Chapter 21
1. The Lonely God
Clear water was bubbling up from a stone basin placed next to a small Jizo statue with a broken nose.
The water seeping through the cracks reflected the blackness of the stone, making the water itself look murky like blood.
A wooden sign propped against the thicket behind them read "Purifying Water."
"Sounds shady..."
Muttering with a cigarette in hand, Miyaki gave a wry smile as if to gently scold me.
"Come now. It doesn't seem to be just some superstition. Look, it says here that when epidemics like cholera and Japanese encephalitis spread in the village, the villagers, thinking that the rivers connecting to other villages were contaminated, often relied on spring water."
"So as long as their own village was safe, they didn't care about anyone else?"
I could tell Miyaki was making a vague expression.
Getting irritated now would only make things harder for Miyaki. I exhaled a long puff of smoke to calm myself, then looked up at the gently sloping stream.
Natural stone walls towered on both sides, covered with nets to prevent rockslides. The barely paved path was green with moss. I figured if someone slipped here, their body wouldn't be found for a week.
"Katagishi, have you been to this village before?"
Miyaki asked while staring intently at the sign, seemingly amused by something.
"Nope. Why?"
"Originally, the request for this case was sent to Rokuhara, right? You intercepted it and came instead. I thought maybe you had some personal reason."
I literally crushed the letter hidden in my suit jacket.
Miyaki turned around to look at me.
"Katagishi, then, can I ask you something unrelated?"
"What?"
"You call Rokuhara your brother-in-law, but is he your wife's brother or an unrelated older brother?"
"It's not unrelated."
I stubbed my cigarette into the portable ashtray.
"He's my wife's brother. I used to be married to a woman named Misaki, and Rokuhara is her brother. This village we're in now is where the Rokuhara siblings were born."
Miyaki's eyes widened slightly.
Exiting the dim stream, we came upon a suddenly wider road. There was a rusted bus stop sign and a glass-fronted shop that looked like an oversized old ice cream display case.
"For now, let's start by asking around."
Miyaki quietly agreed. Perhaps out of consideration for me, she didn't ask any more about Misaki. Either way, I'd have to talk about it eventually.
When I pushed open the heavy glass door, a dusty wave of heated air spread out, and the shopkeeper with earth-toned skin looked at us from behind the counter. Next to the register were a half-eaten chocolate bar and a fragment of what looked like deer antler.
"Excuse me. We're here on behalf of the local government to conduct an investigation..."
"You finally came!"
I was taken aback by the shopkeeper's sudden energy as he kicked over a folding chair and stood up.
"Glad to see someone who takes this seriously! Everyone else says I'm just seeing things!"
The shopkeeper grabbed our hands in turn and shook them, letting out a relieved sigh.
"Um, can we ask exactly what this is about?"
Miyaki discreetly wiped the back of her hand against her jacket.
The shopkeeper looked half confused, half disappointed.
"Isn't it about the giant snake living in the marsh?"
"Giant snake?"
Miyaki and I looked at each other at the same time and shook our heads, both indicating we didn't know anything.
"There's a huge snake living in the swamp that makes all the water ripple! Sometimes it splashes up with a big splash. I've never seen it myself, but sometimes the surface coils up—look!"
The shopkeeper rolled up his flannel sleeve and showed his arm. It was just his earth-colored arm.
"Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps. That wouldn't happen unless you'd actually seen it!"
Trying not to show our disbelief at the shopkeeper's serious shiver, we quickly wrapped things up and left the store.
Outside, where the sun was dimmed slightly by thin clouds, everything looked even more desaturated. A housewife in her forties stood by the bus stop.
"Oh, are you really here to investigate the snake?"
"No, we're not."
The housewife looked us up and down from toes to head.
"Good. That shopkeeper is an idiot. He's a coward. We were in the same class, and ever since he got bitten by a snake in the thicket as a kid, he jumps at hoses thinking they're pit vipers."
I glanced at a neatly coiled rubber hose by the shop's entrance that looked brand new.
"More importantly, I wish someone would do something about the poisonous bugs in the stream. There are yellow and black ones I've never seen before. You need to call a specialist before someone gets stung."
As the woman spoke, the sound of a large vehicle with a loose fan belt interrupted her, and a long-bodied bus slid into view.
Aside from us and the housewife, the bus was empty.
As soon as I sat in the farthest seat and felt the hard metal beneath the cushion, Miyaki spoke.
"Did you bring me here to exterminate your wife's house pests?"
"Of course not. Besides, my wife is already dead."
I regretted saying it the moment it left my mouth, but Miyaki's unreadable expression told me it was already too late.
"Sorry... I didn't mean to..."
"No, that one's on me."
The bus started moving, and the vibrations from the uneven road reached our feet.
There wasn't even an announcement for the next stop—only the rattling of the bus echoed.
"I had a hunch... but I guess I was right."
Miyaki added, talking about my wife.
"Yeah..."
I leaned my head against the seat, watching the steep road and thick trees flowing diagonally past the window.
"I met Misaki in our university folklore studies club. We got married right after graduation."
"Sounds like the ideal love marriage."
Miyaki joked deliberately. I made a sound like I was laughing too.
"We just didn't have any better options... Before we got married, she told me her only family was her brother. She never brought up visiting relatives or going to her family's graves. I figured she must have bad memories and didn't press."
A deep wrinkle had formed between my brows reflected in the window. I placed my hand on my forehead as if to hide it.
"I heard from Rokuhara later that this place had some strange guardian god and beliefs surrounding it."
"Territorial Divine Offenses?"
Miyaki lowered her voice. I shook my head.
"Not sure, but apparently they intentionally practiced inbreeding to create people with divine possession—what we'd now call mental illness. You hear about that sometimes in rural areas."
"Yeah... that's definitely a hometown you wouldn't want to return to. But it lasted into modern times?"
I reached into my jacket and pulled out the crumpled letter. It had no sender or postmark. I had no idea how it had gotten to me.
As I pulled the paper from the torn envelope, Miyaki peeked over. I heard her quietly gasp.
On the torn notebook paper were pencil-written words rewritten many times. The lines were ruler-straight, and the pressure was so strong the pencil had broken mid-sentence.
Big sister,
Please come. Leaving alone is unfair. It's cruel.
The ones left behind are lonely.
Even the god is lonely.
I want to let them out.
It won't work unless all ten are gathered.
Please come.
At the end, the name of this village was written.
"What is this letter? A child must've written it..."
"Who knows."
I folded the paper and stuffed it back into the envelope.
"Maybe this rotten faith still survives today. Whether it's a trap or not, we won't know unless we go in."
The bus announcement said it was the last stop. The digital sign displayed the words "Local History Museum."
Even though it was the last stop, I panicked and pressed the stop button.
As the bus stopped, I composed myself and stood up before Miyaki.
Ahead on the wide road were two directional signs.
One pointed to the marsh, the other to the Local History Museum.
Looking down the winding path, I saw a standing sign that read "50 meters to Kuhara Local History Museum."
"Kuhara, huh..."
It won't work unless all ten are gathered. I repeated the words from the letter in my mind and stepped onto the curved path.
Between the metal fences that made the museum look more like a prison, there was a small gap with a sign that said "Open." It had the lazy feel of a half-hearted public museum.
Despite being open, the grounds were eerily deserted.
"They really don't care, do they..."
Miyaki muttered with an exasperated laugh.
"Feels like they built it just because they had too much land and didn't know what to do with it."
Scattered across a field big enough to play baseball on were low-roofed buildings with no explanatory signs or anything. Surprisingly, it wasn't unstaffed—two or three families, probably there for their kids' homework, were going in and out of the buildings or sitting on benches in the corners.
In the center, where the earth was slightly raised, stood a wooden statue. It was said to be Kuhara Something-or-other, the founder of this museum. The gloomy, gaunt face bore a slight resemblance to Rokuhara.
Though I understood that things like consanguineous marriages weren't uncommon in small villages, a deep discomfort stirred in my gut.
From the building in the back, a boy wearing glasses emerged, led by his mother. His expression was stiff, like he'd just come out of a haunted house. The map labeled the exhibit as "Quarantine and Living with Disease."
There was no one at the building's reception.
As I passed through the automatic doors, the extremely dim lighting faintly reflected off the brownish walls and ceiling. It felt like a dungeon.
"It's dark in here. Maybe they're saving on electricity?"
"Probably because it's funded by taxes."
As I turned my face away while speaking, I was startled to find myself face-to-face with a Hannya mask painted in black and red ink.
The entire wall was covered with paintings of grotesquely emaciated tigers and giant snakes with women's faces.
"Is this a government-run haunted house?"
I grumbled in disgust, and Miyaki giggled quietly.
"It seems this village used to represent plagues as monsters in their artwork. Look, here."
Her slender finger pointed to a caption on the snake painting that mentioned blisters and fever. The tiger, labeled with an alternate name, was probably cholera.
"They even have Soviet Flu here. Did it really spread to such a remote part of Japan?"
"I figured that country would be pretty strict about disease control, though."
We walked along, looking at the paintings in order, but they were just eerie and didn't offer any real insights.
At some point, Miyaki had passed me and slipped behind a black curtain in the back, letting out a small scream.
"What happened?"
When I pushed aside the curtain, I saw an elderly man, half-naked, over Miyaki's shoulder.
"Sorry, I just didn't expect something like this to be here..."
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized the old man was a doll, so lifelike it could be mistaken for real. Sitting cross-legged with a gaunt upper body exposed, the doll was behind a red fence.
In its cloudy eyes, a sharp light gleamed through the lattice.
"A confinement room...?"
As if in response, a rough noise crackled from a speaker, and an old, worn-out recording began to play.
"Until the Meiji era, it was customary in various regions to confine those with mental illness like this... but in this village... they were treated with reverence as possessed by gods... serving as a kind of barrier..."
I glared at the speaker's mesh. The recording cut off there.
"Creepy exhibit."
I was so absorbed in staring at the confinement room doll that I forgot to respond to Miyaki's voice. The dull light reflected from the glass-embedded eye sockets.
This village also had an abnormal god and a strange faith. I was sure of it.
As I stepped out of the building and breathed in the soft sunlight and cold air, something light bumped into my back. A crumpled scrap of memo paper rolled to my feet.
When I picked it up and looked up, a short-haired child—couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl—stood in the distance, arm still extended from the throw.
"Little brat."
While Miyaki gave a wry smile, the child ran off.
I unfolded the paper in my hand and was transfixed by the clumsy handwriting.
"Thank you for coming.
But please come more. Please help big sister. It's almost time. I'm lonely.
Five"
The kanji for the number was written large, filling the bottom half of the memo.
Miyaki narrowed her eyes, glaring in the direction the child had disappeared.
I stuffed the memo into the same pocket as the letter.
Trap or not, I had no choice but to go.