The coverage included a detailed summary of the steps leading to the town’s decision to adopt the elephant, an aerial sketch of the elephant house and grounds, and brief histories of both the elephant and the keeper who had vanished with it. The man, Noboru Watanabe, sixty-three, was from Tateyama, in Chiba Prefecture. He had worked for many years as a keeper in the mammalian section of the zoo, and “had the complete trust of the zoo authorities, both for his abundant knowledge of these animals and for his warm sincere personality.” The elephant had been sent from East Africa twenty-two years earlier, but little was known about its exact age or its “personality.” The report concluded with a request from the police for citizens of the town to come forward with any information they might have regarding the elephant.

I thought about this request for a while as I drank my second cup of coffee, but I decided not to call the police—both because I preferred not to come into contact with them if I could help it and because I felt the police would not believe what I had to tell them. What good would it do to talk to people like that, who would not even consider the possibility that the elephant had simply vanished?

I took my scrapbook down from the shelf, cut out the elephant article, and pasted it in. Then I washed the dishes and left for the office.

I watched the search on the seven-o’clock news. There were hunters carrying large-bore rifles loaded with tranquilizer darts, Self-Defense Force troops, policemen, and firemen combing every square inch of the woods and hills in the immediate area as helicopters hovered overhead. Of course, we’re talking about the kind of “woods” and “hills” you find in the suburbs outside Tokyo, so they didn’t have an enormous area to cover. With that many people involved, a day should have been more than enough to do the job. And they weren’t searching for some tiny homicidal maniac: They were after a huge African elephant. There was a limit to the number of places a thing like that could hide. But still they had not managed to find it. The chief of police appeared on the screen, saying, “We intend to continue the search.” And the anchorman concluded the report, “Who released the elephant, and how? Where have they hidden it? What was their motive? Everything remains shrouded in mystery.”