“The Ceremony of Knots is a traditional event in the village. It’s totally cursed, and it’s said that the man and woman who go through with it are bound together no matter what!” Sumire explained again, once we were back in the Bellflower Room.
We had moved up here because we risked being seen by a passing villager if we’d stayed by the entrance. We couldn’t just stand around in a public place and speak ill of this community’s traditions. It was a simple matter of social awareness. I guess you could make the point that we shouldn’t be speaking badly of it anywhere, but that’s more manners than awareness.
Iroha laughed as she rolled around on top of her folded futon. “It’s cursed? That’s hilarious! Sounds like a pretty twisted god who’d curse you when you were trying to declare your eternal love for each other.”
“It’s not a problem for real couples. But we’re not—” Sumire descended into another fit of sobs and clung to Iroha’s yukata. “I’m so sorry, Iroha-chan! Mashiro-chan!”
Iroha patted her head softly. Which one of them was the teacher again?
She grinned. “C’mon, what have you got to apologize for?”
“I’m supposed to be a wallflower! A mastermind shipping from the shadows. But now I’m cockblocking you guys, and... Oh, I’m the worst kind of trash!” Sumire cried.
“Maybe you should lower your voice a bit?” Iroha suggested.
“I-I think you’re overreacting, Sumire-sensei. I mean, I’m not...uh...” Mashiro was glancing at me repeatedly.
Mashiro was clearly worried I told Sumire about her feelings for me. I hadn’t, of course. Sumire was just convinced from the outset that both she and Iroha were in love with me. Without a shred of evidence, of course.
I say that, but it turned out that Mashiro really did have feelings for me. What about Iroha then? No way. Iroha wouldn’t fall for me in a million years.
Wait, hold up a second. Since when was Mashiro here? She was speaking like she’d been here the whole time too.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in writing hell, Mashiro?”
“Oh, um, I just came to see what all the fuss was about. I needed a break anyway.”
“That Canary girl isn’t gonna get mad at you?”
“She won’t know. She’ll be out in the forest playing with the wild birds at this time of day.”
“What kind of hobby is that?”
On top of every other aspect of her, even Kanaria’s daily routine sounded insane. Maybe that was what it took to be a superstar editor. She did seem kind of too old for a princess talking to the wildlife, though.
Unless.
Unless this was how she combated stress? That was entirely possible. A woman with a track record like hers wouldn’t go out singing with the birds just because something didn’t go her way. She was like me, making her way through life with fine-tuned efficiency. This kind of anti-stress measure had to have some kind of deeper meaning to it. She knew how to enforce deadlines. She knew how to use people’s talents. I could learn a lot from her. Maybe one day I’d be the one playing with birds in the forest.
Mashiro studied Sumire from the massage chair, her cool expression vibrating as she opened her mouth. “You’re overreacting. Isn’t the Ceremony of Knots just some weird superstitious thing? It won’t mean anything if you don’t take it seriously.”
It was a fair point. I didn’t know why Sumire was getting so up in arms about it when nothing in this life was guaranteed. Even the top experts in their field couldn’t accurately predict the next advancements with more than 70% accuracy. Those who hit 80% were nothing short of prodigies.
The tendency to believe one particular outcome is guaranteed and putting all your eggs in one basket is how scammers make their money. Anyone who “guarantees” you anything should be treated with a healthy dose of suspicion.
“It might not just be superstition.”
“Ozu?”
He was the last person I expected to say something like that. Every eye in the room focused on him now, the technological whiz kid whose entire skillset revolved around nothing but cold, hard logic. He was looking at his phone, apparently reading some sort of article.
“Nothing came up when I googled, so I hacked into the village office’s database and looked through their records of these traditional events.”
“They keep digital records in a backwater village like this?”
“Shut up and listen.”
“Yes, sir...”
The smile on his face was too creepy to disobey. In fact, Ozu seemed to be getting more and more creepy as this trip went on. I wasn’t confident I’d be able to stand up to him if I needed to.
“From what I found, the Ceremony of Knots is a sort of wedding procession.”
“A wedding procession?”
“Yup. They used to have these evening processions of the people involved if the bride was marrying into a different village over the mountains or a castle or something. You’d get this whole line of adults walking across a dark path and carrying paper lanterns. You’ve heard of a fox’s wedding, where it looks like there are all these lanterns floating in the dark?”
“Oh yeah, I have, now that you mention it.”
I looked into loads of urban legends and folklore in my research for Koyagi. Usually I rode on Makigai Namako-sensei’s coattails, but there were times when I needed to come up with events and stuff by myself. That was where the internet came in handy.
“The Ceremony of Knots probably looks similar to that phenomenon. The man has to cleanse his body, while the woman wears a white kimono and a fox mask. They then walk in a line with the villagers to a tiny shrine deep in the mountains. Once they arrive, the villagers go back down to their homes while the couple spend the night there alone.”
“That’s all? There’s no special ceremony or whatever?”
“I didn’t find anything about what exactly happens at the shrine apart from that the couple has to stay there.”
“That sounds fine. We’ll just sleep till morning.”
“That’s what I thought, but there’s something I found which got me curious.” Ozu’s eyes narrowed and he showed me his phone with a grave look on his face. There was a pie chart on the screen. A pie chart in a single color. “If you want to get technical, this ceremony has a 100% success rate. Every couple which goes through it ends up married with kids. It ties your fate together with an unbreakable rope. It’s not just superstition; it’s what the data shows. This is a significant sample size too. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“You gotta be kidding...”
I was floored. As a man who valued efficiency above all else, I practically worshipped the very existence of math and statistics. Don’t get me wrong. I knew about the whole correlation not equaling causation thing. For example, it could just be that the village put so much pressure on the couples who went through this ceremony to get married, that they felt they had no choice, especially in an old-fashioned place like this. It could be something like that causing this impossible figure, with no supernatural causes whatsoever.
“Even if it’s got nothing to do with fate or whatever, there’s some kind of force at work making sure these couples get married, no matter what.”
“That’s what I’m gettin’ at. Now d’you see why Sumire-sensei’s losing her mind?”
“Do you see?! What am I supposed to do now? I’ll never be able to face either of you again!”
“Sumire-chan-sensei...” Iroha mumbled.
Mashiro looked at her anxiously.
Now Sumire’s reaction made sense. She thought we’d be fine just lying to her family and saying we’d get married, but once we went through the ceremony, we might actually end up tying the knot. She was under the impression that Iroha and Mashiro, her beloved students, were in love with me. The guilt must have been all-consuming. Well, Mashiro was in love with me, but that was beside the point.