”

“Right, right. Whatever you say, man.”

Gamon wanted to know the answer, right? Why did he keep provoking me? It wasn’t going to help him with anything.

“Um, was there any kind of rule or something for those last ten letters?” Aikawa seemed to have run out of patience with Gamon, and she knocked him out of the way to ask her question.

“The last seven were always the same. ‘EEQTUWI.’”

“Umyu? That doesn’t sound like it means anything, huh.”

“But the three in front were always different. The most common was ‘QEQ.’ Then there was also ‘QQQ,’ ‘POQ,’ ‘QRQ,’ ‘QPQ,’ ‘QEY,’ ‘QEQ,’ ‘QQY,’ ‘QWQ,’ and ‘PIQ.’ There was only one ‘QQY’ that I saw, for example.”

“So there’s some kind of rule for them, but you don’t know what they mean? Maybe Toko would know...”

“Toko?”

“She’s an editor at Mumuu.”

“Huh? Seriously?” Gamon shouted excitedly.

“Seriously.”

“Introduce me.”

“Oh, sure. That’s fine. I’ll do that.”

“Thanks... Um, anyway.” Gamon turned back to me and slowly raised his hand. “By the way, those 256 people, they have to be... them, right?”

I knew what Gamon was trying to say.

Of course, so did Aikawa and Narusawa.

256.

It was a special number, mathematically. It was also a good number for computers to work with. On old 8-bit computers, the highest number you could show was 256. But in Japan right now, that number had an entirely different meaning. For the past few days, you couldn’t look anywhere on the media or the internet without seeing it.

“Maybe this is... a list of the victims who were found in Inokashira Lake.”

Everyone fell silent and the air became heavy once more.

“By the way, um, did you try matching it with the publicly available list of victims?”

“No. I haven’t. I only decoded about ten randomly picked names.”

After that, I used all my brain’s memory capacity towards solving the mystery of the other letters. I thought about it all during work today, but I’d gotten nowhere.

The news had still only announced about half of the victims’ names, and the internet was buzzing with rumors about secret conspiracies and government censorship. But it was still a mystery why it was taking so long.

Gamon suddenly pointed a finger at Ryotasu.

“Okay, Ryotasu. You decode them.”

“Me? Hmm, okay. I didn’t understand what Sarai-kyun said at ALL! Not in the slightest! So you can just leave it to me! ♪”

“Wait—”

“...”

This Narusawa girl seemed to have a few screws loose after all.

She was always so... innocent... no matter what was going on around her... I-It was hard to understand.

“She’s no good. Somebody has to do it. Okay, who should it be, then?” Gamon was refusing to volunteer himself. It was obvious that he’d spent his whole life foisting off the hard jobs onto someone else.

“Do you want me to do it?” Aikawa raised her hand reluctantly.

Gamon’s eyes were shining, but surprisingly, Narusawa shook her head.

“Myu, you don’t have time for that.”

“Huh?”

“You just focus on your friend. Okay?”

“Narusawa...”

Friend? Did she mean Chizu Kawabata?

“But then who’s going to do it?”

“Gamon should do it.” Since they were taking so long, I chose to decide things myself, but Narusawa interrupted again.

“Gamotan can’t do it either. He doesn’t have time for that.”

“You don’t?”

“...Y-Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. That’s exactly right. I’m busy.”

Gamon was trying his best to look away from everyone. That meant he was lying. He was easy to understand.

At this rate, we weren’t going to get anywhere. I guess we’d just have to put off the list, then.

“By the way, you said the name ‘Ririka Nishizono.’ Who is that?”

“...It’s someone I’m thinking might be the real killer, not that I have any evidence.”

“The real killer?” Did he mean the person who’d killed my dad? But he didn’t have any evidence, he’d said. “Who are they?”

“An ero-doujin writer.”

“What did you say?”

“The person who drew this,” Gamon said, and he took out of his bag — a shady-looking doujin with two men holding each other on the cover.

“Hey, can I go home?”

“W-Wait! There’s a reason for this!”