No Such Place

The package reached the Tokyo Chronicle on the morning of Tuesday, October 18, 2011, riding a metal mail cart down the aisle between the desks along with the internal memos and the day's papers. Nothing about it stood out. The floor had spent most of the week arguing about whether it was too early to switch the building over to heat, and about the copier, which had jammed twice before nine. Miyata took the padded brown envelope from the clerk with both hands the way you do when someone hands you something, glanced at the front, turned it over, and found no return address.

He tore the top open and shook out a MiniDV cassette and a single folded sheet of paper covered in English handwriting. He read it for a few seconds, understood about a third, and rolled his chair back toward the desk behind him.

「吉田さん、英語読めますよね。これ、何て書いてあります？」 Yoshida, you read English. What does this say?

Yoshida came over with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and Miyata flattened the page on the desk between them.

Yoshida read it twice without saying anything.「……これは……」 What is this?

--

The tape opened on a burst of blue static, split horizontally for half a second, then settled into the interior of a small rental car with a timestamp burned into the lower right corner: AUG 07 2011, 08:06. A man leaned in to check the framing, late thirties, short brown hair, four or five days of beard. He propped the camera against the base of the windshield and held up a folded road map.

"August seventh, 2011. This is Kaminashi before the earthquake." He laid a second map beside it. "And this is the same area now." The older map showed a thin road climbing north through the mountains until it opened into a cluster of buildings labeled 神無村 (Kaminashi, "the village where the gods are absent"). On the newer one the road just stopped. No village, no branching streets. Even the municipal boundary bent politely around the space where Kaminashi used to be.

"The official line is earthquake damage and landslide risk," he said, unfolding a printout of a forum thread. "Somebody was comparing survey data before and after and noticed this. Villages don't normally get deleted." He smiled at the camera, pleased with himself in a way that would be hard to watch later. "I'm going to find out why."

The tape jumped. He was outside now, walking up a narrow mountain road toward a steel barricade and a temporary government sign warning that the route ahead was closed. The camera swept slowly across the width of the road on the far side of the barrier: trees, guardrail, drainage ditch, pavement. The asphalt beyond looked perfectly intact.

"The report says the road was destroyed," Evan said. "I'm not seeing any earthquake damage." He stepped around the barrier and kept climbing.

The next several minutes were nothing at all, and that was what made them hard to sit through the second time. No shadows moving between trunks, no figure at the edge of frame, no voice buried under the cicadas. Just a foreign man walking up an abandoned road on a hot August morning, breathing a little harder than he wanted to admit on camera. Then the trees opened.

"There it is."

Kaminashi sat in a shallow valley between wooded hills, and the first thing Evan noticed was that it wasn't rubble. Roof tiles were still in neat rows. Utility poles stood straight. A bicycle leaned against a house and a green plastic watering can waited beside somebody's front steps, four months after a disaster had supposedly wiped the place off the map. He zoomed toward the nearest houses and held it there a long time. "This place wasn't destroyed."

Evacuation notices were taped inside several windows as he walked farther in, and an emergency water tank sat in the lot beside the village office. The office door was unlocked, and he went in without ceremony.

Dust lay over the counter. Cardboard boxes had been stacked along the walls, flashlights and disposable masks and bottled water piled in among government-issue duffel bags. "Looks like they did evacuate everybody," Evan said, moving deeper into the room. Then he stopped. "But somebody came back."

He pulled a clipboard out from under a stack of maps and brushed it clean. The document was handwritten in Japanese, and the camera held on the header long enough to read it: Kaminashi Village Temporary Re-entry Roster. Four names appeared under a section for residents, each with a time of entry. The exit column was empty. Below them, under a heading for a joint government survey team, were six more names. Entry times for all six. No exits.

"Four residents were allowed back in after the evacuation," Evan said, tracing the lines with one finger. "Then six government surveyors came looking for them." He turned the page and found nothing, went back to the first, and read it again. "Nobody signed out."

The camera sat on the roster for what felt like a long time. Then the tape jumped, and he was walking downhill fast. "I've got what I need," he said, and his voice had changed. The curiosity was still in it. Something underneath the curiosity wanted to be in the car.

The road curved out of the trees and the barricade came into view with the rental car parked beyond it. "There. Maybe fifty meters." He walked. The picture bounced with each step, cracks in the asphalt sliding past under his boots, utility poles drifting behind him. After twenty seconds he stopped and zoomed in until the car filled the viewfinder, then zoomed back out.

"What the hell?"

He started walking faster and nothing changed. The barrier stayed fifty meters ahead of him. When he finally stopped and turned around, Kaminashi was several hundred meters behind, exactly as far as his legs said it should be. He turned back. Fifty meters. "No," he said, quietly, the way you'd correct a child.

He picked up a stone from the shoulder and threw it. It fell short. He found a second one and put it over the barricade, and the microphone caught it skipping off the asphalt beside the car. Evan went completely still for a few seconds. "Okay," he said. He threw a third, and it crossed too. "Objects can get out."

Then he stepped forward, and the road moved, and the trees moved, and the car did not. He took five more steps and stopped. "I can't."

The counter in the corner of the frame became the thing Yoshida and Miyata watched after that. AUG 08. AUG 09. AUG 11. A forest path with power lines above the ridge that never came closer. A dry riverbed with a concrete bridge downstream that stayed the same size against the horizon no matter how long he walked toward it. A farmhouse in a field north of the village, unchanged in the frame for the length of a whole segment. On the fourteenth he tried it at night, on the theory that whatever measured the distance might need to see him. There was no invisible wall anywhere in any of it. Nothing pushed him back or turned him around. The world simply put more distance between Evan and wherever he was trying to go, quietly, as fast as he could cover it.

By the third week the recordings were shorter and farther apart, and he had started explaining himself to the camera the way you explain things to a dog. He was rationing the tape the way he was rationing everything else. The village water still ran, gravity-fed from somewhere up the mountain, which he said was the only piece of luck he'd had. The power was dead. He slept in the village office because the survey team had left a kerosene lantern and two cans of fuel there, along with a small generator he ran for eight minutes at a time to put charge back into the camcorder battery. Most of the houses had been emptied by families who came back for their things in April and never came back again after that. What he lived on came out of the emergency stores in the office and whatever was left in pantries, mostly rice, canned mackerel, instant noodles, a shelf of pickled plums that he said he was saving.

He worked on the survey team's black notebook through all of it, a page at a time, with a pocket dictionary and the patience of a man with nothing else to do. On AUG 24 he read the early entries out loud for the camera, sounding out the characters and then giving the English.

"March eighteenth. Northern road inaccessible. Distance increases during approach." He looked up. "Same thing." He turned the page. "March nineteenth. Dispatched message through post office chute." He stopped, and read it again. "Post office?"

The camera swung. The tape skipped.

The post office was a small concrete building near the southern edge of the village, and the glass doors were unlocked. Dust on the service counter, postal scales beside bundles of forms, canvas mail sacks still hanging from their hooks. Evan went behind the counter and came up with another stack of handwritten pages, and started reading in the middle.

"Requested exterior team place red marker in collection box if received." He flipped forward two pages. "Eleven-oh-seven. Red marker visible. Delivery confirmed."

He lowered the paper. The camera turned toward the back wall, slowly, and found a metal hatch just above floor level labeled OUTGOING DISPATCH. Evan crouched in front of it and pulled the handle, and cold air moved across the microphone. Inside was a narrow steel chute sloping down into the dark.

He leaned toward the opening. For a few seconds the only sound was his own breathing against the metal. Then a truck, somewhere far down the pipe, tires on pavement, an engine changing gears.

Evan didn't move for a long moment. "That's the highway," he said, and swung the camera onto a building diagram pinned to the wall, a line running from the back of the post office down the hillside to a roadside collection box. "The post office is on the edge. This goes under the road." Then he laughed, and it wasn't relief exactly. It was the sound a person makes when something impossible finally hands them one useful fact.

He put both hands around the opening and the camera caught the measurement. It was under twenty centimeters across. He tried it anyway, turned his head sideways and got one ear and part of his jaw past the lip before the steel stopped him, and he stayed like that for a second longer than he needed to. "Whatever this place does to distance," he said, tapping the pipe with one knuckle, "it can't do it in here." The sentence wasn't scientifically accurate and he seemed to know it. He had stopped trying to explain Kaminashi somewhere on the northern road. What he needed now was a rule he could use, and the rule was that the chute had been laid before March. The diagram put the run at a little over fourteen meters of enclosed steel, and fourteen meters of steel was still fourteen meters. Outside, the road could add as much distance as it wanted. Inside the pipe there was nowhere to put it.

He looked down at the camcorder in his hands for a while without saying anything. "I can't fit," he said. "This can."

The next section began almost black, with metal scraping against plastic. He had knotted the camcorder strap around his wrist and was feeding the camera down the chute. The picture rolled sideways as it slid, and for several seconds there was nothing, and then a pale rectangle appeared at the bottom and grew and resolved into the inside of a red postal collection box.

On the other side of that steel, Japan was going about its afternoon. A car passed. A bicycle bell rang. Somebody nearby was running a lawn mower, and the ordinary sound of it was obscene after six weeks of Kaminashi. Tied around an interior bracket, faded to the color of dried blood, was a strip of red survey tape.

Evan's voice came down the pipe, distorted and small. "It's still there."

He left the camera in the box a while. People were perhaps twenty meters away on the far side of a steel wall, and not one of them knew he existed. When he finally hauled it back up and the picture emerged into the post office again, he was crying, and he wiped his face and seemed embarrassed about it, and then he sat down behind the counter and went back to the notebook.

The handwriting in it changed as the dates progressed, more hurried, less orderly, the columns giving way to plain sentences.

That was the last page. Evan read it twice and then looked around at the empty chairs and the counter and the mail sacks. "They knew they weren't getting out," he said.

Somewhere outside, something moved. He turned toward the windows and waited. A metal object struck pavement out in the village, once, and then the cicadas went on the way they had all morning.

September on the tape is mostly the post office. He wrote letters, dozens of them, on village office stationery and on the backs of tax forms, and he sent one down the chute on every collection day printed on the diagram. The camera caught him copying Japanese characters off the survey notebook one stroke at a time to address them, and reading the addresses out loud to check them: the prefectural police, the town hall two valleys south, the American embassy in Tokyo, his sister in Portland. He had no way to confirm any of it. The red marker trick needed somebody on the outside willing to go stand at a mailbox, and there was nobody on the outside who knew to.

He kept a tally in pencil on the wall beside the hatch, one mark per letter, and by the end of the month there were thirty-one of them and nothing had changed. On SEP 26 he sat in front of the camera for a while without saying anything. "Somebody has them," he finally said. "Somebody read the surveyors' notes in April and did exactly what the notes told them to do."

The cicadas stopped sometime in the last week of September. He mentioned it once, the way you'd mention it to a neighbor.

October came in three short segments. In the first he counted what was left in the office stores onto the counter and moved things around and counted again. In the second he was up on the ridge behind the village at first light, filming the valley he could see and could not reach. In the third the picture was steady on a wall for four minutes before he remembered he'd left it running.

The final segment was timestamped OCT 14 2011, 15:22. The camera was sitting on the post office counter and Evan was in a chair across from it, framed badly, too far to one side. The beard had gone gray in patches. He was wearing a work jacket that had belonged to somebody with shorter arms. He didn't look older so much as reduced, and when he leaned in to check the frame you could see how much of the leaning was in his shoulders.

He had an envelope in front of him and was printing an address across it in block capitals: TOKYO CHRONICLE, INVESTIGATIONS DESK. "My name is Evan Hale," he said, and stopped writing to look into the lens. "I entered Kaminashi on August seventh." He folded several pages from the government survey log and slid them in. "Most of the village got out after the earthquake." He swallowed. "Some came back."

"A government team followed them," he said, glancing down at the roster in his lap. "None of them left."

He got up in the middle of that thought, crossed the room, turned the lock on the front door, and came back to the chair without saying why. When he sat down again he was much closer to the lens than before.

"I've written thirty-one letters and I don't know if anybody read one of them," he said. "A letter is easy to throw away. This isn't." He turned the camcorder slightly, toward himself, and then back. "There's about three weeks of food in the office if I keep doing what I've been doing, and I have not been doing it very well."

He said his sister's name, Anna, and a street in Portland, and asked whoever was watching to tell her he hadn't done anything stupid, that he'd walked up a road that was on a map. Then he said the thing he had presumably been rehearsing for two months, and it came out flat and practiced and worse for it.

"Don't send anyone back. There's no way out. I've had sixty-eight days to find one." He stopped, and stayed stopped long enough that the picture might have been a still frame. "I'm going to keep looking anyway. That's not the same as thinking I'll find it."

He reached toward the camera and the cassette mechanism clicked. The image went blue, then black, but the audio kept running for a few more seconds while the tape came out: plastic against plastic, paper crumpling, adhesive tearing off an envelope. Footsteps of his own, slower than they had been in August. The metal hatch opening on its hinge, a hollow echo, the package scraping against steel. For a second it seemed to catch, and there was a grunt and the sound of a shoulder against metal, and then it slid and fell away fast down the pipe. A clunk at the bottom. Through the tube, faintly, traffic. Evan exhaled once. The hatch closed, and the recording ended.

--

Yoshida rewound the tape and neither of them said anything for a while. Miyata had stopped pretending to work an hour earlier. On the desk between them lay the letter, the cassette case, and the photocopies Evan had folded into the envelope with it.

The names on the roster were real. So was Kaminashi, at least until March. A municipal registry from February listed 183 residents, and records after the earthquake showed all of them relocated to surrounding towns under emergency evacuation. Four of the names on Evan's roster turned up elsewhere as open missing persons cases. The six government employees were harder. Yoshida found five of them by early evening, all assigned to earthquake-related fieldwork, none of them ever recorded as coming home. The sixth name produced no result at all, in any database he had access to.

The paper called the prefectural government that afternoon. The first official said he had never heard of Kaminashi. The second asked them to fax the documents over. The third told them to hold off publishing anything until somebody could call them back. Nobody called back.

Yoshida left his apartment at ten past five the next morning with a copy of the pre-earthquake map on the passenger seat. Miyata had tried to talk him out of it and had been told that he wasn't going into any village, he only wanted to see whether the road existed.

The map brought him to a mountain junction a little before eleven. One road continued north. The other should have turned east, and there was no other road. He parked on the shoulder and walked the guardrail for the better part of an hour, looking for a cut in the trees, a patch of old asphalt, a culvert, anything. The forest came right down to the steel. It was a clear, cold October morning and the mountains behind the guardrail were starting to turn, and there was nothing there at all.

On his way back to the car he noticed a red postal collection box on the far side of the highway. It was completely ordinary. The collection times were printed on the front, twice daily, and there was no village name anywhere on it. He crossed the road and crouched down behind it, and found a steel tube emerging from the hillside and entering the back of the box. When he put his hand on it the metal was cold, and cold air was moving through it.

The collection door on the back had a lock that had given up years ago, and it swung when he pulled it. He got the flashlight out of the glove box and shone it inside. The box was empty. Tied around an interior bracket, faded almost to brown, was a strip of red survey tape.

Yoshida sat down on the gravel with his back to the guardrail and put the light up the chute. The beam went fourteen or fifteen meters into the hillside and then the pipe bent and took the light with it. He listened. A truck went by behind him and the whole box hummed. Then two cars, and a motorbike, and then, for a while, nothing but the wind moving in the pipe and the ticking of his own car's engine cooling on the far shoulder.

He stayed there longer than he meant to. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. His knees started to hurt and the cold came up through the gravel and he told himself he would give it until the next car passed, and then until the one after that.

He was pushing himself up off the ground when he heard it. Something far up inside the pipe, thin as a hair, that could have been a voice.

He went back down and put his ear against the opening and stayed like that with the flashlight off. A minute. Two. The wind came and went in the metal and made a sound that was not quite the same twice, and after a while he understood that he had been listening so hard, for so long, that he would have heard something no matter what was there. He had been awake since four. He had watched a man on a videotape talk about a road that erased itself, and then he had driven three hundred kilometers to stand at a mailbox in the mountains with his ear against a pipe.

He let the collection door fall shut. It clanged and the sound went up the tube and came back smaller.

He got back in the car and sat with both hands on the wheel for a while before he started it. On the drive south he did not turn on the radio.

---

A trailer for the film.