“I don’t really know, but they supposedly engaged in inbreeding to achieve some sort of divine possession…to intentionally produce children with what we would now call mental illnesses. You hear about things like that sometimes in these small villages.”
“I…guess that doesn’t sound like the sort of place a person would be very eager to go back to… Are they still doing that today?”
I reached into my jacket and pulled out the crumpled letter. There wasn’t even a postmark, let alone a return address. I wondered how it had ever made its way to the office. Miyaki leaned over to take a look as I fished the letter out from its torn envelope. I heard her gasp softly.
The words arrayed on the torn sheet of ruled notebook paper had been written over in pencil several times. The lines of the letters were perfect and straight, as if they had been made with a ruler. Whoever had written it had applied significant pressure, and there were marks where the pencil must have broken along the way.
SISTER PLEASE COME. NO FAIR GOING ALONE. TOO MEAN. THE WAITING PEOPLE ARE LONELY. THE GOD IS LONELY. I WANT TO LET THEM OUT. WE NEED ALL ONE TO TEN. ONLY THEN. PLEASE COME
The name of the village was written at the bottom.
“What is this? Do you think a child wrote it…?”
“Who knows?” I refolded the letter and shoved it back into the envelope. “But the village’s strange faith could still be operating. We won’t know until we get there and look around.”
“This god of theirs could be related to your wife’s disappearance as well.”
“Maybe… Well, no. I don’t have any proof of this, but for some reason, I have this feeling that to get anywhere regarding Misaki, I’m going to have to do something about this place first.”
The driver announced the last stop. The electronic sign at the front of the bus read LOCAL HISTORY MUSEUM. I hastily pressed the STOP button before I realized doing so was pointless, since they had already announced this as the last stop. The bus came to a halt. I stood up first, trying to regain my composure.
There were two signs with arrows at the end of the wide street. One read MARSH, and the other read LOCAL HISTORY MUSEUM.
Glancing toward the road on that side, I spotted another sign that read 50 METERS TO KUHARA LOCAL HISTORY MUSEUM.
“Kuhara, huh…”
One to ten, only then. I repeated the phrase from the letter in my head as we walked down the broken road. The Ku in Kuhara meant “nine.” Just as the Roku in Rokuhara meant “six.”
The place looked more like a prison than a history museum. A pathway ran through an opening in the metal enclosure, which had a hanging placard that read MUSEUM OPEN. But the grounds inside were so quiet, it was hard to believe the place was really operating. A typically apathetic public museum. I started to feel disappointed.
Miyaki seemed to have had the same thought.
“It doesn’t seem like they put in much effort in, does it…?” she muttered with an exasperated smile.
“They probably only built this place because they had too much land and didn’t know what to do with it.”
The space inside the enclosure was an open clearing that was spacious enough for a game of baseball and dotted with several low-roofed buildings. There were no signs in front of the buildings to explain what they were. Surprisingly, though, the museum was not deserted. Two or three housewives could be seen wandering in and out of the buildings with children in tow—maybe there for some sort of homework assignment—or seated on errant benches.
A wooden sculpture sat atop a slightly raised mound in the center of the complex. It apparently showed the museum’s founder, a Kuhara something or other. His gloomy, thin face vaguely resembled Rokuhara’s. Which I supposed couldn’t be so rare in a tiny inbred village like this. But I still felt distaste rise from the bottom of my stomach.
A young boy in glasses emerged from one of the buildings farther back, pulling his mother by the hand. His expression was nervous and pinched, as if he had just escaped from a haunted house. The building was labeled as PREVENTING EPIDEMICS AND LIVING WITH ILLNESS on the information map.
We headed toward the building.
The automatic doors opened, but there was no one at the reception desk inside. The somber lights, which were dimmed as low as they could go, reflected off the muted ocher walls and ceiling.
“It sure is dark in here. Maybe they’re trying to save on electricity.”
“It’s probably because they run on tax money,” I said, glancing to the side. I nearly jumped out of my skin as I came face-to-face with the hideous visage of a Noh demoness painted in fearsome red and black.
The entire wall was hung with strange paintings. One depicted a thin, sickly tiger. Another, a serpent with a woman’s face.
“I guess we stumbled into the local municipal house of horrors,” I grumbled. Miyaki chuckled.
“Apparently, this is how they document illnesses in this village. As paintings comparing the sicknesses to different monsters. See? Look here.”
Miyaki pointed with one of her slender fingers. The painting of the serpent was annotated with words such as BLISTERS and FEVER. The tiger was probably cholera, since the word cholera could also be written with the Japanese character for tiger.
“They’ve even got one for the Soviet flu. Do you think the Soviet flu really managed to reach such an isolated corner of Japan?”
“That country seems pretty serious about disease control. Maybe it defected.”
I walked along the wall, staring at each of the pictures in turn. Other than feeling unsettled, however, there was no clear payoff. Miyaki had left me behind at some point. I heard her let out a tiny scream as she passed through a black curtain toward the back.
“What is it?”
As I pushed past the curtain, I spotted a half-naked old man behind her.
“I’m sorry, I just didn’t expect something like this…”
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I realized it was a puppet easily mistakable for a real man. The puppet was sitting cross-legged, its emaciated body exposed. A red wooden barrier stood between us and the puppet, stretching all the way to the ceiling. A sharp light seemed to shine in its cloudy eyes, piercing through the lattices of the barrier.
“This reminds me of an old madman’s cell…”
As if in response, static suddenly burst from the nearby speakers, and a worn-out audio tape began to play.
“Up until the Meiji era, many regions were in the custom…of confining those with mental disorders in cells such as these, known as zashikiro… Here in our village…such people are treated with reverence, touched by the gods…and serve an important function…as one form of barrier…”
I glared at the speaker’s grille. The recording cut off there.
“What a distasteful exhibit,” Miyaki said.
I stared at the puppet in the cell without responding. The glass eye sockets stared back, gleaming dully. There was another aberrant god waiting for us in this village. And another disturbing faith. I could tell.
After stepping outside into the gentle sunlight and chilly air and taking a deep breath, I felt something lightweight suddenly hit me on the back. Glancing down, I noticed a wadded-up sheet of notepaper lying by my feet. I picked it up and raised my eyes, spotting a child with short hair—boy or girl, I couldn’t tell—with their arm extended as if they had just thrown something.
“Little brat.”
Miyaki barely had time to grimace before the child ran away. I uncrumpled the sheet of paper, my attention captured by the clumsy handwriting inside.
THANK YOU FOR COMING. BUT NOW COME MORE. PLEASE SAVE MY SISTER. IT IS ALMOST TIME. LONELY— 5
The number written at the end was so large that it took up the entire bottom half of the page. Miyaki narrowed her eyes, staring in the direction in which the child had disappeared. I shoved the note into the same pocket as the other letter. This was probably a trap. But what other choice did we have?