Mifuyu rubbed her eyes once, twice, and then closed them. She took a deep breath, steadied herself, opened her eyes, and looked around. That’s what she had done one time to wake up from a dream about being chased by a harpoon-wielding person with a fish head. But it didn’t work this time. The lines of cars without passengers still stretched down the road, the only audible sound that of the wind. Among the rows of empty cars, one had crossed the middle line, perhaps braking quickly at the sudden change to the town. “What…what in the world happened?” She needed to find someone—anyone—so that they could tell her what had happened. But everywhere was the same; absolutely no one was around. She didn’t pass anyone on the street; she didn’t see anybody walking in the distance. The cars lay abandoned, but the stoplights still worked, silently shifting from green to yellow, yellow to red, and red back to green at their predetermined rhythm. Even so, Mifuyu diligently stood at the crosswalk and waited for the light to change before crossing and entering the supermarket on the other side of the road. She relaxed a little hearing the recorded voice welcoming her when the automatic doors slid open, but her discomfort soon returned. No one worked the fish counter, and no one walked between the aisles of products. By the time she had circled the entire store and returned to the entrance, her heart hammered on the verge of bursting, and she found it difficult to breathe. Her knees trembled, and when she leaned against a shelf displaying fruit, an apple tumbled to the floor, bruising where it landed. But there were no signs of any employee running to help. “Is anyone here?” she yelled at the top of her lungs, but the supermarket only answered with the in-store music and the hum of refrigerators. Any remaining calmness she felt evaporated. She left the store and rang the doorbells of the houses along the street. Her phone didn’t have reception, and when she entered a police station to use their phone, there was no dial tone, and nothing happened when she punched in a number. The electricity worked, so why not the phone lines? Throwing open the sliding doors to a bookstore, she found no one and ran to check the next store. Her father’s judo dojo was empty, too. On a typical Saturday, kids would fill the space from wall to wall; the sounds of people falling on the mat accompanied by Che’s coaching would be audible from the street. But it was uncomfortably silent now. Pushing the heavy doors aside, she peered in. As she expected, not a soul stood on the dojo mats. Warm tears slowly filled her eyes, blurring her vision. “Calm down, calm down. It’s got to be something with the book curse. It’ll be okay.” She exhaled, wiping away her tears on her sleeve. Leaving the dojo, Mifuyu lost the will to search for someone and simply trudged toward the shopping district with her head hanging low. “This is the real world. I caught the thief and returned the stolen book, just like the rules said. The curse is lifted. I should be able to leave town.” She wanted to check the train station. And what about her father in the hospital? The complex smells of food wafted over from the shopping district, just like always. The lines of sweets in front of the candy shop waiting for children, the blue-backed fish and flounder on ice in front of the fish seller’s, the luscious smell of grilling yakitori wafting over from Hashida Broiler—all of it made her stomach rumble. A green basket overflowed with a mountain of juicy red tomatoes at the grocer. But no one was there to buy or sell anything. Mifuyu stopped in front of Hashida Broiler and stood on tiptoe to peer through the oil-stained window. On a normal day, the large owner would be bent over the grill cooking yakitori, but now the broken fan just churned loudly. Not wanting to waste the yakitori on the metal grill by letting it burn if left unturned, she reached through the window and moved the chicken to a plate on a nearby table while her side threatened to cramp. She licked the sweetly spicy sauce off her fingers, and one of the street cats the people looked after in the shopping district came up and rubbed against her legs. Its soft tail brushed against her calf. “…But the cats are still here…” She knelt down and petted the purring cat, scratching from behind its ears to underneath its chin. A small shadow flittered over the ground, and a pair of sparrows began pecking at the crumbs in front of the bakery. Hearing a dog bark behind her, she turned and saw a gray poodle running her way, dragging a red leash. “No way. So its owner vanished while walking their dog?” Mifuyu grabbed the leash and tied it around a nearby road sign so that the dog’s owner could find it easily later. All the nonhuman animals remained—that made her feel a little better. Which meant that right now, only the humans were missing. It felt like the tiniest sliver of light appearing in a pitch-black space. And that was better than letting fear drive her into a panic. “Okay—I need to find everybody.” Leaving the shopping district, she ran up the stairs to the train station. The area in front of the station was vacant, too, and peeking over the fence that kept people off the tracks, she saw that no trains waited at the platforms. Feeling a slight glimmer of hope, she bought a ticket to the next station over and passed through the ticket gates. The machines operated normally and let Mifuyu head into the station easily. As she climbed the few stairs to the platform, a phone rang. Startled, she looked around. She had just tried a phone at the police station and had gotten absolutely nothing. But that noise was definitely a phone. It seemed to be coming from the station office. In the back of her mind, she prayed that an employee would come rushing over to answer it, but as she expected, no one appeared, and it rang for a while before finally going silent. She sat down on a plastic bench on the empty platform and waited for a train to come. She tried calling her dad on her phone, but of course, it didn’t connect. The second hand on the clock moved, and the clouds brushed slowly across the sky, so time hadn’t stopped. Which meant that a train should eventually arrive. That’s when she heard a train whistle. Looking excitedly down the tracks, she saw a train approaching, just as she had hoped. Mifuyu stood, trying to keep her excitement in check. If she could leave Yomunaga and get to the next town over, she knew she could find someone and talk to an adult or, even better, the police. But the train showed no signs of slowing. The blue train rocketed past Mifuyu as though the station didn’t exist. She could see passengers through the rapidly passing windows. No one looked up, though; it was like they didn’t realize they were at a station. “Hey… Wait! Express trains stop here!” Her screams dissolved into the roar of the train as it rushed past the platform and disappeared down the tracks. The trailing wind dropped leaves on the ground around Mifuyu like souvenirs. The only sounds came from singing sparrows. Silence returned to the platform as Mifuyu stood in a daze, and then a noise brought her to her senses. The phone in the station office was ringing again. Mifuyu hesitantly reached toward the office doorknob and turned it slowly. She assumed that it would be locked, but it rotated easily. Mifuyu nervously opened the door and entered a small room that resembled her school’s teacher’s lounge. A telephone rang on a desk cluttered with papers. She decisively picked up the receiver. “Hello?” “—arrived three minutes early.” “I don’t know. The station should have been—” “Um… Anyone there?” She could hear people talking, but they sounded distant, and she pressed the phone against her ear. “Excuse me, um, but could someone help me? Something strange is going on here.” She didn’t care whom she spoke to; right now, she just wanted someone, anyone, to share this unnerving situation with. But the people on the other end of the line kept talking to each other as though they hadn’t heard Mifuyu at all. “How come it didn’t stop?” “Because there’s no station to stop at—” It was a conversation. She heard two distinct voices. Mifuyu felt like she was eavesdropping. They were still saying something about a station, and Mifuyu continued listening to them for any kind of clue. But their voices were quiet. Mifuyu pressed the volume button, but nothing changed. “—been some mistake?” “I believe so. There’s no station called Yomunaga. Check the route map—” “It’s listed on our map, though… Wait, never mind. It’s not.” Horrified, Mifuyu hung up the phone. There’s no station called Yomunaga? It was impossible; she didn’t want to believe it. But a train had just passed through even though Yomunaga was a stop on the express lines, and people couldn’t hear her on the phone even though the lines worked. She had to assume that the town remained sealed off. Mashiro’s face flashed across her mind. If Mashiro was here, she would definitely help. But Mashiro only existed in the worlds of the book curse. Leaving the office, Mifuyu inserted her ticket in the gate, and the doors slammed shut in error. Trying to leave the same station you got on at without traveling to another station triggered an error, and while she’d typically explain the situation to an attendant, there was no one here now. She placed a foot on the gate and jumped over, muttering about how she had no other options. The station sat on a hill, and upon walking out the gates, all of Yomunaga stretched out before her. The sun had begun to descend, the yellowing evening light reflecting off the roofs of the houses. The area around her was eerily quiet. She had become so accustomed to the noise of everyday life that she realized, for the first time, that complete silence was utterly horrifying. A breeze carrying the lush smell of evening brushed through her hair, pasting a band of hair to her sweaty brow. Standing at the top of the stairs leading down to the shopping district, Mifuyu thought for a moment before heading right, walking away from the stairs. She would go to the hospital. She was worried about her father, Ayumu. But the moment the automatic doors to the hospital opened, her feet refused to move. The silence of the empty hospital felt so chillingly different than the supermarket with its music, the shopping district with the animals, and the station with the rumbling of the train. The white walls and hallways, the vacant reception desk, the empty waiting room with its pale-colored sofa. A pair of crutches lay collapsed on the floor, their owner lost. The numbers on the board for people waiting to be called up to the cashier did not change. The smell of disinfectant spurred uneasiness in her. She recalled a horror story set in a hospital she saw on TV once and shook her head. Wrapping her arms around herself, she proceeded further into the cold hospital. A stretcher sat abandoned in front of the elevator. Some nurse must have been transporting a patient, for the stretcher was now empty with indentations showing that someone had been lying there. Distracted, Mifuyu kept her eyes on the stretcher as she reached for the elevator button. Which is why she didn’t notice that the elevator had actually started moving before she pressed the button. A chime sounded, and the silver elevator doors opened. As they did, Mifuyu gasped. A human! “Ahhh!” “Whoa!” Both people shrieked. Mifuyu jumped back, and the man in the elevator toppled backward. Holding a hand to her chest, she took short breaths to still her pounding heart and looked at the man. “Wait… Haruta?” The mushroom-haired man from Wakaba. The book thief who’d triggered the last book curse. “Mifuyu Mikura. I can’t believe you’re here…” While they talked, the elevator doors started to close, and Mifuyu quickly pressed the button. Haruta stood up and walked out of the elevator on his skinny legs. “Gosh, I’m sorry you had to see me like that,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I was surprised, too…but what are you doing here anyway? Why didn’t you disappear like everyone else?” “That’s what I want to know. I thought I was the only person around.” They both breathed sighs of relief, then looked at each other. Gradually succumbing to the ridiculousness of the situation, Mifuyu let out a snort before grabbing her stomach and doubling over in laughter. Haruta joined in. Their noisy, carefree laughter echoed through the silent, empty hospital. Once they laughed their fill, they told each other what they knew. “Something strange is going on at the station,” said Mifuyu. “The trains aren’t stopping there. The phone rang, and when I picked it up, I heard two people talking, but they couldn’t hear me. It was like I was spying on them.” “So everything outside Yomunaga is normal, then.” “Yeah. I saw people on the train when it passed. I think we’re trapped inside the town, like during the book curse.” “What’s the book curse?” “The security system.” Haruta muttered, “Oh, I see,” and brought a hand to his chin, thinking. “…And what about you? Why are you here in the hospital?” Mifuyu asked him. “Huh? Oh, that… I thought I would try talking to your father, apologize for stealing the book.” Haruta had been released from the book-curse world before Mifuyu. “I didn’t see you,” he added. “But your shoes were still there, so I figured you hadn’t returned yet.” So he’d left Mikura Hall and headed straight for the hospital. His head was so full with what he’d experienced in the strange world and the theft he’d committed, he hadn’t noticed the changes to the town. Once he got inside the hospital, he finally realized that no one was around. “At first, I thought that the nurses were on strike or something, but it was strange that I didn’t see a single patient,” Haruta explained. “I panicked…and ran out of the hospital, and that’s when I realized there wasn’t anyone by the station or in the shopping district. I was so scared, I didn’t even think about getting on a train. I tried walking to the other side of the river.” “Of course, the bridge. What happened?” “I wouldn’t be here if it worked. It’s gone. It should be there, but no matter where I went, I couldn’t reach it. I tried walking toward the bridge like I always do, but the roads always turned and never reached the river.” Two rivers surrounded Yomunaga, which sat between them like a sandbar. You had to cross a river to leave town. “I tried using my phone, but I didn’t have a signal. And the internet wasn’t working, either. The Wi-Fi at Wakaba was down, too. I didn’t know what else to do, so I came back here and looked around, and that’s when I ran into you.” “…I see.” “But I’m worried. I can’t contact my little sister.” “You have a sister?” Haruta blinked at Mifuyu. “You didn’t know? She’s in the literary club at your school. She said she tried to talk to you, and you brushed her off.” “No way. You guys are siblings?” He had to mean that girl who’d spoken to Mifuyu after she got off the train the other day. Now that she thought about it, beyond the fact that they both wore glasses, there was a bit of a resemblance. Mifuyu scowled, and Haruta furrowed his brow. “Take it easy on her. She just wanted some connection with the Mikura family. That’s all.” “All the more reason for me not to join the literary club. You can tell her that it’s never going to happen. Ugh, everyone’s obsessed with the Mikuras. I mean, I knew that, but still.” Mifuyu sighed in exasperation and dejectedly pressed the elevator button. The doors immediately opened, the soft light rushing to greet them. “Where are you going?” Haruta asked. “To my dad’s. I was on my way to see him.” “Oh, then I’ll join you.” “…Please don’t.” She glared at Haruta, who flinched for a moment and then cleared his throat. “Please,” he said as he stepped into the elevator. “It’s just the two of us right now… And Ayumu is, well—” “Gone, too?” Instead of answering, Haruta simply nodded. Mifuyu didn’t say anything more or chase him away; she just roughly jabbed the button for the third floor. They stayed silent until they reached Ayumu’s room on the third floor. The privacy curtains sectioning off each bed in the four-person room dangled, swaying gently. The window had been left open. Mifuyu stubbornly strode across the room and yanked the curtain back on the bed where her father should be. As Haruta had said, the bed lay empty, with only signs of the previous inhabitant remaining. “…Where on earth could he have gone?” said Mifuyu, His phone and the book Mifuyu had bought for him rested on the bedside table. Too much had happened today; Mifuyu could hardly believe that she had just bought the book this morning. She walked around the bed to close the window, slid the sash over, and locked the window. As she did, she noticed something by his pillow. “What’s this?” It was a notebook covered in brown leather. Had her father always had this? She moved over, picked it up, and stared at it. The cover was worn and wrinkled, discolored in places by oils from fingertips. Mifuyu glanced quickly over to Haruta; he stood slightly away from the bed like a visitor not wanting to disturb the family, but he stared at her hands, seemingly interested in the book, too. Deciding that she had nothing more to lose, Mifuyu opened the notebook. She intended to see if it was a schedule or diary of some sort, but deep wrinkles formed on her brow as she flipped through the pages. “What the heck? These pages are packed.” Words written in pen filled the long, thin lines of the notebook, with hardly a gap between them. The next page was the same, as was the next dozen pages, the fifty pages after that, and every page she scanned. It wasn’t a schedule or diary. It was a novel. The handwriting was, without a doubt, her father’s. And she knew the names of the characters all too well. Kaichi, Tamaki, Ayumu. “…Dad was writing a novel.” “What?” Haruta rushed over, took the book from Mifuyu, and began leafing through it. “You’re right. Seems like a story about a family modeled after his own.” “Ew, Dad wanted to be a writer?” Mifuyu had always secretly scorned the people who visited the shrine dedicated to the God of Books behind Mikura Hall and how they wrote nonsense like Please let this be the year I win a prize for best new writer on the wooden ema prayer boards. But Haruta just looked annoyed. “What’s wrong with that?” he said. “I’ve been writing and submitting stories to publishers for a while. I even pray at the shrine. Granted, they’re not great stories, and I’ve only made it through the first round of competitions. What’s the problem with wanting to be a writer?” “I mean, nothing, I guess.” “Precisely, nothing. And Ayumu’s a Mikura, too. It’s natural that someone who grew up around books would want to write stories, right?” Just then, a fragment of a memory danced through Mifuyu’s mind like a spark. She vividly recalled herself as a child, bent over an open sketchbook on the floor, her tiny hand scribbling intently. There was a crayon drawing of a girl in the sketchbook. Big eyes, hair down to her shoulders, triangular ears sticking up from her head. The girl was grinning from ear to ear. “Are you okay? You were spacing out.” “…Huh? Oh, no, never mind. I was just thinking about something.” “Well, pull yourself together. Look at this.” Haruta pointed to a page of Ayumu’s open notebook. Orange fur had wedged itself between the two pages. She picked it up and rubbed it between her fingers, her eyes growing wide as she felt the fur. “Is that…?” It was obviously animal fur. Astonished, she nodded to Haruta. “It’s fox fur,” he said. “No doubt about it.” They searched for fox fur in every corner of every floor and stairwell until they left the hospital. Somehow failing to notice it all on the way in, they discovered an incredible amount of orange fur scattered around the building. Scratch marks from claws even ran down the windows. Exhausted, they lumbered away from the hospital and began searching for evidence of foxes around town, the evening sun painting the buildings red. The wind had blown most of the fur away, but they found some caught in tree branches as well as a set of muddy footprints outside the dry cleaners in the shopping district. Mifuyu and Haruta left for the booksellers quarter. Haruta took a seat on a bench, and Mifuyu sat down a short distance away from him. Leaning back, she felt the hard cover of her father’s notebook in her shoulder bag. “…What happened?” “Mifuyu, I think you know. Everyone turned into foxes.” “But that’s only supposed to happen inside the book curse.” In The Silver Beast’s book curse, which had just ended, everyone had completely transformed into foxes. Only Mifuyu and Haruta had turned back into humans thanks to the machine in the story, while everyone else remained unchanged. “The other times, everything returned to normal once the curse was lifted. The pearl rain stopped; Che, who became that weird rain bringer, and Punch, who became a cool private eye, returned to normal along with the town.” “But we’re finding traces of foxes everywhere. Can you think of any other explanation?” “No, but shouldn’t we be seeing foxes in the stores and the hospital? Even if they got scared and hid somewhere, it wouldn’t be too strange to think that one of them would stay behind, so how come there’s not even one person around? Where did everybody go?” “That’s because… Oh, don’t make this harder than it already is.” Haruta was at a loss for words, too, and hung his head. Crows cawed as they flew through the scarlet sky. She had once seen on TV that crows were smart and cawed to communicate with one another. They must be telling everyone that it was time to head home as they flew. Mifuyu was hungry and thirsty. She had been moving nonstop all day, and with time flowing differently in the real world and the worlds in the book curses, she felt like she had been awake for over twenty-four hours. “…I need a break. I’m hungry, and sleepy… I’ve been running around the entire day. I’ve been trapped in two book curses already. And it’s all because of you and Keiko.” Her voice came out weaker than she intended, and talking about everything made her suddenly overcome with exhaustion. She wanted to go home. “I understand,” said Haruta. “It’s almost night, so let’s think about it tomorrow. I’m tired, too. But can I ask you a favor first?” “What?” “Ayumu’s notebook—could I borrow it for the night?” His request was wholly unexpected, and Mifuyu scowled reflexively. “Huh? Why?” “I just want to read it. I’m not going to steal it.” Even so, was it a good idea to hand her father’s notebook over to someone who had just taken a book from her family’s stacks? She didn’t disguise her distaste as she looked at him, but she didn’t see any other options. She sensed that her father’s notebook held something important inside. However, Mifuyu didn’t like books, and it felt kind of weird reading a story her father wrote. “…You’d better give it back tomorrow.” “Of course. I promise.” Still grumpy, Mifuyu unzipped her bag, removed her father’s notebook, and handed it to Haruta. “If anything happens to it, I’ll take it out on your sister.” “That’s coercion, but fine, I understand.” Even if they wanted to contact each other, neither had reception, which made exchanging phone numbers or e-mail addresses pointless. “How about we meet at Mikura Hall at ten tomorrow morning?” Haruta suggested. Mifuyu agreed, and they went their separate ways. On the way home, she saw the poodle still tied up in front of the bakery in the shopping district, so she untied the leash from the road sign and checked the address on the tags. The house was nearby. She walked the poodle into the yard of the house and closed the gate. As expected, no one was inside. Returning to her apartment, Mifuyu noticed that no lights shone in any of the units, making the building appear like a black silhouette in the red of the setting sun. She unlocked the door and vaguely hoped to hear her father’s voice welcoming her back as she stepped inside, but, naturally, no one was home. “He would’ve been in the hospital anyway,” she muttered to herself. Sighing as she removed the scrunchie holding her ponytail in place, she let her long hair fall. She opened the fridge, poured some barley tea into a cup, drained it, filled the cup again, and drank the whole thing again before even taking another breath. She then took some fish sausage from a plastic bag, unwrapped it, and shoved some of the pink paste in her mouth. She was hungry but didn’t feel like eating. There were eggs and instant ramen in the house, but turning on the stove and cooking—even just boiling water—sounded like too much hassle. After eating four fish sausages, Mifuyu tossed the wrappers into the small food-scraps strainer in the sink, drank another cup of barley tea, walked straight to her room, and fell into bed without so much as changing. Pulling her comforter up over her head, she pressed her face into her pillow and breathed in its familiar scent. With that, she suddenly burst into tears. The warm tears wouldn’t stop flowing, drenching her pillow. Utterly confused, she realized her feelings had finally caught up to her and brought tears with them. “Wh-what if nothing changes back? What am I gonna do?” Saying it out loud made it all that much harder, but she felt like keeping everything bottled inside her would tear her apart. “Dad…you guys…where are you? I’m scared. I’m so scared.” Curled up all alone in her comforter, she cried so hard, she felt like she was a child again. But with no one around to comfort her, all she heard was her own sniffling. She steadied her breathing before collapsing into sleep. Mifuyu. You are a Mikura. She woke with a start in the darkness to the outline of the round light on the inky-gray ceiling. Groaning, Mifuyu raised her head and looked at the clock next to her pillow. Five past seven. She’d been asleep for about two hours. That voice felt like a nightmare. Waking up caused that faint residue to dissipate, but a bad aftertaste remained. It sounded like her grandmother’s voice. Hurriedly smoothing her mussed hair, she rose and looked out the window. The view showed the same void as before, but she heard the howls of hungry dogs whose owners had vanished. She realized that she was gripping the curtain tight, and she pulled it forcefully shut. Mikura Hall’s book curse had to be why everyone had disappeared, and her grandmother was the one who had set it. What had Tamaki done? Mifuyu felt her guts boiling over with anger as she washed her face in the sink. Her eyes swollen from crying, she stared hard at her reflection in the mirror. She had forgotten most of her dream, but those words still rang in her ears. Mifuyu. You are a Mikura. “Enough with the nagging already.” Biting her lip in annoyance, she flipped off the lights and turned around. What had happened to Mikura Hall? She promised to meet Haruta there today, but she was curious to see what it was like right now. She left her house and walked down empty streets lit only by the streetlights. Perhaps because she had cried for a spell, or maybe because of her anger toward her grandmother, her heart felt hard, like a crab protected by its shell. She wasn’t anxious or sad. She wanted to take a giant pair of crab claws to cut the book curse to shreds. Arriving at Mikura Hall, she glanced at Keiko’s white mountain bike, which was still parked outside the gate, as she walked into the yard. She thought she heard plants rustle as she closed the metal gate, but she figured it was a cat and proceeded down the stone path. Just then, a human face appeared from the darkness and yelled, “Boo!” in a deep voice. “Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!” “Oh… Sorry about that. It’s me.” Tripping over her feet, Mifuyu fell on her behind as Haruta rushed out of the dark grass, holding a flashlight. Mifuyu glared at him, ignoring his proffered hand and standing up on her own before angrily brushing away the dirt, as upset as she had ever been in her life. “What are you doing, hiding in our yard?” “…I’m sorry. I couldn’t relax, so I came to search for clues.” “But you can’t get inside without me… Oh, right, you’re a thief.” “Keiko is the only one with a key. Once she returns, I’ll give it right back. I thought just seeing this place from the outside might help calm me down.” “Whatever.” She considered chasing him away but decided against it and unlocked the front door. The second it opened, she smelled the usual old-book smell of Mikura Hall. They removed their shoes, stepped inside, and walked toward the sunroom. The lights were off, and they heard Hirune snoring in the dark. When they turned the lights on, they saw her aunt sleeping on the couch like always. Mifuyu had seen something like this more times than she could count, and so nothing seemed amiss, but Haruta pointed out one detail. “That’s odd. Why is Hirune here?” “What?” “Everyone else is gone. Don’t you think it’s a little strange that she’s still here?” Mifuyu gasped in understanding and examined her sleeping aunt. Her strangely ageless face made her look either young or old. She had always been a complete mystery to Mifuyu. But her being here now couldn’t be explained by the old excuse about Hirune being Hirune. “Aunt Hirune. Aunt Hirune, wake up.” Mifuyu shook her shoulders. But she showed absolutely no signs of waking, simply snoring even louder. “Sleeping like the dead.” “Mifuyu, what happens to Hirune when the book curse is activated?” “I don’t know. She just keeps sleeping, like she is now.” “…I see.” Haruta moved next to Mifuyu, then crouched down, held his hand above Hirune’s nose, and lightly slapped her cheeks. When he saw that she wasn’t going to wake up, he took Ayumu’s notebook from the tote bag hanging on his shoulder and gave it back to Mifuyu. “I read it.” “What, already?” “It’s short. Only took about an hour.” Even though she didn’t write it, she held it close to her chest and asked, “S-so what did you think? Was it boring?” Haruta smiled at that. “No, it was quite interesting. He modeled the story after himself and his family. It’s a bit like an autobiography. The writing is incredibly sharp, too. It reads like a professional wrote it.” Relieved, she relaxed her grip on the notebook. However, the look on Haruta’s face grew stern. “But the issue is what’s written in it. Mifuyu, has anyone ever mentioned that Hirune and Ayumu aren’t actually related?” “…What?” “I’ve heard rumors. A longtime resident told me that, one day, Tamaki just showed up with a baby out of the blue. They said it was strange because she hadn’t appeared pregnant. She named the baby Hirune and raised her as Ayumu’s sister.” “I bet you the old man from Books Mystery told that crazy lie, didn’t he? He hates my family…” “I heard the rumor from Kaname, too, but it wasn’t just him. Ayumu wrote about it in his notebook—not only is Hirune not his real sister, she’s not even human.” Her hands went limp, and the notebook fell to the floor. It bounced off the carpet and landed open. That handwriting she had seen so many times raced across the pages—the same handwriting as the signature on her permission slips. “Not even human?” she repeated. She felt utterly confused and dizzy. Yet it kind of made sense. Hirune was a very curious character. Mifuyu never knew what she was thinking; Hirune always acted like she was living in some other world, and without Ayumu and Mifuyu to take care of her, she wouldn’t even eat. That same beguiling aura resembled something about Mashiro, too. Mifuyu knew that it all somehow connected to the book curse. Every time a book was stolen, Hirune would have that talisman in her hand, and once Mifuyu read it, Mashiro would appear. Mifuyu slowly knelt, bent over, and picked up the notebook. She had to read this. Touching the thin paper packed with her father’s writing, she squeezed her eyes tight. Then she slowly closed the notebook and placed it in her shoulder bag. “Let’s stop for now,” she said. “Huh?” Haruta looked shocked at her decision, but Mifuyu had said it with such resolve. “Aunt Hirune isn’t going to wake up, no matter what we do,” she added, determined. “And you might be able to read this in an hour, but I read a lot slower, and it’ll take me all day tomorrow. First, we have to find everyone.” She recalled the telephone conversation she’d heard at the station. “Right—the phone call to the station,” Mifuyu continued. “That was probably a station worker in another town talking to somebody, and for some reason, I could hear them. Almost like a wiretap…” “I see. So trains can pass through, and the station might only be partially affected by the book curse.” “Yeah, maybe. So according to that conversation, the station seemed to have disappeared. One person asked why the train hadn’t stopped at Yomunaga Station, and the other told them there was no such station and to check the route map. And then the first person said that they didn’t see it on their map, either.” She didn’t want to think about it, but if she was right, then it spelled trouble. “One person knew about Yomunaga, while the other person didn’t, and it should have been on the map, but it wasn’t,” Mifuyu mused. “My guess is that Yomunaga’s existence is fading as time passes. First it will disappear from maps and then eventually vanish completely.” Saying it out loud made her shiver. She felt cold even in the warm air and hugged her shoulders. “We have to find everyone soon or Yomunaga might really disappear by tomorrow,” Mifuyu mumbled. It wasn’t just the people disappearing. If the world forgot about the existence of the town itself—the thought alone was terrifying. Mifuyu imagined herself never crossing the river, never getting on train, alone in an empty town, a meaningless life surrounded by books. “…Okay. So then tonight, we search. But how are we going to do that?” Haruta asked, but instead of answering, Mifuyu silently turned to a wall and walked slowly toward it. It held a giant built-in bookshelf. “Mifuyu?” Haruta asked, confused. She didn’t respond, instead removing one book and walking back to him. “Here,” she said, holding it out to Haruta. “Huh?” Haruta looked dubious. It was a thick, old book titled The Frivolity of Farewells. Mifuyu had never read it. “Hurry and take this outside.” “What?” “Steal it. Otherwise, we can’t get to the world in the book curse. You said it yourself, right? Everyone’s turned into a fox. The real world shouldn’t be the same as a book-curse world, so something happened. The only way to find out is to go to that world.” “…So you’re telling me to be the thief again.” Mifuyu thrust the book forward. Haruta fell back a step, and Mifuyu grew irate. “Do you have any other ideas? Because if you won’t do it, then I will!” Furious, Mifuyu grabbed the book and rushed for the front door. “Hey, wait! Wait!” Haruta held her back. “Okay, okay.” Righting his crooked glasses, he stood in front of Mifuyu, who looked angry enough that steam might start pouring out of her nostrils. “I’ll be the thief. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? You’re a Mikura, so the curse might not recognize you as a thief if you steal one of your family’s books. Even if it does, I can’t let a minor get a criminal record for theft.” With that, Haruta took the book from Mifuyu. Finally a little calmer, Mifuyu scrunched up her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I overreacted.” “Don’t worry about it.” Haruta scrutinized The Frivolity of Farewells, let out a small sigh, and muttered, “Forgive me,” while putting the book inside his tote bag. “All right, I’m off, then. I’ll be in the yard.” “…Okay.” Mifuyu stayed behind in the sunroom and watched Haruta start to walk into the hall, then she turned away. She wasn’t sure if it would count as stealing if she saw him walk off with the book. She listened carefully, straining to hear Haruta putting on his shoes in the entryway and walking outside. She heard the door close. She didn’t want to imagine how things would change or what would happen now. Nervousness chilled her fingers, and she rubbed them together. As she turned back around, she stared in disbelief. Hirune was awake. Her hair a tangled mess, she sat upright on the couch, looking straight ahead. But her eyes seemed to be staring into another world. “A-Aunt Hirune?” Approaching cautiously, she reached out toward Hirune’s shoulder. Her fingers touched Hirune’s thin shoulders first, followed by her palm. But Hirune didn’t react. Her mouth open ever so slightly, Hirune muttered, “Whoever steals this book shall be left behind in a lonely town.” In the next instant, Mikura Hall warped and distorted. “Wh-what’s happening?” Mifuyu quickly grabbed a nearby shelf, but the distortion only lasted a moment. Hand on her chest in relief, Mifuyu looked up, and—Hirune was lying down on the sofa again, sleeping. Beyond the window, the giant ginkgo hovering faintly in the light sat frozen, its branches bent. Apparently, the curse recognized Haruta as the thief. Hirune was gripping that white slip of paper, but who knows where it came from? Swallowing hard, Mifuyu removed the paper from her aunt’s hands and read the words aloud. “‘Whoever steals this book shall be left behind in a lonely town.’” Her aunt had just muttered those exact words. In the next instant, Mifuyu felt the presence of someone behind her. Filled with relief, she turned around. She knew that Mashiro would know what had caused the town to change and where all the people had gone. “Mashi—” “Mifuyu.” The low, husky voice made her body stiffen; she felt frozen in place. The person standing before her was not Mashiro. “What have you just done?” A petite old woman. Black, white, and gray hairs mixed together in a high bun secured by a tortoiseshell hairpin. A lime-green kimono, complemented by a white obi with a red ornament. Her small, pale face housed alert eyes whose sharp gaze could make anyone cower. “G-Grandma Tamaki…” The old woman was Mifuyu’s grandmother, Tamaki Mikura. Her tabi-clad feet slid easily over the carpet, advancing step by step. Mifuyu felt cold sweat pour out of her, and she backed away, shaking her head. “No way. You’re supposed to be dead. How are you here?” She vividly remembered the day Tamaki died. Mifuyu was in fourth grade and had to miss a school trip to attend the funeral. Her father handed her a white chrysanthemum and told her to place it in with her grandmother, and in her fear, she gripped the flower so tightly that she almost snapped its stem. The flower was the same white as the face of her grandmother lying in the coffin—a face like plastered wax, letting Mifuyu know that there was no life left in her grandmother’s body. But Tamaki now stood right in front of her. “Mifuyu, what did you just do? I see everything. I’m here, watching. You let another stranger into the hall without asking your grandma’s permission. And you even let them steal something.” Her face tensing, Mifuyu continued to back away. Her leg hit the low table, and she tumbled backward over it. “B-but…Grandma, I had no choice. This was the only way to save everyone.” “Save your excuses. I know I told you to never let it happen again.” Tamaki raised a hand as she spoke, thrusting a slender finger toward Mifuyu, but Mifuyu couldn’t tear her eyes away from her ghastly, pitch-black mouth. Just then, a gust of wind blew in from somewhere, and Tamaki’s lime-green sleeve fluttered and wrapped itself around her arm. It was a white wind. It swirled over to Mifuyu’s side before morphing into a girl with white hair and dog ears. “Mashiro!” “Mifuyu, this way.” Tamaki’s face changed completely, her mouth and eyes bulging. “Mashiro, don’t you interfere!” But Mashiro wouldn’t listen to Tamaki’s reprimands. Holding tight to Mifuyu’s arm, she kicked fiercely off the floor into a high jump, landed on the stairs, and ran up to the second floor. Dashing down the hall, she opened the door to the large, already-lit stacks. Mashiro shoved Mifuyu in with enough force to send her flying, then quickly shut the door behind them and closed the latch. Tamaki’s shrill voice let them know that she was walking up the stairs, step by frightful step. Though the old woman’s body was small, her footsteps reverberated all the way to where they stood. “Hurry, to the back!” “B-but—” “Just hurry. Tamaki can only exist in this transitory realm of purgatory. If we can get over there, then we’ll be okay.” Doing as Mashiro said, they rushed down the dark, narrow spaces between the shelves. Arriving at the far end of the room, Mashiro flicked her fluffy tail and removed a book, then handed it to Mifuyu. A simple font on a white cover read The City of Misanthropy. “Read it as fast as you can.” Tamaki hammered on the door, and they could hear her nails scraping against the other side. Mifuyu turned the page for dear life. After two months of nonstop frantic activity, things settled down enough for me to finally take some time off. I hopped in my good ol’ car and decided to go on a journey. I didn’t have a destination in mind. I just hit the gas and started driving, taking a solo trip to wherever the winds guided me. Only my knapsack was in the back seat, with socks and underwear—two pairs each—some crackers, and a little money. I could buy anything else I needed. I raced down the coastal road, seagulls squawking and circling overhead. The color of the sky was soothing and soft, like a watercolor painting made with a soaking-wet brush. I opened my window to a refreshing ocean breeze, my shaggy bangs dancing on my forehead. I took one of my hands off the wheel to straighten my hair. Maybe it was because it was still the offseason at the beginning of spring, or maybe this was some hidden gem, but the roads were clear, and I could count the cars in the opposite lane on one hand. Silhouettes of surfers waiting for waves dotted a beautiful sea that moved from white to light green to dark blue with the crash of each wave. A row of houses stood along the road, their paint faded from the saline air. Most of the hotels and small stores selling beach gear were closed. I finally found a spot where I could take a break, right before the entrance to a tunnel. Like many other establishments, the salt and ocean breeze had peeled most of the paint off the wall, and the building looked quite shabby. I parked my car in the adjacent lot and walked up to check the place out; warm light seeped through the building’s glass door and the well-cleaned windows, and I could tell that the owner worked to keep the place as clean as possible. Turning the doorknob with an OPEN sign hanging from it, I walked in to the fragrant smell of coffee. “Welcome.” Inside the dim, cozy shop, the sixtyish-looking owner stood behind the counter in a black bow tie and red checkered vest. There were no other customers, and I sat at a table near the back. The ceiling, floor, and seats were all made of highly polished wood, highlighting the luster of the grain. An old, copper lamp with a brilliant flame sat in the middle of the round table, a small regulator on the side to control the flame. It wasn’t electric, so it had to be a real alcohol lamp. I’d assumed I was in the middle of nowhere, but it seemed like I’d stumbled into a nice little shop. I ordered a coffee, and while waiting for it to arrive, I took the map out of my jacket pocket and marked it with a red pen as I smoothed the creases. This place was about two hundred kilometers from my house. I had driven quite a bit. “Where are you visiting from?” the owner asked me as he set my coffee down in front of me. “A city up north. Haven’t had a day off in a while, so I figured I’d get out of town. I just hopped in my car and ended up here.” “I see.” The owner smiled at first, but soon began twisting his impressive, pointed mustache as if deep in thought. “You might want to turn around soon, though. There’s nothing past here.” “On the other side of the tunnel? It’s all the same to me. I’d be perfectly happy going somewhere with absolutely nothing. I just want to avoid people for now.” Lifting the white ceramic coffee cup with its dark-blue lines, I sipped the amber liquid. I felt the full-bodied fragrance of the roasted coffee pass deep through my sinuses— No, I didn’t feel that at all. Reflexively scrunching my face up, I took another sip. Again, I couldn’t smell anything. Bizarrely, this coffee had no taste and no smell. I stared at the thick liquid lingering in the cup and wafted some steam toward me, but there was no aroma, let alone any warmth. I watched as the liquid grew darker; it became so black that I could no longer see anything reflected on its surface—not even the ceiling lights. The darkness consumed everything like a black hole. “Excuse me, sir, what exactly is this? It doesn’t feel like coffee.” I glanced up, but the owner had suddenly disappeared. When did that happen? But that wasn’t all. The warm light from the lamp had gone out, the area around me had grown chillingly cold and dark, and I reflexively rubbed my arms. Something wasn’t right. Looking at the ceiling, I noticed the previously beautifully polished surface was now decrepit, holes dotting the grain like mouse bites. The ceiling lights, which had definitely just been on, didn’t even have light bulbs in them. Spiderwebs covered the room, and dust flittered through the air. I bolted upright in shock, knocking my chair over. It must have become fragile, because it broke apart once it hit the floor. It was like the entire café had aged decades in a matter of seconds. The tables were covered in worm bites, and the frosted glass of the lamp was cracked. The only trace of the owner was the white coffee cup resting on the faded gray table. Even the tasteless, odorless coffee had disappeared, and maggots crawled over the saucer. “Ah!” I froze seeing the creepy maggots and instinctively stepped backward. Just then, I felt something strange inside my mouth. Some sort of…thin, flat object on top of my tongue. I slowly stuck out my tongue and lifted the thing away with trembling fingers. It was a single strip of paper. If this town has rejected you, seek out the crows. “The crows”? Who wrote this eerie message? More importantly, why was it in my mouth? The coffee cup tumbled over with a clink, swaying on the saucer like a baby’s cradle. This was the type of thing that would make anyone shudder in fear. I quickly picked up my things and rushed out of the café. Rain was coming down in buckets. The sunny weather earlier felt like a fantasy. Pulling my collar up to cover my head, I bolted across the thick, muddy expanse. I jumped into my beloved car. I had no idea what was going on. My heart still hammered, and my mind was a jumbled mess, but I floored the gas pedal, fleeing as fast as I could. The rain fell with such amazing intensity that no matter how fast the windshield wipers beat, I could barely see right in front of me. The rain drops striking the roof sounded like machine-gun fire. I figured I should at least be able to go back the way I came…but before I knew it, I was driving down a dark tunnel. There was one reason I didn’t turn around. I could still hear the downpour behind me, and yet, at the end of the long tunnel, I saw a clear, sunny sky. I kept my foot on the gas pedal half on instinct. Something felt wrong about the sudden rainstorm and the café where time passed so bizarrely. The real road I’d come from was the one ahead of me. I must have been in a daze and passed through the tunnel without realizing. But I knew that if I could just leave the tunnel, I would find that beautiful road running along the shore. And indeed, the ocean opened up for me at the end of the tunnel. Waves lapped against white sand, and faint bubbles appeared on the ocean surface as it moved from foam green to a deep, navy blue. But something wasn’t right. Shortly after the tunnel ended, the road changed into a long railroad track. Realizing my mistake, I pulled my car to the side of the road and got out to stand on the shoulder of the interrupted asphalt. The train tracks began suddenly—railroad ties were wedged deep in loose stones at regular intervals, with iron rails running straight on top. I shouldn’t have gone into the tunnel after all. Regret stained my heart. When I looked back, there was no tunnel behind me. Just the calm ocean, light-blue sky, and the short road bathed in sunlight. I didn’t think I’d gone that far past the tunnel, but I suppose I was mistaken. I had little other option now. It wasn’t like I had any destination for this trip anyway. The ocean lay to my left, and a tall dirt embankment blocked my right side, so I couldn’t go any farther by car. I got my knapsack from the back seat and started walking along the tracks. There was only one set of tracks, so any train would come from directly ahead of me. If one did appear, then I’d run toward the ocean. But I never saw any trains, and the only sounds I heard were the wind and the calls of birds. I sweated profusely and began to resent the clear skies. What should have been a pleasant ocean breeze stung my skin and pasted my hair to my face, and I thought about turning back countless times. But I felt compelled to not stop and keep walking. Just then, the embankment on my right suddenly cut away, and I saw a stairway leading down. Yes! I dashed down the stairs, hoping that I wouldn’t have to walk next to the ocean anymore. The stairs ended in a shopping district. The pristine stores welcomed me, so different than the ramshackle establishments for beachgoers that I’d seen before passing through the tunnel. Hair salons, stores selling knickknacks, a butcher, a grocer, a bar, a Chinese restaurant, liquor stores, and florists. Various stores ran on either side of a street so narrow that a line of three people would block the road. It was an old-fashioned shopping district. But something about this area felt strange. I couldn’t hear a single voice. Rows of merchandise burst from their displays, but there was no one to buy the shiny red tomatoes or sit down to eat the stewed food that smelled so sumptuous. “Hello? Is anyone here?” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Anyone?” I prayed that my words would reach someone who might appear from either inside or outside the rows of buildings. But no one answered. The cawing of crows was the only thing I heard. Looking up, I saw some crows perched on a telephone line. I suddenly remembered that strange slip of paper I found in my mouth. Mifuyu took a deep breath and closed the book. She hadn’t finished the story, but she had read enough. The moment she opened the cover and ran her eyes over the first line, all sounds around her had vanished, and she could no longer hear her grandmother’s fingernails scraping against the storeroom door. That same held true now. Only Mashiro remained next to her. “Did you read it?” “…Yeah.” A deflated expression on her face, Mifuyu looked down at the book in her hands. Every time she read a book Mashiro gave her, she found that all the stories described such weird worlds. The man who made it rain pearls, the solitary detective living in a violent midnight world, beasts born with strange properties and steam-powered machines. She felt they were all too unrealistic before she ever discovered anything that interested her. She only read them because there was no other way to catch the thief. But this time, the setting and the feelings weighing down on her heart as she read were different. Mifuyu intimately understood the circumstances facing the protagonist of The City of Misanthropy. He encountered things that didn’t mesh with reality, and as he ran confused and bewildered, he arrived in a place where an even stranger reality awaited him. What’s more, he felt the same fear in a town void of people that Mifuyu was currently experiencing. “Mashiro, why did you choose this book?” “What?” “The story—it’s so much like what I’m going through now. So far, I’ve been going into all these book worlds, but this one, The City of Misanthropy, felt like it came to me.” A little troubled, Mashiro furrowed her brow and cocked her head. “That’s probably because you’re summoned to the book you need to read the most in any given moment. It’s purely coincidence.” But Mifuyu shook her head fiercely. “You’re wrong. This is no coincidence.” “But…” “Mashiro, how do you usually choose books?” “‘How’?” Mifuyu approached her, and Mashiro looked even more troubled as the dog ears on her head slowly drooped. “…I don’t choose them. Hirune wakes up when a thief steals a book, and I get called in. The next thing I know, I’m right in front of the book I need to make you read.” “But you always know what the book’s about.” “Well, of course. I’m always in Mikura Hall. You can’t see me, though. I can’t leave, so I just read every book on the shelves from top to bottom, since I have nothing else to do.” Now it was Mifuyu’s turn to be confused. “Wait, you’re always in Mikura Hall?” “Yeah. It’s like I’m on the other side of a fog. The bookshelves are the only things that exist, and you and everyone else look like you’re behind thick, frosted glass. I can barely make you out. I don’t know much about what happens on the other side of the glass, and if I talk to anyone, they can’t hear me. But once a book thief appears, then I can go between that frosted glass and the real world—to hand you a book.” “Oh, I see.” “I call that liminal space ‘purgatory.’” “What’s purgatory?” “It’s from Catholicism. People who die with impure souls go to purgatory to be cleansed before they pass on to Heaven. It’s neither heaven nor hell.” Mifuyu couldn’t ask her if she was a ghost. After Mashiro got eaten in The Silver Beast, she’d appeared next to Mifuyu inside the gondola without even opening the hatch; Mifuyu wasn’t brave enough to ask if Mashiro had managed that because she was a ghost. No, it didn’t matter what Mashiro was. The problem was Mifuyu’s insensitiveness. She had wondered occasionally where Mashiro usually existed, but hearing that she had been in Mikura Hall this whole time pained her to hear. Mashiro had been watching her, as though through a blurry lens, and Mifuyu had never noticed. Did Mashiro need to eat? Where were her parents? Was she alone? How long had she been here? Had she been on her own this whole time, with nothing but books for company? Mifuyu wanted to ask all those questions. But as she considered it, Mashiro grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the door. “Let’s go outside. We have to find the thief!” As Mashiro moved forward in high spirits, Mifuyu gasped. That’s right, she’d forgotten about Haruta. “Mashiro, wait. There is no thief.” Mifuyu filled Mashiro in before they left the stacks. When she returned from the world of The Silver Beast, everyone in Yomunaga had disappeared. Trains that would normally stop at the station passed right by, and everyone on the outside might be forgetting about the town completely. The only people in town were Mifuyu and Haruta, so their sole option was to return to a book world. “…So I made Haruta steal another book. We couldn’t think of another way to get back to this world. I never thought Grandma would come back to life and be so angry, though.” Mashiro’s dog ears stood at full attention, and she watched Mifuyu seriously. Mifuyu had to look away from her intense gaze. She felt like she could hear Tamaki’s voice even now. “When I was little, I brought a lady from the neighborhood into Mikura Hall, and Grandma was furious. Seems she’s still upset about it.” “It’s okay. She’s gone. Tamaki only appears in purgatory. I usually don’t see her, but that must be why she appeared this time.” As she spoke, Mashiro squeezed Mifuyu’s hand and opened the door. Just as she said, Tamaki was gone. Leaving Mikura Hall, they found Haruta waiting for them out front. He was much smaller and covered in soft fur, with large ears and a long nose. Now that he had transformed into a fox, he could no longer speak; he could only wag his tail when Mifuyu called his name. “Sorry, Haruta. Guess the thief can’t talk in fox form,” she said. “But I could talk normally when I turned into a fox in The Silver Beast. I wonder why.” Mifuyu appeared relieved to have found Haruto so easily, but Mashiro looked sullen and kept her distance—perhaps recalling the events that had unfolded in The Silver Beast. “Mifuyu, if you want to stay in this world, then you shouldn’t touch the fox yet, because it’ll count as you catching the thief. Where’s the book?” At that, Haruta dashed into some azalea bushes and came back with his tote bag, pulling it by the strap with his teeth. Deftly using his black nose and claws to undo the Velcro, he showed them the inside. It was The Frivolity of Farewells, which Mifuyu had made him steal. “Well, now what? Guess I’ll start by putting this back on the shelf. I’d hate to lose it.” Mifuyu scooped up the book and headed back into Mikura Hall. They returned the stolen book to its original location, and it slid smoothly into the space between the neighboring books, as though they had been waiting for it. The stacks were so tidy. Looking up at the house of books that her great-grandfather and her grandmother had built, Mifuyu sighed. “Why, Grandma? Why won’t you let other people use these books?” Mifuyu was the one who had broken the house rule, but she couldn’t help but think that her grandma bearing down on her like she was ready to disown her was simply too much. “This might sound odd coming from a self-professed book hater like me, but books are meant to be read. That made Grandma so angry, though.” “Because people kept stealing them,” said Mashiro. “Sure, I get that. She said that same thing herself. But Haruta and the other booksellers don’t close their stores even though people steal from them.” “They need to stay open to make money…” “But still!” Mifuyu wrung her hair and stamped the ground at Mashiro’s response. She knew she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t get the idea to form in her mind. “Oh, whatever. Grandma might’ve placed a curse on Mikura Hall because she couldn’t trust other people, but I trust her even less.” Just then, a vague doubt from before took shape. “…Something’s been bugging me this whole time. What if everyone in Yomunaga vanished not because the book curse went crazy or broke down, but because that was how this system was supposed to work from the beginning? That’s the only sensible explanation.” Until now, she had been treating the townspeople’s disappearance as some sort of bug or malfunction of the book curse. But what if it had been inevitable? “I thought something seemed strange. I get why the thief would turn into a fox. I still don’t know why a fox specifically, but having them turn into something other than a human makes it easy to find them and hard for them to escape. But what about the innocent people who transform into foxes as time goes on? Up until The Silver Beast, we caught the thief before everyone became a fox, but in that world, everyone turned into foxes. “So I started thinking, what if this is a rule of the book curse? Even though they’ve done nothing wrong, do people get erased from existence if they become a fox under the curse? Was that one of Grandma’s rules?” Mifuyu glared at the shelves of books, then strode toward the front door, her footsteps echoing through the building. Mashiro and Haruta hurried behind her. Her grandmother had to be in here somewhere, watching her granddaughter through the frosted glass. Like Mashiro said she always did. Putting on her shoes, which were still resting on the entryway floor, she turned around and spoke to the rows of bookshelves in the hallway. “Grandma, I don’t know if you’re a ghost or what, but if our family is the reason everyone in town is gone, I’ll never forgive you.” The sound of something falling came from somewhere deep in Mikura Hall. Mashiro, Mifuyu, and Haruta were all there together, and Hirune should still be sleeping. Mifuyu swallowed hard, then opened the front door and dashed outside before her grandmother appeared again. Mifuyu secretly expected to see everyone from town once she entered the book world. But they didn’t see a soul. They were, however, unmistakably inside the world of The City of Misanthropy. The darkness of night had disappeared, a pure blue spreading across the sky, the ocean visible before them. Not a trace remained of all the abandoned cars on the road, which had been replaced by an unfamiliar railroad leading off to who knows where. The ocean was in front of them, but there was no sound of waves. A silence like time had stopped rang in their ears. The uninhabited darkness had been unnerving, but a midday town without any sign of people was also disturbing. Mifuyu reflexively reached out and grabbed Mashiro’s hand. It remained unchanged, but sweat covered Mifuyu’s palms, chilling them. “Mifuyu, are you scared?” “Who wouldn’t be? How come we can see the ocean but not hear any waves?” Mifuyu took a deep breath, steeled her nerves, and walked forward. “Where are you going?” Mashiro asked her. “The café.” “What?” She continued walking, not answering Mashiro, who was confused. She worried that if she stopped moving, then she would freeze, so she strode confidently as if that would brush aside her fears. Haruta the fox trailed behind the two interlinked girls. The café lay in a quiet stretch of land between the dojo and the shopping district, a little before the booksellers quarter. It was sandwiched between a tobacco store and a bar; all the surrounding stores looked worn down. Built around the fifties, the building had been there since before Mifuyu was born. The rough white exterior paint was peeling in places, ivy crawled up the sides, and the wooden frame around the glass door was always faded. The place never interested Mifuyu in the slightest. Apparently, her father came here often, though. The place should have been vacant, but the light under the eaves shone down on a sign reading AROMA COFFEE. Mifuyu felt her rib cage hammer. This must be the right place. But Mifuyu’s courage failed her. As she hesitated while staring at the old, metal doorknob, Mashiro spoke up in a puzzled voice. “Why are we here, Mifuyu?” “…There was a café in The City of Misanthropy, remember?” “The strange café in front of the tunnel, right?” “That’s the one. I recognized the owner. He always wore a bow tie and a red checkered vest. Plus, he had a moustache.” Those words made her realize something. Her father was the one who called the owner here “Moustache.” Staring blankly ahead, Mifuyu heard the sound of claws scratching below her. The fox Haruta pawed at the door as if telling her to hurry up and open it. “Yeah. Let’s go in.” She turned the handle, the bell above the door tinkling as they entered. The smell of coffee filled the dim, mostly windowless interior, and while it seemed like someone had just been making coffee, there was, of course, no one around. The only source of light in the dark room came from a lantern sitting on a round table in the back. “Just like in the book,” Mifuyu remarked. Muffling her footsteps, she approached the table, with Mashiro and Hiruta behind her. The lantern on the table comprised a glass sphere and translucent base with some liquid inside; it was the alcohol lamp. She remembered seeing this lamp as a child, when her father brought her here. She had tried his coffee then, but it had been so bitter and awful that she quickly drank some of her orange juice. Thinking back on that day as she looked at the side of the lamp, she noticed that a cup of coffee had materialized on the table. Filled with a black liquid, it looked ready for someone to drink from it. Glancing to check with Mashiro, Mifuyu loudly swallowed back the saliva that had formed in her mouth. If they were to follow the story of The City of Misanthropy, she had to drink it. “Here goes nothing.” And with that, she grabbed the cup handle, held her breath, and downed the liquid in one gulp. She couldn’t tell if it had a taste, but after drinking it all and opening her mouth again to breathe, no scent of coffee tainted her breath. “…How was it?” Mashiro asked, staring at Mifuyu with concern. Mifuyu rolled her tongue around in her mouth. She didn’t find anything. The tip of her tongue probed from her front teeth to her back but encountered nothing. Right as she reached her hand out to check the cup one more time, she stopped in shock. Something felt weird. Inside her mouth, a small, stiff object butted up against her left molars. It swelled steadily as she examined it with her tongue, and Mifuyu’s eyes grew wide in fear as she opened her mouth. A slip of paper rested inside. Haruta was the most surprised of the three, probably because he hadn’t read the book. With a yelp, he fell backward onto the ground. Mifuyu stuck out her tongue, gently gripped the paper between her fingers, and extracted it. It was a regular piece of notepad paper. “What does it say, Mifuyu?” “…‘If this town has rejected you, seek out the god.’” The words had been scribbled hastily in pen. She knew that handwriting. “…Dad wrote this.” She was certain now. She gripped the paper and jammed it in the pocket of her jeans. “I get it now. My dad wrote The City of Misanthropy. He called the owner of the café Mustache, and this is definitely his handwriting. Wait—it’s not just The City of Misanthropy.” Her father’s notebook. It contained a personal story about his family. She hadn’t thought that her father had the talent for writing stories, but she did now. “My dad must’ve written the stories used in the book curses, too. That’s why they don’t have an author’s name; they weren’t for sale. He wrote them all—The Brothers of the Lush Village, Black Book, The Silver Beast—for Mikura Hall. For Grandma.” Mifuyu didn’t understand how it worked. Why did this piece of paper have her father’s handwriting on it? Had he been here before and set it up somehow? Or was it just something that the “author” of this world could do? “I wonder why Dad had this paper. Was it so that it would appear in my mouth?” “…The author of a story is the god of that world. Their fingerprints are everywhere.” “I see.” The author’s fingerprints. But Mifuyu sensed there was more to it than that. It seemed like this book had been made specifically for the current situation Mifuyu was facing. She felt the robust wall between the author and the reader shrink to a thin membrane. Her father had been expecting that Mifuyu would, at some point, experience the town with no one in it. “I bet this is what he expected would happen.” “What do you mean by that?” “He knew he’d have to prepare The City of Misanthropy for me to visit someday. So the ‘god’ in this note could be my dad.” And with that, she removed her father’s notebook from her shoulder bag. Having sat on his rump the entire time, Haruta started jumping up and down, trying to say something. “What is it?” Mifuyu asked him. “Maybe the fox thief has fleas,” Mashiro quipped. Haruta became even more animated, standing on his hind legs and pointing at Mifuyu’s hands. “What about my hands?” Haruta shook his head in frustration, walked up to a wall in the café, and began scratching at it with a sharp claw. But neither girl knew what he was trying to do. “Hmph, the fox thief is sharpening his claws like a cat.” “…You really know how to hold a grudge, Mashiro.” “A thief is a thief!” “Sure, I guess. Hey, check it out—he’s writing something. Looks like the thief really can’t speak in fox form. I wonder why.” With tremendous effort, the fox managed to scratch some letters on the wall: N-O-T-E-B-O-O-K. “‘Notebook’? Oh, Dad’s notebook.” She handed her father’s notebook to Haruta, who began diligently flipping through the pages. He stopped when he reached a certain spot, turned the book to Mifuyu, and pushed it toward her. She took it and ran her eyes over the first few lines. The left-hand page sat crammed with writing, but the right-hand page was blank. The final sentence read: “‘The only person who knows that this notebook exists is Hirune.’” What was that all about? Flipping to the next page, she found that it was blank, too, and the sentence seemed like the last one. Mifuyu looked back and forth between Mashiro, Haruta, and the notebook. “So…Grandma Tamaki didn’t know about this? But what does that mean?” Mifuyu mumbled. Haruta moved and waved his arms as if trying to answer, but he just couldn’t communicate what he wanted to say. He was so upset and forlorn. Mifuyu wanted to help him, but patting his back to comfort him might count as her catching the thief, so she simply said, “Um, sure, I’ll think about it,” and left Haruta slumped over. She had no other choice; she had to read the notebook. She flipped it open to the beginning. What she saw there startled her. The first page contained a list. The header on the list read BOOK CURSE RULES. It hadn’t been there before. “Oh, come on. There was a list of rules all along?!” Maybe it appeared when they entered the book curse. Mifuyu dived into the list, tracing each entry with a finger as she read. “‘Forbidden: Anyone of no relation to the Mikura family may not bring a single book from the collection outside Mikura Hall. When this rule is broken, the book curse shall activate immediately.’ “‘Rule: The thief shall transform into a fox. Their tongue shall be sealed, forbidding all pretext.’ “‘Rule: Upon the appearance of a thief, the world shall take the form of a book, excluding Mikura Hall and the shrine.’ “…The heck? I barely understand half of this. Especially the first part about pretext. What’s that about?” The list’s rigidly archaic words seemed to have fried Mifuyu’s brain, so Mashiro jumped in to help. “It means the thief is forced to become a fox and won’t be able to speak so that they can’t make excuses or try to get out of it.” So that was why Haruta couldn’t talk. Admittedly, Haruta was working with them now because Mifuyu had let him plead his case after they came back from The Silver Beast. “Okay. So next, it says, ‘Rule: Ayumu shall pen the establishing books, and Hirune shall make the selection.’ “‘Rule: Upon the passing of Ayumu and Hirune, their duties shall fall to the granddaughter Mifuyu and Mashiro.’ “Wait, what?” Mifuyu stomped her feet and pulled her hair in utter confusion. She was so upset that Haruta jumped up on a chair to stay safe. “At what point did I agree to get involved in this? Whatever, I’m already involved. I see that now.” “Mifuyu, calm down.” “I am calm! Otherwise I’d be smashing everything in sight!” Practically barking her response, Mifuyu furiously paced the room. “And this ‘Ayumu shall pen the establishing books, and Hirune shall make the selection’ part—that had to be that thing with Aunt Hirune back there.” Back then, right after Haruta left Mikura Hall with the book Mifuyu had given him, Hirune suddenly awoke from her slumber, recited, “Whoever steals this book,” and then went back to sleep. Mifuyu still didn’t understand Hirune’s existence, but according to the rules described here, Hirune was the one who selected the book for the curse. Then Mashiro would appear, hand Mifuyu the book, and the world would change. “When I first met Mashiro, she said that she came because Hirune summoned her,” Mifuyu muttered to herself. “Yes?” Mashiro piped up, looking pleased to have heard her name. Mifuyu cringed and continued reading. There was too much she needed to learn and understand. “I swear, when all this is over, I’m selling Mikura Hall.” “M-Mifuyu!” “I mean, that’s the only option, isn’t it? That building is nothing but trouble. Mashiro, I leave it to you to take care of Grandma’s ghost. Anyway, there’s one more thing on the list.” Mifuyu cleared her throat and read the last entry. “‘All curses shall be carried out with the blessing of the Patron of Reading, the god worshipped in Yomunaga Shrine’… What?” She almost dropped the notebook, but she caught it and looked at the line again. She thought that maybe she’d misunderstood or that the book curse was playing a trick on her, but no matter how she read it or looked at it, the words didn’t change. Yomunaga Shrine was right behind Mikura Hall, and everyone in town knew the place well. Mifuyu hurriedly removed the note from her pocket and opened it up. If this town has rejected you probably applied to their current situation, so the only question was the seek out the god part. “I thought this meant the author, since that would be the god of the story. But could it mean an actual god?” Looking back on it, when the town transformed with The Silver Beast, the shrine had also remained unchanged for some reason, just like Mikura Hall. But Yomunaga Shrine wasn’t that old, and rumor said that the God of Books had been enshrined there recently. Her great-grandfather Kaichi was only born in 1900, after all. Mifuyu suddenly recalled a memory. She’d played on the shrine grounds as a child, and her grandmother would be praying in her kimono, her parasol in tow. When Mifuyu arranged the gravel to play shop, when she played freeze tag, when she huddled under an umbrella in lieu of a tent during the rain, her grandmother was there. Her grandmother never looked at her but always faced directly toward the shrine. “That’s right, Grandma prayed at the shrine a lot.” And the statues of a certain animal guarded the entrance to the main hall of the Patron of Reading. “The goddess Inari. The fox,” Mifuyu muttered. Haruta’s orange fur shuddered. The two girls and the fox left the café, running without exchanging a word. At some point, night had fallen. Mifuyu worried that someone might be listening in on their conversations. A line of streetlights leading to Mikura Hall ran like a string of pearls through the slick, oppressive darkness. It was the beginning of summer, but the night breeze was chilly, and Mifuyu’s lungs hurt the farther she ran. But the tightness she felt in her chest came from the intense nervousness gripping her body. She’d always wondered why people turned into foxes. Not dogs, or cats, or bears, not even imaginary animals or inorganic matter. The thief would be so much easier to locate and catch if it got turned into a book or a rock, so why a fox, which could run away? And to begin with, how was her grandmother able to use magic to transform the entire town into a book? No regular human could cast a book curse. Did Yomunaga Shrine possess that kind of power? Gasping for breath, Mifuyu shook her head. She couldn’t believe that. But what other explanation was there? She regarded the shrine as one piece of the explanation for this bizarre world around her. The three figures cut across the street, ignoring the stoplights that continued to change even with no one around. Underneath the cool illumination of the streetlights, they rushed past Mikura Hall and toward Yomunaga Shrine. The hill, shrine, and torii gate appeared exactly the same as always, just like during The Silver Beast. Normally, the sight of the shrine in the afternoon sun and the lush leaves of its camphor tree provided a sense of warmth and peace. But now a figure darker than the night sky loomed like a giant beast lying in wait, arms open wide. The wind raged. The branches and leaves of the camphor tree flexed, and the layers of leaves rustled, blowing through the torii to the ground below. When she placed a foot on the stone steps, the wind picked up, blocking the two girls and the fox from advancing as though using air pressure to push them away. The wind was a giant shield, a massive wall protecting the shrine. Leaves from tattered tress assaulted them like knives. The stone stairs became steeper, leaving the girls no choice but to proceed on all fours. The howling of the wind and trees sounded like the protest of some unworldly beast, and Mashiro lifted her hands, trying to cover her highly sensitive ears, only to be blown tumbling down the stairs. Haruta, with his small, frail body, dug his claws into Mifuyu’s shoulder bag. The roaring continued, the wind so strong that Mifuyu couldn’t see in front of her, and Mifuyu yelled, no longer able to withstand it. “I…I am Mifuyu Mikura! I’ve come in place of Grandma Tamaki! Let me pass!” But the storm did not abate. Gritting her teeth, she forced all her energy into the hands supporting her. “Enough! Stop it! Grandma and Dad aren’t here right now, so I’m the current head of the Mikura family!” And with that, Mifuyu was struck from the side. More correctly, the wind blew at her like a giant fist, but to Mifuyu, it felt like something ramming into her entire body. Struck, Mifuyu fell to her side and almost hit her head, but Mashiro had morphed into a dog and rushed to cushion her fall. The impact had been enough to knock Mifuyu’s bag off her shoulder. “Haruta!” Mifuyu just managed to grab the bag’s strap, but Haruta lost his grip. The wind carried a small orange body through the torii gate. Mashiro kicked off with a bark, flying after it. That was as much as Mifuyu saw. In the instant that Mashiro flew off to rescue Haruta, Mifuyu was hit head-on by a tremendous gale strong enough to convince her that world was ending, and she was tossed backward. She tucked in her chin to avoid hitting her head, like Che had once taught her, and tried her best to control her fall. Her body slammed against the road, and she looked up at the shrine, her face distorted in pain. It stood quietly serene, as though the whole storm had been a dream. Mifuyu gripped her shoulder bag, but both Haruta and Mashiro were nowhere to be seen. Mifuyu couldn’t speak. Rubbing her aching shoulders and back, she staggered to her feet and groaned at the pain surging through her right arm. Then she climbed the stairs. The steps had returned to their normal, gentle slope. Eventually, she reached the top. The torii gate and the camphor tree sat peacefully, like the recent windstorm had never happened. But Mifuyu stood frozen on the spot. The shrine grounds—the entire area from the torii to the main hall—was covered in unending rows of tiny statues, packed so tightly that no space existed between them. The wind pulled the dark clouds of night away, and the moon showed its face. Moonlight bathed the swarm of tiny statues, each one just over fifteen centimeters tall. All of them were shaped like a fox with pointy ears and a bushy tail. They all faced the main hall, like they were waiting for something to appear. She didn’t see any that looked like Haruta, whom the wind had blown through the torii. But Mashiro was there. More correctly, she sat quietly before the main hall at the head of the mob of tiny foxes. “…Mashiro.” But she did not answer and made no sound. Even the leaves of the camphor tree, which had shaken so violently, were now quiet. Mifuyu’s voice was the only thing breaking the silence. Mashiro did not move. Even from this distance, Mifuyu could plainly see that Mashiro, like all the other figures, was made of stone.
Chapter 4
71 min read