“No, I’ll have some too.”
“Thought so!”
The two men sat on a bench in Odori Park. One was dressed casually in black, the other in a formal suit. They both wore sunglasses. Sitting side by side, they munched their buttered potatoes. Sapporo is the kind of city where it’s not unusual to see all sorts of performers and cosplayers out and about, but even so, the antics of the pair sitting on the bench attracted the attention of passersby.
Nanami couldn’t suppress his shock at the quality of their snack. “Wow, this is delicious! And steaming hot!”
“It wouldn’t taste this good homemade!” Gojo cried out.
“Agreed! I totally underestimated buttered potatoes! There’s a reason for having them grilled on the street after all!”
“It makes me want a beer. We should have done this after work.”
“Beer? I don’t get the desire to pair alcohol with something else that tastes good on its own,” Nanami replied, disparagingly. “Hm? Huh?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Your buttered potato looks different than mine.”
“That’s the shiokara. It tastes awesome,” boasted Gojo, “and I’m not sharing.”
“Well, I don’t want any! It looks like a cursed spirit I vanquished the other day.”
Nanami had come to Hokkaido hoping for a refreshing change of pace, but instead his stress was mounting.
After indulging in steaming-hot buttered potatoes, the two cleaned up their mess like responsible adults and began walking east through Odori Park toward the Sapporo TV Tower, where the park ends and a large street runs north to south near the bus center. The street is broad enough that a person might mistake it for the main artery of the city. Few pedestrians use it, though, perhaps because of the city’s general layout.
“So what kind of vicious curse user are you investigating?” Gojo asked. “Not that we know there even is one.”
“You came along even though you don’t know?”
“Well, you’re the one who has to handle it.”
“Then you really shouldn’t have come!” Nanami said. “Anyway, we just stuffed ourselves. How can you be eating an ice cream?!”
“You’re eating one too.”
Gojo was walking in front of Nanami as if that was where he belonged, carefully licking a cheese-and-milk twist ice cream so it wouldn’t melt over the edge of the cone. He wasn’t behaving at all like someone who didn’t know anything about this mission, including which direction they should be heading.
Gojo said he couldn’t understand Nanami’s mundane choice of flavor—cookies-and-cream, not milk, or even chocolate—after they had come all the way to Hokkaido, adding that he couldn’t bear the sight of it. Nanami glared at him through his sunglasses.
Nanami wanted to tell Gojo not to go marching ahead with no purpose, but he decided it would be faster to just explain the mission.
Normally, Gojo would have known about the mission and wouldn’t have to ask Nanami. The fact that he did meant that he hadn’t gotten any info beforehand. In other words, Gojo had known this mission wasn’t important enough for his participation, but he had come along anyway. Nanami knew Gojo was busy and wouldn’t come to the north country just to kill time. He wondered what Gojo’s real purpose was. In any case, the only way to get him to reveal his true intention here was to solve the “doll disturbance” that he’d been briefed on earlier as quickly as possible. He decided a short explanation would be most efficient.
“It all started with a website called Yomotsu Hirasaka,”
Nanami began.
“That’s quite a name, what with the reference to the realm between life and death.”
“It’s on an independent server to avoid search engines, but Ijichi was able to track it down.”
“The man’s got skills.” Gojo’s matter-of-fact tone suggested he expected nothing less.
Hearing that, Nanami guessed that Gojo had badgered Ijichi for Nanami’s destination.
Kiyotaka Ijichi may not have been a superhacker, but once he knew what he was hunting for, he could figure out a way to find it. In this information-saturated society, many situations call for skill in searching rather than specialized knowledge. In that respect, Ijichi was of immense value.
That didn’t mean, however, that Nanami could overlook the fact that he’d leaked information. He decided to have a few words with the man later.
“So what’s the purpose of this website with the tasteless name?” Gojo asked. “Surely not charming videos.”
“It’s actually a pretty plain website, enough to make you nostalgic.”
“You mean like there’s a visitor counter at the top, and when it hits a certain number, you notify the administrator?”
“Sort of like that,” Nanami replied.
“That does bring back memories, unfortunately.”
“Yeah, we’re getting old.” Nanami took a bite of his cone, swallowed, and continued. “It turns out the site is a way to contact a curse user.”
“How so?”
“There’s a simple form. You fill in your request and send it. Then it displays the address to mail your payment to, and that’s how you buy the product.”
“Mail order? How analogue.”
“The address can be traced to a property in Hokkaido owned by a small real estate agency. Apparently, it’s a share house with a single room that’s only the size of two tatami mats.
“That isn’t enough room to share!” Gojo said.
“But the online form will randomly display one of twenty different P.O. boxes, which suggests something shady is going on,” Nanami explained.
“The yakuza use fronts like that, but a curse user wouldn’t think of it.”
“For better or worse, a curse user with a venerable lineage would be unlikely to come up with such a system.”
“So what does the website sell?” Gojo asked. “A rogue curse user could be charging for cursed tools to exorcize fly heads or taking orders to curse people. But I guess something of that scale wouldn’t be enough to warrant bringing you in.”
“You guess correctly,” Nanami said.