Ring

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While he had to recognize that this was a possibility, Asakawa shook his head. He wasn’t going to be defeated so easily.

“But, sir, then it would be the chest that hurt. Why should they be tearing at their heads?”

“Now listen, you. Have you ever had a heart attack?”

“Well … no.”

“And have you asked a doctor about it?”

“About what?”

“About whether or not a person having a heart attack would tear at his head?”

Asakawa fell silent. He had, in fact, asked a doctor. The doctor had replied, I couldn’t rule it out. It was a wishy-washy answer. After all, the opposite sometimes happens. Sometimes when a person experiences a cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in the cerebral membrane, they feel stomach discomfort at the same time as a headache.

“So it depends on the individual. When there’s a tough math problem, some people scratch their heads, some people smoke. Some people may even rub their bellies.” Oguri swiveled in his chair as he said this. “The point is, we can’t say anything at this stage, can we? We don’t have space for that stuff. You know, because of what happened two years ago. We won’t touch this kind of thing, not lightly. If we felt fine about speculating in print, then we could, of course.”

Maybe so. Maybe it was just like his editor said, it was a freak coincidence. But still—in the end the doctor had just shaken his head. He’d pressed the doctor—do heart attack victims really pull out their own hair? And the doctor had just frowned and said, Hmmm. His look said it all: none of the patients he’d seen had acted like that.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

At the moment there was nothing to do but retreat meekly. If he couldn’t discover a more objective connection between the two incidents, it would be difficult to convince his editor. Asakawa promised himself that if he couldn’t dig up anything, he’d just shut up and leave it alone.