I felt relieved and was about to go home again, but then I changed my mind. Wanting to make sure, I looked into the gymnasium through the doorway. The voices belonged not to students, but to grown women who were practicing volleyball. Cold fear ran down my spine and I felt more anxious than ever.

I ran to the main entrance of the school and found the night watchman standing nearby. “Have the students who were practicing badminton in the gymnasium gone home?” I asked.

“They left a long time ago. All the students left a little after 6,” he replied.

An indescribable feeling of apprehension swept over me. Perhaps she had walked home along a different route. Perhaps she had stopped by a friend’s house. I hoped against hope and ran as hard as I could back home. I peered through the bottom part of our front door, which is fitted with a clear piece of glass. Even before I opened the door, I knew Megumi’s shoes were not there in the entryway, where they would have been if she were home.

To make sure, I called out to my sons who were watching television. “Has your sister come home?”
They came running to the front door. “No, not yet. What happened?”

“This isn’t good. She isn’t at school, either. This is giving me the shivers. I think I’ll call one of her friends.”

I immediately phoned the homes of some of her friends in the badminton club.

“I can’t believe she’s not home yet. We parted in front of the school, so she should be home by now. This isn’t like her.”

Every one of the friends I called said pretty much the same thing. I had a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I called the badminton coach.

“I can’t believe she isn’t home yet,” the coach said. “I saw her laughing with her friends in front of the school and she seemed to be her usual self. Maybe she stopped by the bookstore or something. Let’s not make a big commotion yet; just wait a little longer for her.”

Children in middle school sometimes like to stop somewhere on their way home from school. Imagine the embarrassment a teen would feel if he or she came home a little late to find the house in an uproar. I am sure that her teacher had such a scenario in mind when he counseled that we should wait a little longer.

At first, I believed he might be right. I told myself that she might have stopped by her orthopedic doctor’s office where she was being treated for her knees. Megumi had been having growing pains and told me that it hurt when she did flexed-knee jumps during practice. She had been going for a while to a clinic on Furumachi Dori on the other side of town. I immediately called the clinic on the chance that she may have dropped in. But they checked their records and told me that she had not come in that day. It was not like my daughter to stop by a friend’s house or go shopping on her way home from school. It did not feel right, so I called her teacher again.

“She isn’t home yet. This is the first time something like this has ever happened. Something about it doesn’t feel right, so I am going out to look for her.”

Her teacher immediately replied, “Then I’ll go out and look for her as well,” and quickly hung up.
I took my two sons and a flashlight and set out again in the direction of her school. Along the way, there was a hotel that had been damaged by a fire and was no longer in business, as well as an unlit parking garage. These were the places that I had always warned my daughter to be careful of. The Savoy Hotel outwardly looked like a normal hotel, but it was totally deserted and was therefore a place to be wary of.

I circled the area calling out, “Megumi, Megumi!”

North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter By Sakie Yokota Translated by Emi Maruyama and Naomi Otani Published by Vertical (www.vertical-inc.com) 224pp with color photos Available January 20 for ¥1,973 via Amazon Japan.

When I still saw no signs of my daughter, I thought that she might be somewhere near the sea, so, pulling my sons alongside me, I retraced my steps and headed toward the shore. Across the next street was the Gokoku Shrine. Beyond the shrine grounds, across the street and through the stand of pine trees, was the sea. The grounds of Gokoku Shrine are not lit, and only the path that leads to the shrine itself glowed white in the inky darkness.

I was frightened, but there were three of us, and I had my flashlight with me, so I proceeded to enter the shrine grounds, calling my daughter’s name as loudly as I could. I heard nothing. Even
I was afraid to walk to the far side of the grounds and my sons began to cry that they didn’t want to go any further, so we turned around and walked along the street that led to the sea.

There were several cars parked along the beach. I was desperate, so I flashed my light inside each car and asked, “Have you seen a young teenaged girl?” I thought there was a chance that she might have been dragged into one of the cars.

The young people in some of the cars yelled at me. Of course, anyone would be startled to suddenly find him or herself in the glare of a flashlight. I immediately apologized, but my mind was in such a state that it didn’t even occur to me to think that what I was doing was very rude.

I also thought that she might have been locked into the trunk of a car, so I stood there for a while, watching. However, I had no idea how to open a trunk and my sons were saying to me, “You’ll get into trouble if you touch those cars.”

“But your sister may be locked up in one of the trunks,” I replied. I felt a crushing sense of panic.
I couldn’t give up. Shining my light along the beach, I tried to see if I could find something that belonged to Megumi. I thought that she might have fallen from a sheer incline, but found nothing.
“I hope your father will come home early,”

I said as we went back to the house, not knowing what else we could do. When I got home, Megumi’s teacher was standing by the front door, waiting for us. His home was nearby, so he had bicycled to our house.

“She’s not home yet?”

“We were out looking but couldn’t find her.

I think we should call the police right away.”

“Don’t you think it would be better if we waited a little longer…,” he started to reply as the phone rang. It was my husband. He wanted to let me know that he would be late coming home, as he was playing mahjongg with his colleagues that night. The time was a little before 8 o’clock.