“Everything’s so disjointed…”
Ozawa’s muttering contrasted with the delighted face on my computer screen.
After our previous meeting, we started e-mailing each other anytime one of us uncovered something.
Ozawa had suggested that rather than discussing each new piece of evidence, it might be more helpful to wait until we’d reached a point where we could examine our findings in depth. Two weeks later, we’d collected enough information to warrant an online meeting.
While virtual meetings like this have become more frequent since COVID, I still feel a little weird about not seeing someone in person. As I watched Ozawa deftly sharing his screen and speaking without any hesitation, I began to feel the gap in our ages.
“Complicated stories can be really enjoyable for readers. Personally, I’m quite fond of mysteries like this one, too,” he added with a laugh. “It’s fun to try to solve them.”
We started by going over all our information.
It seemed Ozawa had been correct about mysterious incidents radiating out from the mountain, but more than one type of incident appeared to be involved.
We created broad categories, such as “the mountain caller,” “the red woman,” and “the cursed sticker.”
In , people seemed to encounter the mountain caller on the west side of the mountain, and the red woman on the east side.
Once we’d settled all of that, we examined each story in turn.
“The biker’s blog is probably related to the mountain caller we’ve seen in other creepy stories. The description of the shrine matches the one in A Peculiar Comment and the Letter from a Reader Being Stalked. Plus, the presence of the female dolls matches up with the obsession with women we see in the other stories.”
At that point, I raised some issues that had been bothering me.
For some time, I’d more or less assumed all the incidents stemmed from a very powerful god whose shrine had fallen into ruin and who had lost all their worshippers. But the hokora in the biker’s blog was filled with dolls. Shrines like that usually house gods, but this one didn’t seem to contain the shrine’s primary deity. So what had it originally held, and why wasn’t it there now? Was there some reason it had gone missing? Or was there never anything inside to begin with?
“We’ll have to search through the region’s historical records, or else ask someone who knows about the place’s history. Otherwise, it’s going to be very tough to learn more about that shrine. And when it comes to the hokora, I doubt much detailed information on its origins has survived… There’s nothing about it on the internet, and neither it nor the ruined shrine are named on any maps.”
Ozawa’s statement brought an end to the discussion, and we moved on to the next topic.
The red woman appeared in A House to Rent and in the interview about the cursed video. The woman in the Letters to the Editor section had the same characteristics. Details tend to be exaggerated as stories spread, but I figured it was safe to assume these were all the same woman.
However, these stories about the red woman involved a lot of unknowns. Ozawa described her behavior as “inexplicable,” and I agreed. Why was she jumping? What was she feeling? We had no idea what was driving her.
“The mountain caller tries to lure people to the mountain, but the red woman goes out and approaches her targets. She seems to want them to find her. But we need more information. I’m so glad you interviewed K, the magazine’s former editor. I couldn’t have gotten in touch with him on my own. I’d appreciate it if you kept using your network to gather more info.”
I nodded along silently, thinking about the college student from that interview. What was he doing now? Had the woman followed him?
Next, we talked about the ghost apartments on the east side of the mountain.
“This is the complex that appeared in Masshiro-san. And it shows up thirty years later in Waiting, where it has barely any residents. But based on the Letter from a Reader Being Stalked, Building Five was already a famous suicide spot some decades after the apartments went up. We can’t yet say whether that was the cause of the complex’s decline, or just a contributing factor.”
His tone seemed to imply something, so I asked him to clarify, and he continued.
“I’m sure you’ve already realized this, but when I found the unpublished draft of Waiting among the research materials, I noticed something. The published article dropped the description of the building’s surroundings, but the draft mentions that a mountain was visible from the windows of Building Five. That’s right—our mountain.”
With that, he shared an aerial photograph he got from the internet.
“The mother in the story spent every day watching the mountain from her window. Of course, if you only consider the story in isolation, it sounds like she was waiting for someone to throw themselves off the building. But we know there’s something strange about that mountain, adding a new perspective on what the mother might have been waiting for.”
I then brought up the part where she offers the narrator persimmons, as further support for Ozawa’s theory.
Assuming the story was somehow related to the mountain caller, that could explain why people only jumped from Building Five. If you took the aerial photo and drew a straight line from the apartment complex to the small, isolated structure visible on the mountain (in other words, the ruined shrine), then Building Five would be the closest structure to the shrine in the complex.
In Waiting, the mother and son looked out the window and saw the body of the jumper. Unless it was random coincidence, this would mean the jumpers were choosing the closest spot atop the closest roof to the shrine, then leaping toward it.
Perhaps those on the west side of the mountain jumped from the dam, while those on the east side jumped off the roof of the apartment building.
“Building Five comes up in the interview about the cursed video as well. It’s unknown when that video was recorded, but the red woman appears in it, too. I wonder if she and the mountain are connected somehow.”
Ozawa was muttering to himself, fully aware that I couldn’t answer his question.
“The sticker is as much of a mystery as the red woman.”
I, too, had been baffled when Ozawa sent me Closing In On the Truth About the Mysterious Sticker!
The torii in the image, as well as the fact that one of the people in the testimonials went all the way out to the dam in to kill herself, seemed to imply there was some sort of connection. But the reason for the multiple designs remained a mystery.
“If the human figure on the sticker is the mountain caller, then the ‘woman’ character (女) in the corners kind of makes sense. But I don’t understand the ‘end’ character (了) at all. It can be pronounced as ‘ryou’ and can indicate that something has ended or been completed. And the text in the chain e-mail with this character resembles the message from the red woman in A House to Rent. Of course, the woman said she didn’t remember the words exactly, so it could just be a coincidence.”
As he continued, I pondered whether the two varieties of sticker might serve different roles, or whether the change came about during the process of their creation.
“I did some investigating on my own after sending you that article. I walked around my neighborhood looking for the stickers, but I couldn’t find any. I found a lot on the internet, though.”
In fact, I had done the same thing, so I was well aware of how the cursed stickers had spread all over the internet.
Using an image search, I checked for any sites that had the cursed sticker, and I found quite a few.
The sticker appeared in multiple formats, such as on a random post in the middle of a forum thread, or from social media accounts that did nothing but post the image over and over again. Someone was obviously trying to spread the image online. I found both the 女 and 了 variants.
“It’s kind of unnerving to find out the same image has been spreading through all sorts of different means for so many years.”
A moment later, Ozawa added, “Honestly, when I read the article about the cursed sticker, I remembered hearing something similar from one of my friends in college…”
Then he told me the following story.