The cramped interior of the vehicle was filled with the aroma of coffee.
Sitting in the passenger seat, Miyaki stared down at the sweet bean paste spilling out from the stomach of the taiyaki, a fish-shaped griddle cake, that she had just split in half. She cried out in disappointment.
“This is smooth bean paste,” she complained.
“So? It’s the same, isn’t it?”
“Not at all. I wanted chunky.”
She sounded annoyed. She wiped the bean paste off her fingers with a wet tissue and then bit into her taiyaki with resignation. Through the car windshield, which had grown foggy from the car’s heater, I could see a train station. It was wooden—a rarity these days. There was also a small stall next to it. I glanced at the stall keeper, who was flipping hot metal taiyaki molds amid the steam. Our eyes met, and she bowed. There was a tear-shaped mole beneath her eye, which made her look tragic even when she smiled. For a moment, I was reminded of something from my past. I turned away.
When dealing with divine incursions, the most important thing was to never leave one’s flanks exposed. If someone held on to weakness, agitation, and past scars while doing this kind of work, there were things that had a way of slipping into those gaps. I shook my head and took another sip of coffee.
“Instead of a food stall with no customers, they could have assigned at least one attendant to the station,” I complained.
“What’s wrong with a food stall? I like when there’s little distractions like this.”
“We’re not here to have fun. The request came via a tip from the village doctor. People usually try to keep this kind of stuff under wraps. The fact that he came to us suggests this case is going to be even more trouble than the last one.”
There was no way to tell from the outside whether a taiyaki had smooth or chunky bean paste inside. But what if its puffy dough stomach was empty instead? Because that was what we were dealing with this time.
The two-story clinic sat with its back up against the thick and gloomy woods, surrounded by a smoky green haze. Glancing up at the walls of the building, which were streaked with dirty rain marks, I could see a white sheet on a laundry pole up on the roof that was encircled by a rusty fence. The fluttering sheet would probably look like a ghost once night fell.
The spaces in the parking lot were barely marked. I brought our van to a stop, and Miyaki and I disembarked.
“Based on what we’ve been told, there’s something in these woods known as the god that ate men,” Miyaki muttered, staring toward the foot of the gloomy mountain, which was swathed in a mantle of dark-green leaves.
“I wonder why it’s not called the god that eats men.”
“According to legend, it was once an evil god that could grant wishes but would snatch people away and eat them once the wishes came true. However, one day, a shrine maiden offered herself up as a sacrifice, and the god had a change of heart and became good instead. Or so the story goes.”
“If the god was so good, I doubt we would have been called in.”
Even as I said it, though, I knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Our job would have been a lot simpler if these things could have been sorted into neat categories like good or evil. If divine incursions were just malevolent creatures, maybe we could have stamped them out and washed our hands of the matter. But there was no telling what the consequences might be if one went around heedlessly destroying what no human meterstick could measure. A fact that I had experienced for myself more than once.
The glass door of the clinic was yellow like iodine, and it bore the establishment’s name etched in white. The door swung open, and a middle-aged man with a white doctor’s coat hanging from his shoulders ushered us inside. The place was quiet, as it was closed for lunch. The fluorescent lights reflecting off the lobby’s linoleum floor left the hallway as dark as a cave. A nurse was arranging charts and prescriptions at the reception counter in clear view, causing Miyaki to grimace. Before long, this lobby, which had a green pay phone and a vending machine that sold juice in paper cartons, would likely transform into a corral for the elderly.
We made our way deeper into the clinic, where the characteristic carefree magnanimity and sloppiness of the countryside was on full display. At the doctor’s urging, we entered one of the examination rooms toward the back.
The doctor closed the sliding door behind us and offered steel stools for us to sit upon. The stool had no backrest and almost no cushion. I felt like a patient as I took a seat, facing the doctor.
“Honestly, I shouldn’t be showing you this. It’s private patient information. But under the circumstances…”
The doctor pulled out a thick file from the cabinet, a bundle of papers bulging out from within, and placed it on the desk.
“These are the medical records of someone who passed away here.”
“Allow me to take a look.”
I opened the file. Several pages of yellow ruled notepaper were stapled together inside. I wasn’t even sure what language the words, scrawled in ballpoint pen, were supposed to be in. They must have been medical terminology. I tilted the file at an angle so that Miyaki could see as well, but she looked as bewildered as I was. There was a note in a corner of one of the pages that I thought might be in German.
“I’m sorry, what are we…?”
Just as I was about to glance up and ask the doctor for an explanation, a single photograph nestled among the notes seemed to leap off the page and catch my eye. I gasped.
The photo showed a series of white arches. Farther back, above these arches, I could see a human jaw and nose. It was a photograph of the upper half of a cadaver that had been laid out on a table, the abdominal cavity opened. I glanced back at Miyaki, who was sitting behind me, but she simply peered over my shoulder at the photograph, seeming unfazed.
The ribs had looked like archways to me at first. Looking back at the page once again, I noticed there was something disconcertingly mechanical and inhuman about their structure. A moment later, I realized what it was.
The internal organs, which ought to have been tucked inside the ribs, were gone. Even the muscle tissue, which should have stretched between the individual bones, was gone. Stripped clean, like fried drumstick bones.
“The organs…”
“Exactly.”
The doctor nodded with a sigh.
“The phenomenon began around two years ago. There doesn’t seem to be any issues while the patients are alive. But once their bodies are dissected, the organs that ought to be there are missing. It even happens in autopsies carried out immediately after death, which means that it can’t be explained by decay or by some sort of microorganism.”
“Could it be a parasite that only dissolves the organs…?” Miyaki asked, interrupting. The doctor shook his head.
“The idea that a patient could lose most of their internal organs without any noticeable symptoms is unthinkable. We last x-rayed Mrs. Karahara—excuse me, patient zero—just a week before she passed, and absolutely nothing was out of place.”
“So organs that must have been there while they were still alive are suddenly disappearing at the moment of death…”
I closed the file.
“The police suspected organ trafficking at first. I don’t know what I would have done if the relatives hadn’t spoken up on my behalf,” the doctor said with a wry smile.
I glanced at Miyaki. She seemed fascinated by all this.
“I don’t understand how you can stare at a photo of a dead body like that so soon after eating.”
“And I don’t see how those two things are at all related.”
“You’ve got more fortitude than I do, then.”
Although Miyaki occasionally seemed surprised or unsettled by the inexplicable phenomena we encountered, she never got spooked or lost control of herself. I wondered sometimes how she had managed to develop such composure at her young age.