EDGE by Kôji Suzuki Read Free Book Online

the editor assigned to the project. She made two week-long visits to the Fujimuras’ neighborhood and put together a thirty-page article.
    But even after all of that, Saeko was unable to crack the case. She still didn’t know what had happened to the Fujimuras. If they had been the victims of a crime, there was no solid evidence as to who had committed it.
    More and more, it seemed to Saeko as if the Fujimura family had simply vanished into thin air.
    2 Saeko turned off the TV, crawled out of bed, and opened her planner to check the time of her meeting today with the TV station. One p.m., in a meeting room at the station. There was still plenty of time.
    She had breakfast and took a leisurely shower. As she stepped into a tight skirt and zipped it up—she hadn’t worn one of these in a while—she felt her body tense slightly in anticipation. This was the first time Saeko had ever been involved in a television show. She relished the idea of undertaking a job far more grueling than anything she’d ever done. She wanted to lose herself in work that would exhaust her mentally and physically, without sacrificing pride or self-respect.
    She knew that by pursuing novel experiences she could maintain a certain degree of tension in her life that would help her forget the pain. At the same time, she had a tendency to imagine failure around every corner and was often afraid to take the initiative. Instead, she found herself always passively going with the flow, letting herself get caught up in whatever work happened to come her way.
    Even though her father had advised her to do just the opposite.
    Whenever Saeko struggled with her schoolwork, her father never simply gave her the answers. Instead, he offered subtle hints, guiding Saeko to find the answers on her own.
    When Saeko was in sixth grade, her science teacher assigned a difficult problem as homework, and the answer was nowhere to be found in her books. It required a spatial understanding of astronomical bodies to work out the answer, and the teacher hadn’t expected any of the students to actually solve it. He had simply intended for the assignment to stimulate deep inquiry in the students by way of forcing them to think about a difficult problem.
    Saeko had thought about the problem to the best of her abilities, but the answer was beyond her. Eventually, she consulted her father.
    Her father began by drawing an illustration and explaining how the planets orbited the sun. With gestures and humor, he offered an animated account of the resulting interplay of light and darkness, the waxing and waning of the moon, lunar and solar eclipses, the relationship between the positions of Venus and Mars, the directionality and volume of light received from the sun, and so forth. By helping Saeko visualize the relationships between the sun, the planets, and the moon and how we perceive them from the Earth’s surface, he gave her an important hint as to how to solve the difficult assignment.
    “Close your eyes and picture it …”
    Her father’s gentle guidance worked like a charm. Saeko thought long and hard, and suddenly found herself able to visualize the planets orbiting the sun. The light that radiated out from the Sun in every direction and the resulting shadows made the Moon and Venus and Mars sparkle all the more fantastically in her imagination. She grasped the planets’ orbits perfectly and absorbed with ease the principles behind the phenomena. It was the moment that gave rise to Saeko’s passion for science and her ability to close her eyes at any time and witness the incredible astronomical spectacle wrought by the play of light on the objects of the solar system.
    When Saeko’s father disappeared during Saeko’s second year of high school, her ability to visualize celestial motion also departed. When she did manage to conjure up lifeless, mineral objects revolving in a dark vacuum, there was no beauty in the image. At the same time, she lost interest in physics,