Thinking back, for what was only a tiny radio station you could hear in Kichijoji, he got a lot of letters like that.
“Your father’s name was... Koresuke Gamon.”
“Right! You know my dad? I never thought he’d have any listeners in the FBI! Was he super popular in America or something?” I said jokingly, but Asunyan didn’t laugh at all. Her face was calm and collected.
How’d she know my dad’s name? Was she really a stalker, maybe?
“I’m here investigating the Inokashira Mass Suicide—”
“The 256 Incident.”
“Two-five-six? What?”
“That’s the name I came up with. Oh, the FBI can use it. I won’t ask for royalties.”
“The 256 incident... Right. In the process of working on the case, this station’s name came up.”
“What kind of connection is there between my dad and the 256 incident?”
“I discovered that your father was involved with a certain group.”
“Huh?” A certain group?
“The Hachifukushin Circle. Have you ever heard of it?”
I shook my head. “What’s that?”
“A kind of spiritual seminar, as they’re sometimes called. Your father was very popular there.”
“Spiritual... what?” I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. “Listen, don’t talk about my dad that way. He was just a normal guy who started up an FM radio station for fun—”
“As he answered letters with people’s problems on-air, many people came to rely on Koresuke Gamon. Eventually he started holding seminars where he could speak to them directly.” Asunyan was staring right at me. Her way of talking had changed a little. It was... strange. There wasn’t any harshness to her tone, but it felt like it was putting me on my guard. “In the end, it became a religious corporation.”
“A religious corporation?!”
I hadn’t heard that at all. Not a thing about it. Dad had never talked about it, and neither had Mom.
“The Hachifukushin Circle was a religious corporation intended to help those in need. At first, it functioned as a sort of hospice. They took in people hospitals said they couldn’t help, or those who disliked or didn’t trust doctors. But eventually it became a kind of cult.”
A cult. I snapped when I heard that negative word. “I don’t know anything about that!” I stood up from my chair and stalked towards Asunyan. “My dad was the leader of some kind of cult? No way! Don’t talk about my dad like that!”
“That’s not what I’m here to do.” Asunyan looked a little bothered, but she didn’t flinch or turn away. “But the Hachifukushin Circle and FM-KCZ are both probably related to what you call the 256 incident!”
“Shut up! You’re not even really with the FBI! You’re just making things up! Don’t try to intrude into my private life with your fantasies!”
“They aren’t fantasies, and I’m not making stuff up!” Now it was her turn to get emotional. “Those were the last hints he left me before he died!” she yelled.
The two of us glared at each other, only a few centimeters apart. But it was Asunyan who looked away first.
“I’m sorry.” She took an awkward step away from me.
“Wh-What? I’m talking to you because you wanted to talk. Why are you trying to make things worse for me when I’m already dead?”
“That wasn’t what I wanted to do...”
Wait, who was ‘he’ anyway?
“I can’t be at the center of all this... It’s a coincidence. I’m not the hero of a light novel or anything. The whole ‘the hero is actually dead’ trope got played out a long time—”
“I’m sorry for talking about this without thinking about how you’d feel. But I’m not lying. I have proof. Look at this.” Asunyan took a phone out of her pocket. “This digital data contains the magazines put out by the Hachifukushin Circle.”
I looked down, afraid, at the smartphone.
There was a group photo with many people in it. It was a picture of an empty-looking room, like you might see at a hospital, but there were more than two dozen people in it, of all different ages and sexes. And at the center of all of them, smiling, was...
“Dad...” So was Asunyan telling the truth, then? Just looking at this photo couldn’t tell me if it was a cult or not.
But it did prove my dad was involved with the Hachifukushin Circle. And that he’d died without telling me.
“Why didn’t Dad tell me anything before he died? Was it because I was just a kid?”
“Or maybe there was a reason he couldn’t,” Asuna said.
“What reason is good enough not to tell your own family?”
Asunyan didn’t answer, but that’s how I knew exactly what she was trying to say.
“Are you trying to tell me Dad was up to something bad?”
Asunyan had just called it a cult. A cult religion. This was a side of my father I knew nothing about.
“A-Anyway, this is all just a lie. What are you hoping to get out of lying to me?”
“Right now, I want every clue I can get my hands on. And it seems to me like you’re deeply involved in this. So help me.” Her expression was pleading. She looked desperate. She didn’t look like a detective who was researching a case because it was her job. It felt like she had some other kind of attachment to it.
“I’m deeply involved in the case, huh? Is that what they call ‘detective’s intuition’?”
Asunyan chuckled. “I don’t think I have that, but...”
She took off her glove on her right hand and touched the microphone in the DJ booth.
Asunyan closed her eyes slowly. What was she going to do? It felt somehow like I shouldn’t approach her or say anything. I gulped.
And then she exhaled softly and opened her eyes. It only lasted a few seconds. And then she started to talk.
“The postcards are in the right side of the drawer. It was your job to put the letters and postcards in there. The name of the program was Musashino Wonderland. You would always wait outside the booth with that radio, the Skysensor, and then your dad wouldn’t start broadcasting until you had turned it on. You’d give up him a thumbs-up as a signal. He always started the program the same way. ‘Once again, we’ve started off with my son watching me. Welcome to Musashino Wonderland.’”
It was like she was reading my memories. Everything she said was just how I remembered it.
“H-How... do you know about my dad?”
Asunyan put her glove back on and shrugged a little. “I don’t have a detective’s intuition, but I do have stuff that’s a little bit different. That’s how I’m an FBI agent at this age.”
Did she have special powers? This was even more like a manga.
“Are you a psychometer?”
“Huh? Y-Yes. You know about us, huh?” Asunyan was shocked that I’d guessed her power.
“There’s a lot of them in manga.”
“I-I’ve never had anyone tell me that before.” Maybe it wasn’t that popular a superpower in America.
“Oh wow. A superpowered high school girl FBI agent, huh? You’ve got all kinds of stuff going on.” But that explained it, yeah. That would explain how she got to be an FBI agent at her age. “So it wasn’t cosplay, then.”
“I guess you believe me.” She turned back towards me, relieved. “I’ll tell you everything I find out about your dad, so... please help me.”
I knew that she wasn’t a bad person. And that... there were things about Dad I didn’t know. I was curious, but I didn’t want to get involved too much myself.
So what could I ask for in exchange?
“I’m willing to help, but then let me report on this.”
“Report?”
“I run a blog called Kirikiri Basara.” I pulled out my phone and showed her the web page. “Can you let me do a special on you, as a ‘Japanese High School (Hot) Girl FBI Psychometer’? I was already planning on doing a special on Myu-Pom, the ‘(Cute) Popular High School Girl Fortune-Teller.’ A lot’s happened, and I haven’t done it yet. I’m sure if I did a special on that, I’d get tons of hits on my website. If you’re okay with that... then I’m willing to help.”
If I was dead, the least I could do was try and get some hits for my blog. At this point, I practically didn’t even care.
“Your blog... Okay. But keep me anonymous, alright?”
“You can leave that to me. I’m planning on introducing you as Asunyan.”
“Huh?” Asunyan blinked at me in surprise.
“It’s a nickname. You can call me by my nickname, too. Or maybe just call me ‘Yuta’!”
“Wait.” Asunyan cut me off. “Let me check something. I did tell you that I was from Seimei, right? And that I already graduated?”
“Oh, so maybe I should call you ‘Miss Asunyan’?
“That’s not the issue. I’m older than you, you know that, right?”
“Wow, are you the type that thinks about stuff like that? Like a musclebrain type? You don’t seem that way at all. I’m really surprised.”
Asunyan sighed, then looked down and started to whisper. “Avoids confronting people head-on. Instead, chooses to joke and change the subject. Has probably run from confronting things for years...”
Wait, was that my profile? Wow, I guess she really was an FBI agent. And she was pretty accurate, too. Well, I mean, I knew it. I was a scummy ghost affiliate-blog admin, after all.
“So anyway, Asunyan, I want you to wear cat ears during the interview. Or maybe a jacket with a cat-ear hood, like Myu-Pom.”
“If you call me Asunyan one more time, I’ll rip off every fastener on that duffel coat of yours, starting from the top.”
“S-Scary! You really are a musclebrain!”
That kind of gap wasn’t something we needed. These days, being violent not only wasn’t a positive trait for a heroine, it was enough to get you hated.