Going back to his old elementary school for the first time in years, Aoyama was first struck by how small the place looked. He’d been on the shorter side when he was a kid, so he got a strange satisfaction out of feeling big now. He’d asked Nanaka if he could come here to talk to her friends—Miki in particular.
This was an independent investigation, not something Rumi had told him to do. He wasn’t trying to distance himself from her because of what Mononobe said. The young shaman was dealing with things anyone would struggle to endure. He lived like that every day. And not just him—it was probably the same for anyone who could see the supernatural. Assuming he—or Rumi, for that matter—did what he did out of pure selfless virtue would be an insult.
Aoyama was starting to realize he’d put Rumi on a pedestal ever since she’d saved his life in college. He tried his best to work with her as an equal, but deep down, that wasn’t really possible. He had immense respect for anyone who could experience the kind of hellscape he’d seen and still dedicate their time to helping others. But blindly trusting whatever she said wasn’t healthy, either.
With that in mind, he’d used his own personal judgment to find something he could do to help. That led him to the idea of investigating at the school. Mononobe had said it was “all the same,” asleep or awake. He hadn’t gone into any more detail, so Aoyama couldn’t be sure if he’d got the message. But it sounded like Mononobe was telling him to look into how the Haruko dream was affecting the real world. In that case, the best thing to do was to ask the people who’d actually experienced it.
Of course, he was a grown man asking to talk to elementary school kids, so he had to be careful. No matter how much Nanaka might claim he was cool or had a nice vibe, it would still look suspicious. He’d been sure to get permission from the school before proceeding. Once they heard he was attached to the Pádraig Aoba Church, they were surprisingly accommodating. He’d been expecting a lot more resistance.
Changing into indoor slippers in the entrance hall, he was greeted by the teacher in charge of Nanaka’s class, Ms. Sawako Akino. She beckoned him into the elevator and guided him to a reception room on the far side of the third floor. A cup of tea was already waiting for him on the table when they arrived.
“I’m sorry to put you through all this trouble.”
“It’s no trouble at all, especially given everything your grandfather did for us.”
Ms. Akino gave a hearty laugh. Aoyama hadn’t been completely honest about why he was here. Saying it was part of a paranormal investigation would have made the school suspicious of him. He’d simply said he was concerned that the children were being scared by some urban legend lately and that he wanted to talk to them to help put them at ease. Fortunately for him, the school had assumed this was some kind of impromptu counseling session. It wasn’t a million miles away from the role his grandfather had filled for the community years before. Just one more reason to be grateful to the old man.
“I really don’t understand why the children like scary stories so much. I suppose we were like that at their age, too, what with Angel-san and whatnot… Oh, but you’re rather young, Mr. Aoyama, so you probably wouldn’t know about that. It was like a version of kokkuri-san. Of course, that caused mass hysteria and foaming at the mouth, so it got banned almost right away.”
Aoyama knew about kokkuri-san. It had enjoyed a sudden surge of popularity a generation or so back, not just among school kids but among high school students and adults, too. It was something used in spiritualism, similar to western table-turning or Ouija boards. During the game, a group of people sat around a table together and attempted to receive messages from the spirit world.
Scientifically speaking, there was nothing spiritual about it. The participants simply put themselves into a suggestive state, believing that the spirits really were listening, and subconsciously moved a coin on a board themselves. That was the widely accepted explanation of it. It had even been tested. In a group of randomly selected participants, the coin would fail to point to the correct answer if no one at the table knew it already. In groups that didn’t believe in the supernatural, the coin never moved at all.
The mass hysteria incidents that Ms. Akino had mentioned had really happened during the height of the craze, though. Supposedly, you would become possessed if you forgot to send off the kokkuri spirit or broke the rules in some other way. The incidents had been caused by belief in those stories—another form of self-suggestion, according to Rumi.
Kokkuri-san came with a specific set of rules. The more people stuck to those rules, the more likely they were to believe they were rooted in reality. They would think there really was a kokkuri spirit, it really was the one moving the coin, and it really would punish anyone who broke the rules. Most of the people who reported strange side effects turned out to have been prone to suggestibility and hysteria from the very start.
The appearance of actual victims elevated kokkuri-san from a simple children’s game to something greater, attracting more and more people until it became a countrywide craze. As society changed, it became less popular, but even today’s kids still did it from time to time.
The Haruko story could probably be explained the same way. It wasn’t so different from “Seven Mysteries of the school” stories that were told around the country. And with its specific, real-life setting and strict rules and punishments, it was no wonder it exercised such a fascination over young, impressionable minds.