All the papers had the same design drawn on them: a torii with a person underneath.
It would make sense to assume the family was all drawing the same design on the pieces of paper. But think about it. The youngest daughter was only three years old. It’s hard to believe she had the skill or patience to draw the same design two hundred times in a row. And no one understood why they were doing any of this to begin with.
When I heard that, I suspected the disappearance might be some sort of religious incident. I checked around, but I couldn’t get a picture of the drawing, and I couldn’t find any talismans or religions that used the image of a person underneath a torii.
My boss forbade us from publishing anything linking the case to religion unless we had hard evidence, so we never wrote anything about it.
When I heard the recent rumors about this sticker, I wondered if it was related. But I never saw the design that the family drew, so I can’t say for certain.
*Editor’s note:
“In 2003, a family went missing in Kawagoe City, Saitama. One night, a man working in Tokyo called E (38), his wife (36), their eldest daughter (7), and their youngest daughter (3) all disappeared. Their unfinished breakfast was left in the house, and no coworkers, friends, or relatives heard anything from them. They had no known reason to leave, and though it was widely reported on at the time, no explanation for their disappearance ever surfaced. It is now July 2008, and their whereabouts are still unknown.”
Testimony of F (twenty, female, university student)
Chain e-mails used to be popular at the all-girls high school I attended. They’re really common, right? You know, things like “If you don’t send this picture to three people, something bad will happen to you.”
One of those e-mails was really similar to the picture on the sticker. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the stickers around the city after I started college.
But the sticker was a little different. It had the character 女, for woman, on each corner, but the one from the e-mail had the character 了, as in end. I remember talking to some friends about what it could possibly mean, so it stuck in my mind.
That chain e-mail was kind of unusual. It had a picture like the one on the sticker, but the accompanying text was really bizarre. This was a long time ago, so I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something like this:
“Thank you for finding me. Send this to as many people as you can, and you will make a lovely friend. They’re very cute.”
Creepy, right? We all sent the text to one another as a joke, but one girl in our class who had a good sixth sense said it was really dangerous and that we should get rid of it, so I deleted it from my inbox.
Testimony of K (forty-five, female, housewife)
My friend went insane because of this sticker. Please be careful.
R was my neighbor, and our families used to spend time together. I’m a housewife because I have to take care of my kid, but R didn’t have any children, and she and her husband both worked full-time. Even so, we would see each other while taking out the garbage, and she was always nice to me. I sometimes went over to her house. We were very close.
One day, I was over at R’s house. She had the day off, and we hadn’t seen each other in a while, so she’d invited me to tea. We were chatting about this and that, when R mentioned she had recently gotten into something new.
She sold insurance door-to-door and usually walked or rode her bicycle. She covered a lot of ground every day and knew her territory really well. One day during her rounds, she noticed that sticker all over town.
At first, she just thought, Oh, there it is again, whenever she saw one, but at some point, she started to enjoy finding them. Some had been placed in really obscure locations, so looking for them felt kind of like a treasure hunt. Spotting one would bring her a little burst of joy, so she’d keep an eye out while she made her rounds.
Her husband even teased her, telling me with a wry grin, “Isn’t my wife such a weirdo?”
But the next time R talked to me about it, I began to wonder if there might be something wrong with her.
She’d made a map of all the places she’d found a sticker, and she was getting really worked up about it. She went on and on about how many she’d found, where they’d been, and which areas she planned to search next. She was very dedicated to her job, so I figured it made sense she was passionate about her hobbies as well. At the time, I just listened without giving it too much thought. But looking back now, I think she was already starting to lose it.
Later, R died.
She committed suicide.
On one of her days off, she suddenly announced that she was going to . She went there alone and jumped off the side of the dam.
I attended her funeral, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at her husband. He was so distraught.
I remember running into him following the memorial service marking the forty-ninth day after her death. I hadn’t seen him since the funeral, so I asked him how he was doing. He smiled as he spoke, his voice slow and calm.
He said that once he could function again, he started cleaning up R’s belongings. He hadn’t even been able to touch them for some time. But going through her things was really hard on him.
Just seeing her vanity table made him miss her. They’d brought it over from her parents’ house, and she’d always loved it.
The vanity’s three-paneled folding mirror had stayed closed since R’s death. Remembering her sitting in front of it as she put on makeup, he began to think that maybe if he sat in front of it himself, it might help him understand her decision. He addressed her silently as he opened the doors.
The mirror was covered in those stickers. They were plastered over every inch of all three panels.
For a while, her husband simply sat there, staring at it. When he caught his reflection in a gap between two stickers, he realized he was smiling.
He moved away shortly after we spoke, leaving all his household belongings behind, as if he’d fled in the night.
As you can see from these four testimonies, the sticker appears to put a kind of curse on people. Perhaps they are being spread by some supernatural force. Any reader who finds one around town should be careful not to get too close.
The third testimony raises the possibility that the picture can spread through any medium. Interestingly, the image appears to vary as well. If someone with evil intentions is using multiple avenues to spread this curse, then it could well pose a serious threat.
The editorial team will continue looking into this mysterious sticker. Please keep an eye out for future reports!