“A wig monster?! In the bathroom?!”
Maki spoke so loudly that other groups of customers in the food court turned their attention to Yoshiki’s table. It was a weekday, but since it was already evening, there were a number of students from Kibogayama High School scattered around the Mion Mall food court.
Yoshiki rushed to clear his throat. “That’s right. She was sayin’ she didn’t wanna take a bath ’cause there’s a wig monster in the tub. Been goin’ on about it since last night.”
“The heck is that?! It’s totally just loose hair.”
“Naw. It was, like, a stupid amount of hair. There’s no way it could be loose hair. And she said that thing was aggressive as all get out.”
The previous night, after dinner, Kaoru had been the first to take a bath. But within minutes, she’d come flying out of the bathroom, screaming.
She’d clung to their mother, who was washing dishes in the kitchen, and shouted, “There’s a monster in the bath! A wig monster!”
Yoshiki, who had been watching TV at the dining table, was the first to react by expressing his disbelief, but Kaoru glared at him and insisted that she wasn’t lying.
While she was washing her hair, she felt strands of hair clinging to her foot.
Everyone in their family had short hair, but this hair was long.
Then, just as she heard a splish from the water, she saw a large mass of hair peeking out from between the tub and the bath cover. According to Kaoru, there was definitely enough hair for a whole person. When she reached out to touch it, it slipped back into the bathtub and disappeared.
Kaoru promptly flew out of the bathroom and put on her clothes without drying herself off. Then, as she tried to leave the changing room, she heard a loud thump behind her.
She turned around and saw the shadow of a mass of hair clinging to the bathroom’s glass door.
“No way!” said Maki.
After hearing the details, all Maki did was laugh. Yoshiki didn’t blame him. Even Yoshiki himself was thinking, What the heck is a wig monster anyway?! as he told the story.
Before their group went to the food court, they had stopped at an arcade, where Yoshiki won a plush toy for Maki from a crane game. The plush was some kind of bizarre character. It was hard to tell what exactly—maybe a dog or a cat—but according to the description, its “hair had grown out because it worked too much at a factory for hair-growth formula,” which was how Yoshiki found himself bringing up the story about the wig monster.
“Another ghost, huh?!” said Maki, a soft drink in one hand.
He kept on laughing, having completely forgotten that Yoshiki had just won him a plush toy. And only recently, he had asked Yoshiki to walk with him through the forest path on his way home because it was too scary.
“One guy on the baseball team also said he spotted somethin’ not too long ago,” Maki mused. “Seems like this kinda thing’s been happenin’ more an’ more.”
Unlike Maki, Hikaru had been quiet the whole time. His only response was a nasal “hmm” as he stared down at the straw in his soda fountain cup—although earlier, after seeing how happy Maki looked to get the plush at the arcade, Hikaru had teased Maki, saying, “Ya givin’ it to a girl or somethin’?” (And he seemed to be right on the mark.)
Finally, Hikaru asked, “You still haven’t seen it yourself, have ya, Yoshiki?” with an uncharacteristically pensive look on his face.
“No… I haven’t seen nothin’.”
After Kaoru left the bathroom, Yoshiki had only taken a shower. He’d carefully checked inside the tub, behind the wash bucket, under the bath stool, and throughout the room but didn’t find anything. It was the same for his parents, who took their baths later that evening. In the end, nothing happened.
“Then we’ll go an’ check out your bathroom later today,” Hikaru announced. He chugged his soft drink, and as soon as he finished, he got out of his chair.
Maki, with the plush toy in one hand, said, “What? Yer goin’ already?” but Hikaru threw his empty cup into the trash, and Yoshiki followed him.
As soon as Yoshiki had opened the door to his house, Hikaru said, “Boy, it’s hot out today!” and wiped sweat from his forehead.
“Would ya like some barley tea?” Yoshiki asked him.
“Naw. Let’s get to the bathroom first,” Hikaru replied firmly before taking off his sneakers at the entrance and putting them away.
Hikaru’s hurried actions made Yoshiki realize that whatever it was that Kaoru had called a “wig monster” was no joke—it was the real deal.
It was one of those things from the other side that Kurebayashi had told him about.
“…Why’s a ghost showin’ up in my house? And what is that thing anyway?”
“I’m not exactly sure what ya’d call it. Somethin’ like a ‘stain’ or ‘impurity,’ maybe? They always collect in places where humans live. They don’t normally appear like that, though.”
“But why my place specifically?”
No one was home. Both of Yoshiki’s parents were at their jobs, and Kaoru had joined her mother at the beauty salon where she worked. Kaoru had been doing that occasionally ever since she stopped going to school, but perhaps the reason she went on this particular day was because she was afraid to stay home alone.
With no one in the house, everything was quiet, so when Hikaru muttered, “Well, that’s ’cause”—his voice echoed oddly throughout the residence—“there’s somethin’ appealing about ya to those things from the other side. Since yer nice.”
“I don’t really get it. I’m not nice at all.”
Yoshiki knew that mixing too much with Hikaru would make it easier to attract things from the other side, but he wondered if that was because he was, as Hikaru said, being “nice.”
The light of the setting sun shined weakly into the changing room. Standing in front of the glass door that dimly glowed white, Hikaru paused for a moment with his hand on his chin and strained his eyes to peer through the frosted glass. He appeared to be listening for something.
“…Nothin’ there?” Yoshiki asked him.
“Naw, it’s there.”
Hikaru’s instant reply caused Yoshiki to instinctively step back.
“Honestly, it’s fine if these things are drawn to me, but why are they comin’ to you?”
“What’re ya gonna do to it?” Yoshiki asked.
“I’ll smash it up and put it inside me like last time,” Hikaru replied as if it wasn’t a big deal.
He opened the door to the bathroom that Yoshiki used every day.
“Is that all right?” Yoshiki asked Hikaru.
“Yeah, it’s fine. ’Cause I’m protectin’ ya.”
Hikaru smiled and closed the door behind him.
Yoshiki waited and waited, but the bathroom remained silent. There weren’t even any signs of movement from Hikaru. Yoshiki considered calling out to him several times, but the incredibly heavy stillness made him hesitate to do even that.
Yoshiki wasn’t sure how long he waited, but just as the light of the setting sun streaming into the changing room began to turn a deeper orange, there was a loud thump from inside the bathroom.
When he looked up, he heard an unpleasant noise of something being hit, along with splashing.
It was a heavy sound—as if something…or someone, had fallen into some water.
“Hikaru?! What happened?!”
There was no response. Yoshiki reached for the door, hesitated, and then flung it open with all his might.
He immediately regretted his decision. The air in the bathroom was stagnant and filled with a suffocating, sour stench.
“…Hey!” he called.
Hikaru was in the bathtub. It should have been empty after Yoshiki’s mom drained it the night before, but it was now filled with water, and Hikaru was completely submerged. Only his hand had managed to pull out of the tub and was gripping its edge.
“What’re ya doin’…?!” Yoshiki cried.
Yoshiki plunged his hands into the water to pull Hikaru out, but as soon as his hands entered, something thin wrapped around one of his arms.
It was hair.
Countless strands of long hair crawled up Yoshiki’s arm.
It reminded him of when he had touched Hikaru’s insides. It was just like that time. Something nonhuman was entering Yoshiki.
Before he even had a chance to call Hikaru’s name, the hair dragged Yoshiki down into the water. It coiled around his legs, waist, chest, and neck, and all he could see before him were countless bubbles floating about.
In each murky bubble were reflections of scenes that appeared and quickly disappeared—memories of the food court he was in earlier, yesterday’s events, last week’s, last month’s, the day Hikaru disappeared, and then Hikaru, and Hikaru, and Hikaru again.
The next thing he knew, Yoshiki found himself standing in the middle of a rice field.
The landscape didn’t belong to Kubitachi. Instead of terraced rice fields built with stacked stones, there was an endless expanse of flat, eerily perfect square rice paddies.
Yoshiki stood motionless upon a footpath, one of the many between each paddy that appeared perfectly straight, as if drawn with a ruler.
“…The bath,” he said.
When he looked up, where the sky should have been, there was a blank space filled with a seemingly artificial whiteness. It was an inorganic, unsettling white—the kind that would have a plastic odor to it.
“Ah… This is a dream. Must be.”
As he began mumbling to himself, a shadow fell upon his face.
There was no sun, but something was casting its shadow.
Beside him, standing at attention like a dear friend of many years, was a brain. The brain wriggled its massive, slug-like body and squirmed its head back and forth to look down at Yoshiki.
It had no eyes, but it was staring at him.
“Here, have some radish,” it said. The voice belonged to an older man from Yoshiki’s neighborhood.
“That boy of theirs sure is slow,” came a different voice, this time from behind Yoshiki.
When he turned around, there was another brain that was just like the first one. The voice belonged to the middle-aged wife of Nishidaya’s shopkeeper—a woman he would sometimes encounter behind the register at Nozomi Supermarket.
Before he knew it, Yoshiki found himself surrounded by numerous gigantic brains. Something moist and hot brushed against his cheek.
“Yer smart, aren’t ya? What’re ya doin’ for college?”
“Hey! Ain’tcha gonna cut yer bangs?”
“Boy can’t even give a proper hello!”
“Those Tsujinakas were fightin’ again. I feel so bad for their son!”
He knew each and every voice, each word they spoke.
They were things Yoshiki had heard over and over again in his suffocatingly small village.
The brains slowly dragged their massive forms forward and closed in on Yoshiki.