“This is your money back, Mr. Matsunaga. We will cover your hospital bill as well, and at a later date, we will transfer the mi-keshi fee for the curse that befell you.”
“But if I take it…”
“This isn’t like what we gave Mr. Hara. You’re accepting this in order to be freed from the mi-keshi. You don’t want to remain trapped in the karma of Mr. Hara and Mr. Araki forever, do you?”
“No…”
“All right. Please wait here for a moment.”
Yoshio left the room.
Mitsuhiro stared at the paper bag with the stack of bills. Of course, he was relieved that Miyoko had one less thing to blame him for, but this “ritual” he’d have to join in made him extremely anxious.
As he played around with the envelope in his hand, he began to nod off from the medication. That is, until a knock on the door startled him awake again.
“Come in.”
Yoshio Tamai entered, handing him another paper bag. When Mitsuhiro took it, he saw that it contained a long-sleeved shirt, a set of underwear, and a pair of pants. Everything was white.
“Shall I help you into it?” he kindly offered.
Mitsuhiro politely declined and asked him for a few minutes of privacy.
Using only his left hand, he took off his patient’s gown and, after a struggle, managed to put on the new clothes. They didn’t fit perfectly, but it wasn’t that bad. He took out his father’s belongings and the money envelope from his bag, along with his house keys and wallet, and put them in his pants pocket.
When he stepped out of the room, Yoshio was waiting by the window, leisurely gazing at the evening sky.
“Let’s go. I’ll take you in my car.”
Mitsuhiro followed Yoshio out of the hospital. None of the hospital staff took him to task, even though he hadn’t been discharged. What was in the basement of this hospital? The question suddenly crossed his mind as they headed for the parking lot. Tamai Construction managed the hospital’s ritual hall; maybe that was why no one objected to their comings and goings. Not that he felt like asking Yoshio about it. He’d be in the hospital for the next few days, and he didn’t want to think about what was really there the whole time.
Guided by Yoshio, he got into the passenger seat of the van. The cargo area was filled with various cleaning tools, multiple helmets, and cardboard boxes labeled with terms like “shrines” and “shrine accessories.”
Tamai sat in the driver’s seat, started the van, and drove out of the parking lot and onto the main street.
“We will do our best to find out about those invited into the hole,” he said, sounding sterner than before. “If they have families, we will distribute mi-keshi fees to them. This is entirely our duty, so please don’t worry about anything, Mr. Matsunaga. Helping Hands will no longer contact you.”
Suddenly, Mitsuhiro felt that sensation again his in left hand. The feeling he had touching the ground at the bottom of the hole while he was desperately fighting Araki.
The ground had been oddly soft and squishy, emitting a pungent odor that stung his eyes.
His impression was that he might have been crawling around where the fourteen people swallowed by the hole had been piled on top of each other…but whether it was the painkillers or the fear and guilt in his mind, all his memories were shrouded in black fog, too thick to form anything coherent.
“Sound money means sound dispelling, you see,” Yoshio said in a matter-of-fact tone that made it difficult to tell if he was joking or not. Probably not, though. He had the same no-nonsense attitude as a seasoned construction worker whose livelihood depended on putting in good work.
“We will also have to pay Chief Sugawara and Mr. Takenaka. I’m afraid the ritual-hall-management fee will have to be raised by quite a large amount, but I’ve already been granted permission from the chairman of Shimaoka.”
“Right,” Mitsuhiro meekly replied.
Yoshio said nothing more. Once they arrived at Shibuya Station, he maneuvered the van through the crowds of cars and buses and parked it in the construction lot.
“Let’s go. You’ll want to put a helmet on.”
He got out of the driver’s seat and took two helmets from the back of the van. Mitsuhiro got out as well, took a helmet with his left hand, and put it on.
When the two of them reached the door of the soundproof wall, Yoshio tapped out the number code like it was muscle memory, unlocked the door, and motioned Mitsuhiro to join him.
Mitsuhiro did so, vaguely thinking about how, for a change, he was actually supposed to be here. No one brought it up before, but this really wasn’t someplace a guy from the IR department should have had an all-access pass to day and night—something especially true of the ritual hall below.
They wound up not stopping by the site office after all. He descended the temporary staircase he had climbed a few hours earlier with his daughter, soon arriving at the wall with the 鎭 character written on it. It seemed to stick out much more clearly now, as though it had been freshly drawn. Maybe it was paint, or maybe the ashes from burning a bonfire’s worth of amulets.
Following Yoshio down the stairs, he immediately noticed that the whole area had been given a thorough cleaning. In Tamai’s words, it had been “purified.” Thanks to that, the foul odor had completely vanished, and for the first time, Mitsuhiro felt the damp coldness that you’d normally feel belowground like this.
Trying to maintain control of his groggy mind, Mitsuhiro counted the steps on his way down, just like he did with Sae on the way up. He must have been muttering numbers out, because Yoshio glanced back at him at one point, but he didn’t offer any comment.
Sure enough, there were 177 steps between the top and the passageway. The door to the ritual hall was open, and the lights were on inside. Yoshio bowed toward it, and Mitsuhiro followed suit, taking care not to strain his right shoulder.
Following him into the ritual hall, Mitsuhiro was surprised to find himself in what seemed like a much different place. The floor was brightly lit by the orange lights, and he could see that everything had been swept clean. Four mounds of dark soil had been piled up over the edges of the hole, all the same size and shaped like geometric cones. To prevent the mounds from collapsing into the hole, there was an arrangement of boards, ropes, and temporary wooden pillars around the edge, decorated with paper streamers and sakaki branches.
Stakes had been driven into the four corners, with more branches lashed to them. Square ropes ran between the stakes, streamers hanging down. The entire hole now looked like a full-on shrine for an earth-appeasement ceremony.
Around each mound of earth were three small pyramids made of pebbles, twelve in all. Mitsuhiro thought they looked like the rock used for making crushed-stone piles. In this method of pile creation, vertical holes were drilled with a pile driver, then filled with crushed natural stone to firm up the foundation and improve earthquake resistance.
—They’re going to fill the hole?
As he realized this, Mitsuhiro noticed a small white curtain set up next to the pile driver on his right, with a group of ten men and women standing in front of it. They were of varying ages, some in their twenties and others in their sixties or older. None of them appeared to be construction workers. They were dressed in white kimonos with hakama trousers of different colors and white tabi socks—a bit like they were preparing for a festival, Mitsuhiro thought. Some had shovels, others had flutes, and one was holding drumsticks next to a large taiko drum that had been brought in.