In 2018, Jake Adelstein’s accountant, Morimoto, vanished without a trace (and shortly before Tax Day, no less). An American expat who has 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. The vanishing of Adelstein’s accountant, along with his tax filings, left the American shocked and in the lurch. Also a little saddened, or so we’re told, as he had additionally considered the accountant a friend.
Still, Adelstein is broadly familiar with people falling off the face of the earth; such is the nature of being on the crime beat. So he found another bookkeeper 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’s had any experience with seemingly widespread disappearances in Japan, that he thought to revisit the mystery of his missing accountant, the results of which have now arrived in the form of a new narrative podcast series called The Evaporated: Gone With the Gods.
The phenomenon of people ghosting on their lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, 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. (Listen, the vacuum guy from Breaking Bad had to come from somewhere.) But the occurrence appears to be more prominent, or at least codified as mythology, in Japan, so much so that there’s even specific nomenclature for such vanishings: kamikakushi, which roughly translates to “hidden by the gods†or “to spirit away,†the latter bringing to mind the famed Hayao Miyazaki film. These days, a more secular descriptor tends to be deployed: the jouhatsu, or the titular “evaporated people.†The series notes that over 80,000 people are reported missing in Japan every year, a good portion of which are thought to be made up of jouhatsu, but owing to its gray nature, formal statistics on the phenomenon are squishy at best. Nevertheless, the jouhatsu has become a recurring point of cultural interest, both nationally and internationally, routinely being made the subject of news segments, books, even manga. In 2016, a French duo, Léna Mauger and Stéphane Remael, published a visual travelogue on the evaporated people called The Vanished, which sparked a round of coverage here in the United States by outlets like the New York Post and PRI’s The World.
The jouhatsu is the kind of societal peculiarity that comfortably fits into Japan’s image in the Western world as a distinctly foreign and idiosyncratic place that’s jam-packed with stuff perfect for globe-trotting magazine features, fawning if formulaic Chef’s Table episodes, and explanatory YouTube travel videos. Given the nature of the project, The Evaporated largely keeps within the tradition, never fundamentally challenging the terms of that particular gaze. However, to its credit, the series does end up being interesting and less gawking than one might initially expect.
Based on the first three episodes made available for preview, the case of the missing accountant mostly functions as a framing device for Adelstein, who hosts the show with a reporting partner, Shoko Plambeck. (The series is also produced by Thisanka Siripala.) The Evaporated begins with the duo poking around for Morimoto, but it quickly shifts gears into something more ambling, reallocating its attention instead toward exploring the systems that enable the jouhatsu phenomenon and the people that inhabit those subterranean worlds. That shift in emphasis is reasonable, even necessary. After all, it’s often the case that those who voluntarily disappear don’t want to be found, and at any rate, The Evaporated ends up making the more interesting choice to highlight the jouhatsu as an object lesson in policy externalities. We’re told, for example, that the phenomenon is in large part the by-product of strong privacy laws, weak social-support structures, and informally sanctioned underground economies. The mix is embodied by the existence of “night movers†— businesses created specifically to help people disappear — that eventually turn out to be the podcast’s primary point of interest. By the end of the third episode, what starts out as a search for a missing accountant shakes out to be a slice-of-life piece, one that observes the people who work as these night movers and the circumstances that led them to this world.
As a production, the podcast is serviceable if undistinguished. The series comes from Campside Media, a studio founded by former magazine journalists that has released some remarkable nonfiction audio works over the years, including Chameleon: Wild Boys and Suspect, and Sony Music Entertainment. Unfortunately, The Evaporated doesn’t end up matching the polish of those other efforts. However, it does play around with some intriguing technical ideas, particularly with respect to how the production tries to handle cross-lingual storytelling. Much of the interviews were originally conducted by Adelstein and Plambeck in Japanese, later translated into English, and delivered, with some level of dramatic performance, back to the English-speaking audience. That approach isn’t ultimately successful, as the artifice of the voice performances tends to overpower the potential authenticity of any particular moment. But it’s still a notable contribution toward an emerging trend of narrative podcasts interested in existing across languages.
Adelstein himself makes for a curious presence behind the mic. You might have heard his name recently: His 2009 memoir, Tokyo Vice, which chronicled his years as one of the first non-Japanese reporters covering the police beat in the country, was recently produced by Michael Mann for a HBO Max series starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe. Throughout the podcast, he leans quite a bit on the shadow-walking nature of his beat and long-cultivated persona — “I’ve seen all kinds of weird stuff in these many years wandering the Japanese underworld,†he says at one point as an aside — though, much like statistics on the jouhatsu phenomenon, it probably behooves one to take the guy with a grain of salt. Shortly after the release of the HBO Max series, The Hollywood Reporter published a feature evoking skepticism about the veracity of Adelstein’s memoir. This may or may not end up being a deal-breaker for some consuming Adelstein’s work. Self-mythologizing might be part of the underworld game, but a shadow of incredulity loomed over my listening of The Evaporated nevertheless.
That said, the most interesting thing about Adelstein as a narrator is how his present situation bucks against the swashbuckling projection of his memoir. Now in his 50s and firmly crossed over into elder expat territory, there’s a new side to his classic White Guy in Asia archetype that feels more protective than voyeuristic of the people he’s both living among and documenting. That aging sensibility serves the podcast quite well. An existential malaise sits at the heart of The Evaporated, which explores a phenomenon largely fed by people on the brink and at wit’s end. There’s a wide variety of reasons someone might want to disappear without a trace: they could be facing insurmountable money problems, they could be trapped in an abusive household, they might have made a potentially life-threatening mistake. One thing that makes The Evaporated worthwhile is how little judgment it brings to rough circumstances, poor choices, and difficult lives. Such an outlook can only come, perhaps, from many years wandering the underworld.