Read Online Birthday by Kôji Suzuki - Free Book Online

for a final round of feedback, and then break for the night. The theater had a strict closing time, so there would be no midnight rehearsals tonight. For him, moving into the theater also meant freedom from having to stick around for late rehearsals, worrying about missing his last train home.
    Suddenly Toyama sensed a presence behind him. He turned around.
    The door was ajar, and a woman was standing just outside it. In the dim light of the booth he couldn't make out her face. Toyama got up and opened the door wider.
    "Oh, Sada. It's you."

    Sadako Yamamura stood in the doorway blankly.
    Toyama took her hand and brought her into the booth, shutting the door again behind her. The door was heavy, soundproof.
    He waited for her to say something, but she just stared past him, tight-lipped, at the almost-complete stage below. The living room set was being assembled, and the director was giving detailed instructions regarding the placement of its various components.
    "I'm afraid."
    The words resonated with all the naive simplicity of an aspiring actress facing her first appearance onstage.
    Sadako had graduated from high school on the island of Izu Oshima and immediately come up to Tokyo; she'd made a remarkably rapid transition from intern to actress. She had every right to be nervous and uneasy.
    Needless to say, out of the eight interns, she was the only one going onstage tonight.
    Toyama tried to encourage her. "Don't worry. I'll be cheering for you up here."
    Sadako shook her head. "That's not what I mean."
    Her gaze was hollow as she shifted it from the stage to the spinning tape reel. It was blank—he'd just checked it, but he'd neglected to push stop, so on it spun.
    Toyama stopped it and rewound it.
    "Everybody's scared when they debut," he said over the sound of the tape rewinding. But Sadako's reply was strangely off, like an out-of-focus picture.
    "Hey, is there a woman's voice on that tape?"

    Toyama laughed. As far as he could recall, he'd never recorded a solo human voice: playing something like that while an actor was delivering his lines would kill the performance. Under normal circumstances they'd never overlay dialogue with dialogue like that.
    "What kind of question is that, out of the blue?"
    "It's something Okubo said a few minutes ago, you know, when you were checking your sound levels. He made a funny face, like he was afraid of something. He said there was a woman's voice on the tape. Not only that, he said he'd heard it before. So I..."
    Okubo was another one of the interns, multital-ented but short, and so sensitive about it that it had given him a complex of sorts. He was another one who had a crush on Sadako.
    "I know what you're talking about. That's crowd noise. You know, what we play in the background during your scene."
    They'd taken the crowd noise for that scene from a movie. The voices were just supposed to be submerged in the background; no one voice was supposed to be heard above the others. But it might be possible for someone to have the auditory illusion that he or she was hearing one of them in particular, in an aural close-up, as it were.
    "No, that's not it." Her denial was forceful enough to bother Toyama.
    "Well, then, do you know what scene it was?"
    If he could figure out where it was on the tape, he could check it now on the headphones. If there was a strange woman's voice on there, he had to deal with it now, or it would be trouble later.
    But the chances of that were next to nil. He couldn't count the number of times he'd listened to the tape during rehearsals. Not to mention the repeated scrutiny he'd given it on his headphones when he'd edited it together. There was no way a stray sound could have gotten on there at this point.
    "Okubo's been saying strange things. You know that little Shinto altar backstage?"
    "Most playhouses have 'em."
    Toyama was beginning to guess what Okubo must have been telling Sadako. Just as theaters all had Shinto altars, they all had scary stories