Somewhere in the Sakyo Ward of Kyoto, Japan, a young man took a break from digging with a beat-up shovel and wiped the stream of sweat pouring down his forehead.
It was only mid-June, but temperatures had soared to peak summer highs the day before.
According to the weatherperson on TV the night before, the heat was supposed to continue through the end of August.
Why do I have to work outside at a time like this? Who does that meteorologist think they are, sitting in an air-conditioned room talking about how hot it is like it’s someone else’s problem?
After unfairly cursing out the innocent weather forecaster, the young man glared at the sun, which blazed mercilessly overhead, and looked around.
He was at the construction site for a new residence.
It was a common occurrence—after the Japanese economic bubble burst, big, old houses were torn down, and the vast properties were split up for a neighborhood of prefab houses to be built.
Not that it was his job to build those houses. He was working on the exterior construction and landscaping. That meant the structures on the property outside the building. For example, the gate, fences, garage, front walkway, storage shed, and yard.
In the spring, he had started working for a company that dealt with a wide range of general exterior construction.
He had been hired to work in finance, but because they were short-staffed, he had been sent to this construction site under the premise of on-the-job training.
I should have been working in a cool office by now.
The man turned his attention to his colleagues, who were standing a short distance away.
They were busy preparing the foundation for the fence and the concrete for the walkway and seemed to have forgotten about him.
It was suspicious that he was the only one working in a different area.
Back when a big house existed on the property, there’d been a small shrine in the corner of the garden that was removed when construction began.
The young man was currently digging up the rocks that filled the spot where the shrine had been.
All remnants of the shrine needed to be removed before they started the landscaping work. However, even landscaping professionals hesitated to casually disturb a site where a sacred shrine had been cherished for many years.
And that was why a young guy with hardly any experience was given a pickax and a shovel and told to dig—a job that no one else wanted to do.
About twenty rocks needed to be removed. None were big, but they were firmly embedded in the earth, and the hard soil was a pain in the neck to break through.
“This is like an iceberg,” the man mumbled to himself. “You can only see the top protruding from the ground. But I guess this isn’t really the time to think about stuff like that.”
Thus, the young man resumed his struggle against the rocks.
As he had noted, every rock appeared to be thin like a tile but was actually planted surprisingly deep in the ground. Maybe they were more like teeth.
The people who lived here long ago must have done everything possible to ensure a firm, stable base so the shrine wouldn’t topple over.
While he could appreciate that, he had to face the hard truth—he had been working all morning and had only managed to dig out eight rocks. The construction site supervisor had come to him a while ago and snickered. “Is that all you’ve managed?”
The guy could have helped if he thought I was slow!
The young man used his annoyance to fuel his physical strength and pushed the pointed tip of his shovel into the ground.
“You poor thing, having to do that all by yourself,” a gruff voice said behind him. “You’d better make sure you go someplace for a cleansing ritual as soon as you’re done.”
The young man let go of the shovel, which was stuck in the ground, and turned around.
A small old man stood there, grinning. He looked familiar. He was one of the interior contractors who had come to the worksite two days earlier. This was the first time they had spoken to each other, but the young man had seen him walking around, holding wallpaper, a stepladder, and a bucket containing a paintbrush and a ruler. He figured the man was a plasterer.
“A cleansing ritual?”
The young man was taken aback by the dangerous-sounding suggestion, and the elderly plasterer flashed him a wicked smile, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“Oh, you didn’t know? The shrine that used to be on the rocks you’re digging out was there for centuries. I hear it had a history.”
“A history? When they tore it down, I was told a Shinto priest came and did a purification ritual.”
“They just did that so they’d feel better.”
“Feel better—about what? Are you saying a powerful god was enshrined here or something?”
Seeing the serious look on the young man’s face, the older man lowered his voice. Despite it being broad daylight, he spoke like he was telling a ghost story.
“I only heard it from my supervisor, but the shrine was empty for a long time.”
The tension left the young man’s body, and he slapped the handle on his shovel, saying, “Well then, it’s just an empty shrine. What’s there to be worried about?”
“Oh, but this is where it starts to get tricky. This area was a vast field during the Heian period, with nothing but this shrine. It’s illustrated in an ancient picture scroll.”
“It was that old?!”
“Yeah, though I’m sure it was rebuilt over and over. Anyway, I hear it said comb shrine on the picture scroll.”
“‘Comb shrine’?”
“Yeah! Like a comb you use to fix your hair.”
“Oh, so it’s a shrine dedicated to combs.”
“A comb was probably the object of worship at the beginning. The wooden shrine eventually decayed. Scary, huh?”
“A comb is only a tool, and I don’t see that as scary.”
As the young man smiled wryly, the older man placed both hands on his salt-and-pepper head and gestured like he was combing imaginary long hair.
“It’s a comb that women used long ago. People wouldn’t have set up a shrine for it if it wasn’t full of some woman’s darkest emotions and grudges. It gives me the creeps,” the old man said with a shudder.
“Then the shrine was set up for the female owner of a comb?”
“That’s what makes sense to me. Generations of the estate’s owners seemed to take good care of the shrine, but after the last owner died, the daughter’s son-in-law inherited it. He wasn’t a local—he was from Tokyo, so you can’t blame him for not caring about the estate or the shrine. Before you know it, he tore everything down and sold the land.”
“…Huh.”
“I don’t know who was enshrined here, but the shrine’s god would naturally be upset at such poor treatment. That’s why none of the local contractors wanted to take on this job—they were afraid of being cursed—and it went to your company from Osaka, which didn’t know anything about this history. I guess you drew the short end of the stick. I’d be careful if I were you.”