A spray rose up from the rusty red pipe.
“Geez, that’s hot! It must have come straight from the source,” Miyaki shouted, jumping back, her hand dripping wet. Steam rose from her hair, which had also gotten splashed by the water.
“Well, you shouldn’t have shoved your hand straight in like that. You’re gonna get yourself burned.”
I sighed, feeling the gravel of the unpaved road bite at the soles of my shoes.
“But the sign says hot springs.”
“We’re not here to have fun, remember?”
Hot-spring water spouted from a pipe that stuck out of the stone wall bordering the gently sloping hill. Miyaki shook her hand, which had gotten wet in the spray. She seemed carefree, like a college student out on fieldwork. Something about the scene seemed strangely familiar to me. Maybe I was remembering something I had seen during my own student days.
I shook my head and glanced up at the faraway sky, which was hemmed in by the dead branches of the trees.
Japan in the middle of winter—it was the perfect, bucolic scene. The bare trees appeared even whiter beneath the rays of the sun, and the branches and leaves with their faint remnants of snow were like ash after a razing. Reddish-brown patches, the remainders of a trailing fence, were visible through the trees, with some old, abandoned railway tracks on the other side.
“This place is more desolate than I thought it would be.”
“The line was already abandoned when I came here two years ago. I doubt there’s been any construction work since—just steady decline.”
A simple roof remained where the station had once stood, just a few wooden boards across a steel frame. The place looked mostly the same. An impromptu sign that’d been stuck together with packing tape fluttered on the links of the fence. The sign had seen better days. A vinyl cover had been placed there to keep off the rain, but it had turned yellow at this point. Even the drawing paper inside had been reduced to sodden wastepaper. The only words still legible, in faded indigo marker, were DUE TO, THIS LINE, and HERE.
The mound of dirt and rocks still sat atop the tracks, the bulldozer now too rusted to make out its original color. There was a scattered stack of logs. Two pillars, like red canes, poked out from the dirt. For some reason, they reminded me of torii shrine gates.
“Hey, look. There’s something there,” Miyaki said. She was walking a few steps ahead of me. She pointed toward the peak in front of us.
“What is it?”
Peering in the direction that Miyaki was pointing, I could make out the head of a huge white statue poking out from between the hazel mountains. It was wearing a veil over its head, but the folds of the cloth had been carved at an equal distance from each other, like an accordion divider. The bumps and hollows chiseled into the surface, apparently meant to suggest eyes, a nose, and lips, were so nebulous that they looked as if they might have been carved freehand.
“Is that Kannon? Wait, no. The Virgin Mary, maybe?”
“There are also Maria Kannon statues. Back when the Christians were being oppressed, they couldn’t erect statues of the Virgin Mary openly, so they would carve them in a way that could be mistaken as Kannon at first glance.”
Either way, the statue looked to have been made by a complete amateur. It was nearly impossible to tell what object of worship it was actually meant to represent.
“You heard there used to be some sort of cult building around here, right? The Silent Voice. They were disbanded after the core members were arrested on suspicion of fraud.”
“That makes sense. If they had to leave in a hurry, maybe some of their stuff wound up getting left behind.”
“Supposedly, they gathered all sorts of spiritualists from around the country—everyone from Buddhist and Shinto priests to people claiming to be possessed by malicious spirits. Who knows why? Maybe it was just to make themselves look more authentic. But maybe a statue like this, which can’t be narrowed down to one object of worship, was better suited to their needs.”
“Katagishi…” Miyaki stared at me with a dubious look upon her face. “Was any of that information in the case file?”
“I, uh, looked some stuff up,” I said, shaking my head as if to escape from her gaze.
I knew I had heard this information somewhere, but I couldn’t seem to remember where. I hadn’t read it. Or even seen it. No, I had definitely heard it. That was all I knew for certain.
The trees on the mountain across the way had already dropped their leaves; only the thin bare branches remained. That must have been why the statue was so much easier to see than last time. Last time? Yes, that’s right; I had already seen this statue, hadn’t I? Two years ago. So then why hadn’t I remembered it until Miyaki pointed it out? A fair amount of time had elapsed since we had returned from Rokuhara’s village, but if my mind was still this fuzzy, that ordeal must have tired me out more than I had thought.
Miyaki didn’t press. She turned her back toward the mountain and idol, facing the abandoned railway tracks instead.
“What do you think that big square box is?”
A two-square-meter enclosure, made of wood, sat underneath the partially collapsed roof. It was full of mud and wet fallen leaves and looked abandoned.
“Who knows…?”
As soon as I said it, though, I suddenly recalled a memory from when I had come here years ago of the wooden frame being filled with hot, earthen-colored spring water that glimmered beneath the summer sun.
“Wait a sec—it’s a footbath. There was a footbath here.”
“A footbath?”
“I think so…but the water was pretty muddy-looking, so I don’t think anyone was still using it at that point…”
I rubbed my temple with my fingers. Was this really a memory from here? I wasn’t mixing it up with someplace else, was I?