The ocean was so beautiful, it almost seemed fake.
Each individual wave shimmered like twists of aluminum foil beneath the sunlight, which streamed down ceaselessly from overhead.
The road that ran perpendicular to the shore was crowded on both sides with little wooden souvenir shacks and grills. Though it was the middle of winter, it was as bustling as anyone would expect to see in the swimming season.
The slow way the surfers walked in their thick wet suits, the wet fabric glistening, made me think of dolphins on legs.
I was puffing away at a cigarette in front of a convenience store with a name I had never heard before. Miyaki pointed to a flag that was fluttering atop a sign telling visitors to TURN OFF ENGINES.
“Hey, look at that. Apparently, this place was ‘number four in last year’s ranking of the best villages you’ve never heard of.’ And ‘top ten every year since ’97: a new record!!’”
The flag, which looked like a printout of something that a local store worker must have painfully hand sketched in colored pencil, fluttered in the sea breeze.
“Well, isn’t that swell? Honestly, most of the villages we go to have something so gloomy about them that you can tell something’s wrong right off the bat. That is, if they even have that much going for them. I can’t remember the last time we were sent to an actual tourist spot.”
“Vacationing on the taxpayers’ dime?”
I tossed my butt into a nearby red tin ashtray.
“Yeah, it’s a veritable paradise…at least, if you ask locals. But if it was so great, I doubt they’d have to keep hitting us over the head about it. If it was that great, I doubt we would have been called here in the first place.”
“You’ve been in a bad mood the whole way here, Katagishi,” Miyaki said, shrugging. “A job is a job, right? Even if this one did come from your brother-in-law. At least it seems like a decent case for once.”
“I don’t see what’s so decent about it…”
In campfire stories, it’s always living creatures, not the things that go bump in the night, that were the real horror. And I couldn’t agree more. I’d rather face a hundred paranormal oddities than deal with my older brother-in-law, Mitsuji Rokuhara.
Ever since I first met him, I’d been creeped out by his extremely pale face, his habit of looking off into the distance, and the way his eyes seemed to pick up on my every move.
I remember a time I visited his place. When he’d opened the fridge, I had almost expected it to be full of human limbs and organs, all sealed up in vacuum packs.
To make matters worse, though Rokuhara was not my immediate supervisor, he was still my boss.
And since we worked in the same place, even when the office was swamped, he always knew when I was too free to refuse a case. Which was how we had wound up with an open-ended dilemma like this dropped into our laps. The kind of case where there wasn’t enough evidence for a proper, official investigation. They say that humans are the real monsters. Usually, I hated that phrase, but at the moment, I was starting to get it. No amount of exorcism was ever going to banish Rokuhara from my life, and witchcraft wasn’t likely to have much of an effect on HR departments and family registers.
“So far, we’ve only dealt with relatively straightforward cases that involved hunting down the source or identity of an ongoing divine incursion. This time, we’re being asked to confirm that nothing is happening here. Probatio diabolica. There’s nothing harder to prove than a negative.”
While I was still grumbling, a young couple strolled past, causing the corners of Miyaki’s mouth to twist into a grin.
“There’s a lot of couples wandering about. That’s not the real reason you’re upset, is it?”
“What would that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it reminds you of places you visited before with your ex-wife.”
Something seemed to get stuck in the back of my throat. I knew Miyaki wasn’t trying to be mean-spirited. In fact, she was probably just trying to lighten my mood with some well-meaning banter. I adjusted my tone of voice, reminding myself that she wouldn’t know the details of my situation.
“If you’re going to talk trash, maybe I’ll just leave you here.”
“Hey, wait!” Miyaki shouted, hurrying after me.
Ignoring her pleas, I began walking down the road of tourist shops, which led toward the sea.
A man was searing dried fish on a briquette grill in front of his shop, wafting smoke our way with a handheld fan. Meanwhile, a woman selling bath salts, face masks, and other random knickknacks packaged as local souvenirs tried to hawk small samples of her goods.
An old person was napping on a faded bench in front of a drugstore, arms and legs spread-eagle. The drool dripping from a corner of their lips captured the light, accentuating their satisfied smile.
“Maybe this place is just a peaceful, bustling tourist town after all,” Miyaki said.
As I turned to look at Miyaki, I caught sight of a store sign swaying in the wind over her head. It featured an orange mermaid.
“Let’s hope so.”
Everywhere we looked, this place was filthy with mermaids. Everything from the felt stuffed mascots in the stores to the American-style neon signs in front of the motels—so out of place for a Japanese fishing village—were modeled after a mermaid.
Miyaki came to a halt, staring into the display freezer at the front of one of the shops.
“Look, even the ice cream is shaped like a mermaid.”
I could make out the shape of a tail fin and a woman’s long head of hair among the frosty popsicles stuffed inside the frosted case.
“Ice cream in winter? No, no, no. A young lady like you needs to keep herself warm. Not that I’m one to talk. I am the person selling them, after all!” said a brash, pushy voice.
I raised my head in surprise as a middle-aged woman, tying the strings of her apron, appeared from out of nowhere.
Miyaki responded with a polite smile. The woman glanced at my suit, which made it immediately clear that we weren’t tourists. For a moment, a shadow passed across her smiling face.
“You’re here on business?”
“That’s right. Tourism research. We were just going to pop into the village hall today to say hello, but we decided to take a little walk around since we’re here,” Miyaki said.
The woman’s face changed to an obvious expression of relief, and she began arranging the goods at the front of her store. I didn’t have Miyaki’s talent for fabrications. I just nodded.
“There sure are a lot of places with mermaid motifs around here, though, aren’t there?” Miyaki said, as if she was just noticing this for the first time.
“You bet your sweet patootie there are. Have you heard the legend? About our local mermaid?”
“How did it go again? A mermaid washed up on the beach, right? And to thank the fisherman who saved her and the villagers who helped nurse her back to health, she shared her flesh with them to make them immortal?”
Of course, we hadn’t actually gone to the village hall. This was all information cribbed from the case file that Rokuhara had shoved at us. Although he had supposedly handwritten the file, the words were as trim and orderly as an open-source font. Which was also disconcerting.