It was a typical sleepy rural scene.
A garden this big would have been unthinkable in the city. Once winter came, the verdant green hedge surrounding the house would probably blossom with camellias. The neighbors didn’t seem to mind if the branches stuck out a little into the road. A brand-new shed, painted sky blue, glittered beneath the sunlight in a corner of the yard.
“My grandson painted it when he came to visit. I even told him it was too flashy for this old house.”
The old woman who owned the house smiled at me softly as she massaged her liver-spotted hands. I responded with what I hoped was a polite smile in turn, though I’m not sure how convincing I was.
“And this is the shed in question?”
The old woman nodded. I pulled out a photo, taken with an instant camera, from my suit pocket. The date was written on the back with a splotchy ballpoint pen; it was exactly one year ago. I turned the photograph around and held it up in front of the sky-blue shed.
It was far from a typical rural scene.
The shed in the photograph had been thoroughly crushed. It looked as if a typhoon had just swept through, except that the wooden garden gate in the background stood untouched. The shed, meanwhile, had been reduced to a splintered heap of plywood, with garden tools, a dented children’s bike, wooden bats, baseball gloves, and other scattered contents tumbling out from within.
The real issue, however, was the single massive eyeball enshrined almost reverently atop the ruined shed. It looked to be around one and a half meters in diameter. The white orb glimmered wetly with a texture like milk jelly, reflecting the morning light at the time the photograph was taken. A slighter, smaller, pale-gray circle sat ensconced within the larger orb, with yet another concentric black circle within that. Looking closer, I could see red veins, like coral, scattered throughout the jelly-white sphere.
“So…an eye?” I asked stupidly.
“It would appear so,” the old woman said with a perfunctory grin.
“And this fell on your shed last year?”
“Yes…”
As I lowered the photograph, the new blue shed slid into view like a projector slide.
“I couldn’t tell you if it was the left eye or the right, I’m afraid…”
“Does it matter?”
I must have sounded irritated, because the old woman reacted by shrinking backward slightly. I’ve never been good at these sorts of interviews. With a sigh, I glanced past the hedge, where I spotted a petite woman dressed in an inoffensive plain black suit just like I was. There was a grin on her face.
“Miyaki, next time, you come along, too.”
I exited the old woman’s yard, leaning my weight against a guardrail that stood along the unpaved road. I lit a cigarette.
“I take that to mean you frightened one of the locals again. I was busy, you know, tracking down information at the village hall. You’re gonna have to get used to interviewing people, Katagishi.”
“Remind me, which one of us is the senior agent?”
Despite having only just transferred into our department, Miyaki had her shit together. Her large round eyes and neatly trimmed bangs may have made her look like a kid, but the section she’d been in before coming to mine was apparently sort of a big deal. As for why she had been transferred into a peculiar department like ours, I wouldn’t have a clue.
“Well? What did you manage to learn that was so important, you had to leave your poor partner all by himself?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Miyaki said with a grimace, as she pulled out an acrylic file folder from her briefcase. “Apparently, the incidents started in ’97. The first occurrence happened in the pool at Daisan Elementary School, which is located just down the hill from here. The school is abandoned now.”
“Declining birth rates strike again.”
But what could you expect? With a population of less than four thousand, the majority of whom were already senior citizens, this place was the definition of rural depopulation. It seems the main industry here was agriculture, and most of the land was taken up by rice paddies. There wasn’t so much as a convenience store in sight. On top of that, with these unfortunate incidents happening every year, who wouldn’t want to get out of here?
I took the document that Miyaki held out. The image resolution of the newspaper article, which had been copied onto a sheet of paper, was hideously grainy. After squinting, I could just barely make out the edge of a twenty-five-meter pool in the black-and-white photo included in the article. Something that looked like a large pipe crossed through the center of the picture, stretching from one end to the other. It formed a slight crook about halfway along the pool.
“It’s hard to make out. Couldn’t you have at least made a color copy?”
“Not on the taxpayer’s dime. Hey, hey, don’t get your cigarette ash on the documents.”
Still clutching the cigarette between my lips, I held the page up to my face, moving it back and forth, up close and then far away again several times before I finally managed to piece together what I was supposed to be seeing. The pipe split apart into five hose-like appendages, the ends of which were resting on the starting blocks at one end of the pool. Each of those hoses were tapered at the end, capped with something stiff and curved, like dingy oblong kickboards. I frowned. The whole thing looked like some sort of B-tier composite photograph.
“This must be the arm the old lady mentioned earlier.”
“So it would seem,” Miyaki said, rifling through the documents in her file folder. “Apparently, once per year without fail since ’97, a giant body part has fallen somewhere in this village. So far, I’ve been able to confirm a nose, two arms, what looks like a canine tooth, a knee, a forty-meter-long strand of hair that weighed around twenty kilograms, and, oh, the organs. A spleen and a left kidney, supposedly. Hmm…let’s see. Then the eyeball from the house you just visited, of course. The other eye already fell in ’98.”
“Now they’ve got a set.”
“They’re not playing Go Fish.”
Just then, a little car horn beeped twice jauntily, making Miyaki and I lift our heads. A suntanned old man leaned out of the driver’s side of a pickup that was piled high with lumber, smiling and waving his hand. I stiffly spread the corners of my mouth, doing my best to return his smile.
“You two folks down from the city?”
“Yes, we came from Tokyo for a municipal survey,” Miyaki answered in a cheerful voice before I could even open my mouth.
“Is that so? Well, tell your higher-ups to do something to bring some younger tourists out this way!” the old man said, then drove off in his truck, leaving a friendly smile and the putter of his engine behind. There was no indication he had doubted Miyaki’s words.
“You lie like a rug, you know?” I said, half exasperated and half impressed. Miyaki just shrugged.