Fresh water welled up in the stone basin, which sat next to a small jizo statue that was missing its nose. The water seeping out between the cracks reflected the blackness of the stone, making the water itself look like stagnant blood. A wooden placard reading PURIFYING WATERS had been placed behind the basin, leaning against the bushes.
“I don’t trust it…,” I muttered, my cigarette in one hand.
Miyaki rolled her eyes in reproach. We had discovered the basin along the gorge path leading to the village we were headed toward. “Purify,” my ass. Considering the case on our hands, I wasn’t buying any of it.
“Now, now, apparently, there’s more to it than just tall tales. Look, see here. It says that during times of cholera, encephalitis, and other infectious illnesses, the people of the village would often rely on the springs because they believed the rivers and other water sources, which were connected to other villages, had been polluted.”
“So as long as their own village was fine, screw everyone else, right?”
I could tell Miyaki was disconcerted. But with the bad mood I was in, there wasn’t much she could do other than grimace. I exhaled a long puff of smoke to calm myself and turned my eyes toward the gently sloping gorge. A net had been slung across the natural stone wall to prevent rockslides. The path, if it could even be called that, was green with moss. If someone happened to slip in a place like this, it would probably be a week before their body was ever found.
“Katagishi, have you ever been to this village before?” Miyaki asked, keeping her eyes fixed on the sign as if she saw something interesting there.
“Nope. Why do you ask?”
“This request was originally delivered to Rokuhara’s section, right? With the way you snatched that letter up, I figured maybe this case meant something to you.”
I had, in fact, “snatched” the letter, just like Miyaki said. It was now hiding in my jacket, crumpled up into a ball. Miyaki turned toward me.
“Can I ask you something unrelated, Katagishi?”
“What?”
“You referred to Rokuhara as your brother-in-law before, but is he married to one of your relatives? Or is he your wife’s brother?”
“I thought you said you were going to ask something unrelated… He’s my wife’s brother. The older brother of Misaki Rokuhara, the woman I was married to a long time ago. The village we’re heading to is where they were both born.”
I stubbed my cigarette out in my portable ashtray. Miyaki’s eyes widened slightly.
Once we made our way out of the dark gorge, the road suddenly grew broader. A rusty bus-stop sign stood by the side of the road. There was a shop with a glass-paned entrance and an old-fashioned ice cream display freezer sitting out front.
“Why don’t we start by interviewing locals?”
Miyaki nodded quietly. She didn’t ask any more questions about Misaki. Maybe she was trying to be considerate. I knew I was going to have to tell her everything at some point, but I wasn’t sure where to begin.
As I pushed the heavy glass door open, the warm musky air from the heater billowed out to greet us. The sallow shopkeeper stared at us from behind the counter. A half-eaten chocolate bar and the fragments of a deer or some other animal’s horns were lying on the counter next to the register.
“Excuse me, we’re here on a municipal survey…”
“So they finally sent someone!”
The shopkeeper leaped to his feet, knocking over his pipework chair behind him. I blinked.
“They all said I was seeing things! But I knew! I knew someone would take me seriously eventually!”
The shopkeeper took my and Miyaki’s hands in turn, shaking them vigorously before sighing in relief.
“I’m sorry…would you mind telling us exactly what you’re talking about?”
Miyaki surreptitiously wiped the palm of her hand on the back of her jacket. A mixture of confusion and disappointment appeared on the shopkeeper’s face.
“You mean you’re not here to investigate the giant serpent that lives in the marsh?”
“Giant serpent?”
Miyaki and I exchanged looks at the same time. I shook my head.
“There’s a huge serpent that lives in the marsh, big enough to make the entire surface churn! Sometimes, it comes to the surface, and you can hear the splash. I’ve never actually seen it, but I’ve seen the way the water spins, so I know it’s there. Here, take a look!”
The shopkeeper rolled up the sleeve of his flannel shirt and showed us his arm. All I could see was his sallow skin.
“You see that, just thinking about it gives me the goose bumps. Would a man get goose bumps if he hadn’t seen what he had seen?”
We quickly ended the conversation and exited the store before the shopkeeper, who was indeed trembling, could notice our annoyance.
Maybe it was the thin skein of clouds over the sky, but the world outside seemed to lack saturation. As we exited the shop, we spotted a housewife who looked to be in her forties. She was standing in front of the bus stop.
“Don’t tell me you actually came to investigate that snake?” she asked.
“No, we have not.”
The housewife slowly looked us over from the tips of our toes to the tops of our heads.
“Well, good. That shopkeeper is a fool. And a coward, to boot. We were in the same grade back in school, you know. He got bit by a snake playing in the bushes one day as a kid, and now every time he sees a garden hose, he thinks it’s a viper waiting to get him.”
I glanced at the rubber hose by the shop’s entrance, neatly coiled as if new.
“What you should be looking at now is those poisonous insects that show up in the gorge. Those yellow and black ones—some of them are like nothing I’ve ever seen. You need to call in a specialist before someone gets stung!”
The thrum of a large engine with a loose fan belt interrupted the woman, and the long carriage of a passenger bus sidled into view. Miyaki and I sat down next to each other in the last row. Other than the housewife and ourselves, the bus was empty. I could feel the hard metal through the cushions of the seat.
“You didn’t bring me along just to help bug-proof your wife’s house, did you?”
“Of course not. Besides, I don’t have a wife anymore. She went missing.”
As soon as the words slipped out of my mouth, I regretted it, but when I saw the sheer horror on Miyaki’s face, I realized it was too late.
“I—I’m sorry…,” she said.
“No, I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
The bus kicked into motion. I could feel every bump and divot of the road. There were no announcements about the next stop. The only sound was the rattle of the bus.
“I had wondered, but I guess I should have known…,” Miyaki said hesitantly, “…about your wife.”
“Yeah…”
I stared out the window and laid my head back against the seat. There was nothing to see out there but the densely packed trees lining the steep road as they rushed by at an angle.
“I met Misaki in a folklore-studies club back in college. We ended up getting married after graduation.”
“A match made in heaven,” Miyaki said, intentionally lighthearted. I chuckled in response.
“That or maybe it was just that neither of us had much luck dating up until then… Before we got married, she told me that the only family she had left was an older brother. There was never any mention of visiting her hometown to meet relatives or of going to see her parents’ graves. And I chose not to pry, figuring bad memories were involved.”
There were deep furrows etched between my brows in my reflection in the window. I placed a hand on my forehead, hiding the lines with my fingers.
“Rokuhara told me this later, but the guardian deity of this village as well as the beliefs associated with it are apparently very strange.”
“A divine incursion?” Miyaki asked, lowering her voice. I shook my head.