Yes, yes, hello. Nice to meet you.
Well… I guess I’ll have an Earl Grey tea. Hot.
So you never met O?
I heard. You used to work with O’s old coworker, right? K, was it?
O called me one day out of the blue. He said a former colleague told him about a writer investigating , and asked if I would let you interview me, since the two of us did some research on the place a long time ago. I said yes because I can’t figure out what to do for my next book and thought that maybe talking with you would give me some ideas.
So you’re a freelance writer, huh? Times are tough for us, aren’t they? All the publishers are bleeding money. They print less of my first editions every year. Maybe they’re trying to hint that an old lady like me should retire. Ha-ha, I’m just joking. Ignore me.
O? I worked with him at his old job, when he was a literary editor. We’ve known each other for ages. It must be almost twenty years now.
But after only a few years, they transferred him to another department. What was it called, again? The horror one. That’s right, it was the editorial department for the monthly magazine . I didn’t hear anything from him after that. They didn’t have the budget to hire me. Ha-ha.
But we started working together again after he changed publishers and wound up back as a literary editor. Well, you know, this field is pretty small. Connections mean something.
Oh, that’s right. You’re looking into , aren’t you? Is this for ? Is it still a monthly publication? What? They’re only making one-offs now and then? Wow. I guess we all have it rough.
Um, what were we talking about again? That’s right, .
Have you read any of my books? You have? Thank you.
That’ll speed things up. As you know, I write a lot of horror.
I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to do this for so many years.
So this was about, oh, twenty years ago. O was still a newbie; he’d just started doing proper work as a literary editor, and he took over working with me from his predecessor.
While O and I were discussing my next project, I received an offer from an editor working in children’s literature.
They wanted to make a compendium of horror stories for children, centered around the theme of school, and they didn’t want to pull any punches. That was why they hired me, an actual horror writer.
O and I had been thinking of making my next piece something about the propagation of rumors.
So I decided to explore how elementary school children spread horror stories, then use that to gather material for the children’s book.
In the end, however, the piece with O moved in a different direction, so the materials I gathered didn’t help much with that project. The book turned out wonderfully, though, so pick it up if you’re interested.
Oh, sorry. Forget about that for now. I had never written a children’s book and knew absolutely nothing about children, so I decided to do some field research.
The editor for the children’s book used his network to connect me with three elementary schools in the Kanto and Kinki regions, and O and I went to interview the students in person, just the two of us. We could have brought the other editor, but three’s a crowd, you know.
One of those schools was in .
By the way, do you believe in ghosts? Yes. I see.
Me? Well, this may surprise you, since I’m a horror author, but I don’t.
Now, this is just my personal opinion based on my many years as a horror writer, but I believe that ghosts are born from human fears.
Ghost stories don’t come from people who have seen a ghost with their own eyes.
If an anatomical model was dancing every night in some elementary school’s science room, it would be huge.
Think about it. That kind of room is a dedicated space, separate from the other classrooms. It’s usually in a special building or annex. Fewer people go there, and less often. And when someone visits a place like that, they get scared, even if it’s only a little. The fact they’re not sure what’s scaring them just makes the experience even more terrifying. So in order to share that vague, ominous feeling, they make up a ridiculous story like the one about the dancing model.
I used a location in that example, but it could be anything that elicits fear.
There’s a theory that the jinmenken, or human-faced dog, that got popular a little while back was a response to children’s fears about stray dogs.
Of course, it’s perfectly fine to be scared of stray dogs. But some kids have dogs as pets, so they’re not afraid of strays, and they don’t understand the other children’s fear. The jinmenken helped them find a shared target for their fear. Maybe that’s why it spread so fast once the media picked it up.
Just like the jinmenken, certain fears are shared by people all over Japan. That’s why the ghost of a girl named Hanako haunts school bathrooms across the country, and why people see ghosts in every hospital morgue. The same process produces them all.
But at the same time, as such collective fears survive through the ages, their names and details can change.
No one has a landline anymore, so Mary, the haunted doll, calls your cell phone. Sometimes she even sends an e-mail. Maybe she’s not even called Mary anymore, but the vague fear of communicating with someone whose face you can’t see has survived.
That’s one reason so many horror stories involve mountains, rivers, and oceans, no matter what era they’re from. Humans fear forces of nature they can’t control, and that fear persists, passed down under different names through every age.
But there are exceptions.
If something deeply shocking happens in a small area, it can become a scary story unique to that region. And that’s precisely what happened at that elementary school in .
There are two sections in my Scary School Stories series that came from interviews I conducted in . One is in The School with Nine Mysteries, and the other is in Scary Stories from Around the School.
That’s right. Those are the ones. I remember the work fondly. You’ve already read them, I see.
Originally, I didn’t plan on publishing those two stories, but the first and second books sold well enough to keep the series going, and to be honest, I’d pretty much run out of scary stories based inside schools. That volume expanded into the areas around schools. Of course, by the time it reached the printers, it had been a while since I’d done my research.
The interviews I conducted at weren’t like those at the other schools.
A local incident a couple of years prior had influenced the scary stories there.
For The School with Nine Mysteries, I interviewed several students, then summarized the stories that seemed common to all of them.
Seven of them were typical, the kind you hear everywhere. But all the children ended with the same two legends.
That struck me as odd, so I asked about it, and they told me the last two stories had gotten popular at their school recently. You see, that school originally had only seven mysteries, too. But then two more cropped up, making nine.
The new stories were The End-of-Day Bell and Akio.
In addition, the students told me two more stories that took place outside of school. Both of those were recent, too. They were the basis for The Jumping Woman and Akito and the Phone Booth. Actually, there was one more. But I couldn’t include it.
It was exhilarating. I was witnessing firsthand how elementary schoolers spread scary stories—the very subject of the book I intended to write.
As I just mentioned, I believe scary stories emerge from vague, undefined fears. At the time, I spent countless hours trying to determine the underlying fear that had given rise to the stories in .
I discovered an incident where a mother and son committed suicide.
I have copies of the newspaper articles from when it happened. They were inside the notepad I used for my research. Being organized is helpful at times like this. Here you go.
The boy who died was an eleven-year-old named Akira . Yes, you write his name with the character 了, the same one that means “end.”
The article doesn’t mention the mother, but she killed herself one year after Akira.
I tried asking the students, but they said their parents forbade them from talking about Akira’s death, and they refused to discuss it. So did the teachers, of course. But I found out the school bell really does ring a few minutes late sometimes.
So O and I started asking around the neighborhood. We made up some excuse to talk to housewives on their way home from the grocery store. O was good at that kind of thing.
Coincidentally, one of the people we interviewed had witnessed the incident with Akira.
She lived in an apartment close to the elementary school and was just coming back from shopping when it happened. As the school bell rang to signal the end of the day, she was pushing her bicycle loaded with groceries up the hill to the apartment. She could see a group of people gathered in the park inside the complex.
A child was hanging from a tall tree in the park.
Below him, she could see a woman she assumed was his mother screaming his name, half-mad, with her arms in the air, jumping to try to get him down.
The kids had just gotten out of school, and a bunch of them had gathered around to watch.
The woman we interviewed ran over and told one of the kids to get an adult, then ordered the others to go home. She didn’t want them to witness such a gory scene.