Chapter 12
Prologue, The God in the Box at the Bottom of the Water
It's dangerous over there.
It rained an unbelievable amount until yesterday, so the dam's going to be a mess. Yeah, I'm heading out for an inspection now.
It's a hassle, the day after heavy rain. I have to go all the way down to the bottom of the dam. There's actually an elevator, but after rain like yesterday's, it's unusable. I have to go down step by step using the stairs.
It's not like the dam itself gets wrecked by the rain. It's not built that poorly.
It'd be a problem if the dam that submerged an entire village couldn't handle it. The real issue is with the elevator... yeah, that's right.
People who don't understand anything love to talk about curses from destroying the village, but if it were that simple, we wouldn't be struggling.
That village that got submerged was covered in camphor trees—it was a dark place. I'm from the neighboring village, but I always tried to stay away from there.
I mean, the main industry there was making coffins from those camphor trees. They spent all day making boxes for the dead. Of course it felt gloomy.
Apparently, the people over there didn't think it was gloomy at all, though.
The camphor trees were considered the guardian god's sacred trees in that village.
Unlike the single large tree you see at a shrine, all the camphor trees surrounding the village were sacred. In the old days, they used to bury the dead villagers under those trees, so they believed that if you made a coffin from wood imbued with ancestral spirits, you could go to the god.
Hold on a second. Phone call.
What? Huh? That idiot, I told him to take the stairs, and he went and got lazy. Not my problem. No point calling a doctor. I'll be there in thirty minutes, so wait.
Sorry, what were we talking about?
Oh, right. That village, since they couldn't even hold proper funerals anymore, said they couldn't make a living just building coffins, so they started getting into tourism. I think it's called marquetry? Not anything fancy, but they sold these neat little boxes made from camphor wood that only opened if you solved a mechanism. They were good at making boxes, after all.
They didn't sell that well, but since they were rare, some people bought them.
But then, the villagers didn't just stay gloomy—they started acting weird.
They said they could hear voices coming from inside the boxes. Voices of their dead mothers, children, or old friends. Crazy, right? I knew someone who lived there—his little sister died of illness when she was around twelve, and he stopped going to work and just kept fiddling with the box. Said he could hear his sister's voice. Said she was looking for the badminton racket he bought her. That he had to find it with her.
It creeped me out, so I left him alone, and he ended up hanging himself from a camphor tree. He didn't even use a rope. There was a huge hole in the trunk, and he stuck his head in and dangled there.
That kind of thing happened more than once.
It's superstition, but after that, people started saying they saw a huge person in black mourning clothes—about four meters tall. That height matched the camphor trees in the village.
Then the dam construction was proposed. The village had already been abandoned by the young people who were creeped out, so no one opposed it. The city or prefecture gave money, and the village was quickly submerged. That should've been the end of it.
Another call. Sorry. I really should be going now.
It's not really a curse. If it were just a curse, that might've actually been better.
I don't think you'll ever come to the dam, but if you do, don't use the elevator.
Even without using the elevator, when it rains, the water level in the dam rises. And then—it comes up.
But if you can avoid using it, you should.
After all, those boxes made in that village, no matter what they were originally for, all end up being for sending off the dead.
But I wouldn't know.