EDGE by Kôji Suzuki Read Free Book Online Page A

mathematics, the ability to grasp spatial relationships—and the courage to explore new territory.
    Saeko’s thoughts shifted back to the present. The memory of receiving hints from her father had brought to mind his postcard.
    Where did I put it?
she wondered. With the sudden realization that she’d forgotten something important for many years, her movements quickened. She pulled open drawers all over the apartment, hunting for the lost item.
    She finally found the postcard in the file of records pertaining to her father’s disappearance. The card’s edges were tattered and frayed; after it had arrived, she had carried it with her at all times, touching it frequently and staring at it with intense longing. She had probably tucked it away in the file a few years before getting married. Now, more than ten years had passed since she’d last handled it.
    It was a run-of-the-mill picture postcard, but the postmark was somewhat unusual. It had been sent from La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. The picture was of the ruins of Tiwanaku, which were not far from La Paz.
    On the back of the postcard was Saeko’s father’s familiar handwriting. His letters and postcards were always written horizontally in Western style since he made frequent use of numbers and English words in his correspondence.
    The postcard was dated August 19, 1994, and the postmark bore the same date. He must have written it the morning of the nineteenth and posted it just after checking out of his hotel. After leaving the hotel he hadflown from the El Alto International Airport in La Paz to Houston, and the next day to Narita. He’d arrived at Narita on August 21st, checked in at a hotel near the airport, and called Saeko to let her know that he would be heading for Shikoku the next day.
    She never heard from him again.
    The postcard had arrived on August 25th, when Saeko’s father’s disappearance had already robbed her of all vitality, leaving her dazed and lost. Even though she knew it had been written a week earlier, when the postcard arrived it convinced Saeko somehow that she would see her father again one day. It had given her the strength to go on living.
    How are you, Saeko? I’m headed back to Narita now by way of Houston. Coming here has led me to realize a number of things
.
    Life, eyes, black holes, language …
    The extinction of the dinosaurs, the extinction of the Neanderthals …
    Life and death. Opposing concepts. In terms of information theory, the mechanisms of life and death are the same. The interplay of light. The interplay with the brain and consciousness maintains the structure of the cosmos. The important thing is the network of relationships. If these relationships break down, “the sun will not rise tomorrow.”
    August 19, 1994, La Paz
    When the 17-year-old Saeko had received this postcard, she had no clue what her father was driving at. In fact, it wasn’t until she became a philosophy major in college that she recognized that “the sun may not rise tomorrow” was a reference to Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
. Saeko’s father always put his references in quotation marks to avoid confusion. The full quotation from Wittgenstein was, “It is a hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.”
    The Internet and e-mail were not yet ubiquitous when her father had written the postcard, and Saeko suspected that he had intended it to serve both as a message to his daughter and a memo to himself.
    But what on earth had he meant? Saeko had been so preoccupied by his disappearance that she had neglected to devote herself to deciphering the postcard’s message. There was something ominous in the mention ofextinction and a denial of the future in that clause “the sun will not rise tomorrow.”
    Was it pure coincidence that Saeko had remembered the postcard her father had written her eighteen years ago on the same morning she was scheduled to attend a meeting