Shadowy Work

Questions about a missing person probe a much larger cultural mystery.

IN 2018, Jake Adelstein's accountant, Morimoto, vanished without a trace (and shortly before Tax Day, no less). An American expat who's lived in Japan for much of his adult life, Adelstein had long relied on this person to handle his books. Which was no small feat, apparently, given the American's work as a reporter covering the country's criminal underworld, a job that naturally generates all sorts of unorthodox expenses. Still, Adelstein was broadly familiar with people falling off the face of the Earth; such is the nature of the crime beat. So he found another accountant and moved on from the incident. It wasn't until two years later, when Adelstein received a call from a podcast company asking if he'd had any experience with seemingly widespread disappearances in Japan, that he thought to revisit the mystery of his missing acquaintance turned friend, and the results have now arrived in the form of a new narrative series called The Evaporated: Gone With the Gods.

People ghosting on their lives is obviously not specific to Japan. In every country, in every city, there are always individuals trying to get out of bad situations or simply looking to start over. But the occurrence appears to be more prominent, or at least codified as mythology, in Japan, so much so that there’s a specific nomenclature for such vanishings: kamikakushi, which roughly translates to “hidden by the gods” or “spirited away,” the latter bringing to mind the Hayao Miyazaki film. These days, a more secular descriptor tends to be deployed: the jouhatsu, or the “evaporated people.”