Chapter 1
The Haunted Building
No one believed it at first. Not even a little.
It began right after the beginning of the new school year, and no one knew who started it. Rumors are like that.
Everyone knew the story, down to the last detail. They could even tell you whom they had heard it from, and when. Still, even if you traced the chain of he-said, she-said a hundred people back, you wouldn’t find the original source.
“Hey, you know that big building next to the Mihashi Shrine, over in Kobune? They say it’s haunted!”
That’s how Wataru Mitani heard it, from Katchan, the son of the bartenders over at Bar Komura. Katchan’s real name was Katsumi, a girl’s nickname. The story went that his parents—expecting a girl—had decided upon the name way ahead of time. The obstetrician told his mother that the ultrasound showed it was “definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a girl.” But on that ninth of April, eleven years ago, a healthy baby boy arrived one week ahead of schedule, his wailing cry so distinctive that soon everyone, even the people in the nursing ward across the hall, came to recognize it instantly. It was a funny cry. He sounded hoarse and gravelly.
“My old man says I must’ve been smoking inside my mom’s tummy.”
Wataru didn’t find it hard to imagine at all. He remembered, with a laugh, the year they entered Joto No. 1 Elementary School together. They walked to class one December morning, both donning their school-issue yellow hats. As soon as they got into the room, Katsumi had run over to the sputtering old kerosene heater and stood there, shivering, even when the teacher came in the room. When he was told to take his seat, he replied as casually as could be, “Oh, don’t mind me. Just get on with it, chop chop, chop chop.” Wataru had somehow managed to keep from bursting out laughing until he got home, where his parents thought he was making the whole story up. The episode had since become legend, and, even now that they were all in fifth grade, the teachers would say things like, “Doing your homework, Komura? Chop chop!”
Katsumi’s voice had been hoarse as ever when he told Wataru the rumor about the haunting in hushed, excited tones. His voice broke when he said the word “ghost.”
“You’ve always been into ghost stories, Katchan.”
“It’s not just me, everyone’s talking about it! Some guy was walking by there the other night and he saw it! And when he tried to run, it chased him!”
“So, what kind of ghost is it?”
“They say it’s an old man.”
Oh, how unusual. “What’s he dressed like?”
Katchan scratched his nose, and his raspy voice became even lower. “He wears a cloak. A black cloak, covering everything, like this,” he said, swinging his hands up as if to throw a hood over his head.
“So how could they see his face? How would they know he’s an old man?”
Katsumi’s face wrinkled. Wataru would sometimes run into Katsumi and his uncle at the market or at the station, and his uncle would always greet him with a bright “How are you,” his face wrinkling in exactly the same way.
“I don’t know, you can just tell. That’s the way ghosts are,” Katchan grinned. “Why do you take everything so seriously? I swear, your dad must’ve put a steel trap in your head by mistake.”
Wataru’s father, Akira, worked at a steel company, which wasn’t to say he actually spent time on a factory floor forging steel bars or anything like that. The company ran all sorts of ventures—from foundries to shipyards—continuously expanding as demand for its core product dwindled over the years. At thirty-eight years old, Akira had spent only a few weeks in the company’s steel factory, right after being hired. Since then he had worked in R&D, then the PR department, and now he was stationed at a subsidiary company specializing in vacation resort development. Still, Katchan had insisted on calling him Wataru’s “steel-workin’ dad” since kindergarten and had never tired of the joke.
But Wataru was stubborn. He could never just accept something without a clear logical rationale behind it. It was a trait he picked up from his father.
His grandmother on his father’s side had first pointed it out about three years ago. The family had gone to her house in Chiba for summer vacation, and, though Wataru was still shivering from a day of swimming, he had asked his grandmother for a shaved-ice treat.
“Shaved ice? With you fresh from the sea?” she had said. “You’ll catch your death of cold.” He had protested, and his grandmother had laughed and shaken her head. “Just like your father, always eager to argue a point. Poor Kuniko!”
His mother, Kuniko Mitani (always “that Kuniko” to his grandmother), pretended she wasn’t listening.
“In ten years of marriage, that’s only the second time I’ve heard your grandmother say something nice about me,” his mother had told him later. She asked why they had been arguing, and Wataru had explained, “She told me I couldn’t eat shaved ice after swimming in the sea, so I asked her why she sold it at her shop.”
His mother had laughed out loud. Akira Mitani’s parents ran a food and drink stand on Ohama beach, on the Chiba Peninsula. A small public beach house was attached to their setup, with showers and places for people to change. During the busy summer months, Wataru’s grandmother would be out in back, making shaved ice in a big metal can all by herself.
“That’s a good point,” Kuniko had said, giving him an affectionate pat on the head, “but your grandmother is right—you do have your father’s argumentative streak.”
When Akira heard the story days later, he had frowned. “Don’t confuse a kid whining for a treat with the argument of a rigorous, logical mind,” he had said, as logical as ever.
In any case, Wataru was not the sort of boy to readily believe in ghost stories, especially not one as riddled with holes as this one was.
The building in question, the one next to the Mihashi Shrine, was actually still under construction. It stood in an awkward, half-completed state almost exactly midway between Wataru’s home and the school, so he passed it every day on his way to and from classes. He knew its story well, even though the rumors kept getting it wrong.
The building had been under construction for what seemed like forever. A crew had started work on the site during spring break more than two years ago, when Wataru was still in second grade. The eight-story steel framework had gone up first, and everything seemed to be proceeding on schedule, until one day, work stopped, and the whole building was covered in blue plastic tarps. As far as Wataru could tell, there were no construction workers on-site anymore. A while after the heavy machinery stopped coming, somebody removed the old blue tarps and put up new blue tarps in their place. That’s when Wataru noticed a new construction company had moved in.
According to Kuniko, the tarps had been replaced once more after that, and the name of the construction company had changed, as well. After that there had been no change to the site at all, and so the building stood there, draped all in blue, not quite a proper building, coldly looking down on the surrounding houses. A placard out in front that had listed a timetable of projected completion dates had disappeared.
“The contractor and the builder had some kind of dispute, so construction stopped. Happens all the time these days,” his father had said with a roll of his eyes, and Wataru soon forgot about it himself. But Kuniko’s interest was piqued, and she had started asking around.
The Mitani family lived in a large apartment complex with nearly three hundred units. They bought their apartment right after Wataru was born, and moved in right away.