“It’s true—the people around here have always believed in helping one another. Whenever someone is in trouble, whenever any ugly business rears its head, we’re right there to lend a hand. It’s rare for such a sleepy place as this, but a lot of the young people who come on vacation actually wind up staying, you know? Not that I’m surprised, considering how warm and inviting we are,” the woman said as she arranged three mermaid-shaped nesting dolls along the register counter in order of size.
We had been here for less than two minutes, and I could already tell that the word humility was not in these villagers’ vocabulary. The praise this woman was heaping on her village was the kind of stuff most people would usually be too embarrassed to say even about another person—not even one they were trying to butter up. This degree of loyalty to the group was starting to make the mermaid feel like the emblem of some sort of secret society or confederacy of spies.
“Not so much local pride as it is proud locals, I guess you could say,” I said, interrupting. Miyaki jabbed me in the side. Though I thought I had chosen my words rather judiciously.
“Proud as a peacock!”
Instead of being upset, a beaming smile filled the woman’s face.
“We are in the top ten villages you’ve never heard of, after all. And that’s top ten in the country. We’re the only ones on the list in this prefecture!”
The woman spoke with her diaphragm, so her voice was loud and booming. I could also hear horse races being broadcast on a radio in the store across the street. Miyaki jabbed me with her elbow again as my attention began to drift.
Sunlight pierced the store window, extending like a blade of light.
The woman squinted.
“Have you heard what they call the ocean yet? When it glitters in the sun like this? They say it’s the mermaid turning over in her sleep.”
I glanced to the side just in time to watch as the sun, glimmering brilliantly between the gaps between the shops, illuminated the paved slope of the road and the blue horizon of the sea waiting beyond.
“Sunny skies make for sunny people; that must be why everyone here is so bright. Not like the next village over. That place is like another country. Dark, by a cliff and next to a mountain, so all the people there—”
In a ham-fisted gesture, the woman suddenly clamped a hand over her mouth. Following her gaze, I saw a thin, shadowy figure walking along the faded white lines of the pedestrian crossing. It was a woman. She clearly looked out of place among all the absurdly bright and cheerful people of this village. Her hair hung down like tangled yarn, and her bare legs poked out from the long, trailing hem of her down jacket.
With a mixture of curiosity and disgust in her eyes, the proprietress of the tourist shop silently watched the woman until she finished crossing. Miyaki glanced at me as if questioning whether we should follow the strange woman, but I shook my head no. Once the storekeeper saw that the stranger was gone, the smile returned to her face.
“In any case, enjoy the village. Take your time. What were you working on again? A travel magazine, was it? You just promise to make us look good, you hear!”
The woman ladled out two cups of amazake from a pot in the back and pressed the paper cups into my and Miyaki’s hands.
“The woman who crossed the street—do you suppose she’s from the neighboring village?” Miyaki asked.
She traced the tourist shops with her eyes as she walked, the steaming paper cup of amazake, a sweet drink made from fermented rice, still in her hand.
“Maybe.”
At first glance, this fishing village seemed almost too carefree, but there was one dark shadow blotting out the sun after all. We already knew that they had issues with the neighboring village.
There had been complaints. About one village hoarding the tourists, enjoying prosperity, and getting preferential treatment when it came to public works, while the other continued to slide into obscurity. A common enough story.
“It’s true—this place is certainly jumping, whereas the other village we passed through on the way here looked like it was in a slump. But couldn’t any complaints just be ascribed to jealousy?” she speculated.
There was something I had intentionally not shared with Miyaki. There was a reason my brother-in-law had brought this case to me. It had stemmed from a letter.
While the sender had been anonymous, the postmark was from the neighboring village. Though incoherent in parts, one sentence stood out. About the village with the mermaid signs being in some sort of trouble. If the only thing the sender wanted was to defame the more successful village, there were a million better ways to do so. They could have gone to some tabloid or rag. If one person was so insanely jealous of their neighbor that they just couldn’t stand it anymore, would they really go out of their way to call a doctor after discovering that the neighbor was sick and didn’t know it yet?
“By the way, this was supposed to be amazake, right? Doesn’t it smell kind of fishy to you?” Miyaki said and brought the steam up to her face to sniff.
“That’s probably because she was selling dried fish in there, too.”
Just as I was about to lift my cup to my lips, someone bumped into my arm.
“Sorry…”
It was the woman in the down jacket who we’d seen before. She was much younger than I had thought when I had seen her from behind. In fact, although bedraggled, she couldn’t be older than a student. She was practically a kid. There were several moles scattered across her wan face, and the bones of her chest—which stuck out like a washboard and were visible through the open flaps of her down jacket—were painful to look at. Her sandaled feet and legs poked out of a short slip dress and were covered in fresh scratches. I could hear the old biddies in front of the diner across the street whispering to each other conspiratorially.
“What is she doing here again?”
“I know there aren’t any motels in their village, but can’t she find somewhere else to go…?”
The woman stared at me with a face so devoid of expression, she could have passed for a corpse, before swinging a hand mechanically into the air. Her fingers collided with my paper cup. It fell from my hand, the lukewarm liquid splashing all over the asphalt.
“Hey…!”
Miyaki stepped in front of me, but before Miyaki could speak, the woman suddenly pushed her back by the shoulder. Miyaki never even had a chance to complain before a truck barreled past at high speed mere centimeters away. The wind pressure rushed past, leaving only exhaust gas in its wake, and the remains of what had once been my paper cup were flattened against the road. If we had been even one step closer, it wouldn’t have been the cup now covered with tire tracks. It would have been Miyaki and me.
A moment later, the voices of the locals chimed in, asking if we were okay. The woman in the jacket shook her head wordlessly, shoved her hands into her pockets, and walked away.
“What just happened…?” I mumbled.
Miyaki, who was standing next to me, was still staring at the ground.
“I think she had the right idea about not drinking that stuff, Katagishi.”
My gaze shifted from Miyaki’s face, frozen in a nervous half smile, to her feet.
For some reason, the amazake seemed to sparkle as it crept across the surface of the asphalt. But I had a feeling it wasn’t just the light reflecting off it.
There were rainbow flecks mixed in among lumps of rice. Flecks that didn’t belong there. They were fish scales.