“Whoa!”
“I can’t let you off so easily, not now that you know who I am, ribbit.” The words were threatening, but somehow lacked the necessary tension to be effective. The mochi began munching away at the cucumber it was holding.
“Wait, ‘ribbit’…?”
“Don’t curse us!” screeched Kazuki.
“However…nomnom…it must have been fate…nomnom…for the two of you to have woken me up…nomnom. Thus, I called you…nomnom…here again…gulp.” The mochi extended his legs forward and shockingly prostrated himself before them. “Human children! Please lend me your aid, ribbit! I beg of you, ribbit!”
Kazuki, who was holding his academic good luck charm out as if it were a talisman to ward off evil, paused for a moment. Who would have ever dreamed he’d hear a stock phrase of mecha and magical girl anime thrown at him, here, at Asakusa’s Kappabashi?
“Pass,” Toi said decisively from beside Kazuki, wielding his silver ruler in hand.
“Huh? Are you sure you want to refuse like that?”
Even though you might be cursed for it? That was the part that worried Kazuki, but Toi was far more pragmatic. He didn’t even believe in the existence of kappa.
“See if I care,” Toi spat. “Who’d listen to something a frog says anyways?”
“…I’m not a frog.” The voice crept up in volume from the ground below.
“Huh? A frog?” With those words, Kazuki stepped on a landmine.
“I said that I’m not a damn frooooooog!!” Keppi abandoned his superficial politeness and whizzed up into the air, spinning rapidly as a runaway train on his stubby, plump legs.
“Something crazy’s going on!” The two boys turned their backs on Keppi in an attempt to run, finally sensing danger, but before they could flee—
“Desiiiire…Extractioooon!”
—they received a blow to their behinds, the likes of which they’d never felt before. Kazuki’s consciousness abruptly cut off.
Scene 3
“HUH?!”
The next time Kazuki awoke, the sky turned to midnight around him. He heard a pained groaning in the dark, eerie quiet.
“Mmm… Uuungh…” Keppi stood before him, currently in the process of pooping out something roughly the same size as himself. “Mmm… Ahaa…”
Plop…
“Whoaaa! A kappa?!” Kazuki exclaimed. Keppi excreted a kappa wrapped in an amniotic sac. “Kuji became a kappa!”
He could tell that the creature was Toi. How? Well…
“Look who’s talking, you’re a kappa too!” Just as Toi pointed out, Kazuki became one as well.
“As a prince, it sends me into a rage when people insult me by calling me a frog. So I plucked out your shirikodama, ribbit.”
“N-no waaaay!”
Kazuki and Toi both became kappa.
“This is the Desire Field, ribbit. The underside of the human world. Humans can’t see kappa or this world, ribbit.”
It was as if Kappabashi was submerged under water, for it was cool and dreary, dappled with a scattering of glowing red lights.
“In other words, the two of you are both alive and dead, ribbit.”
“Alive…?”
“…and dead?”
The conversation sounded more like fantasy than reality to the two freshly-turned kappa.
“Wait! My box!” A familiar voice called out. Enta was running toward them.
Kappa-Kazuki ran to meet him without thinking. “Enta, it’s me!” he cried, but Enta didn’t seem to be able to see him at all.
“Leave this to me, ribbit. Here we go… Pfft!” Keppi took out a blowpipe and aimed a shot straight at Enta.
“Gah?!”
The letter “A” appeared on Enta’s forehead for a moment before quickly disappearing. Enta blinked for a moment, then gasped. “Wah! It’s a huge frog!”
“I’m not a frooooog!” Keppi roared.
“Gyaaaaah!!”
Enta’s cry echoed throughout the Desire Field.
In the southern part of Kappabashi Kitchenware Town, two handsome police officers worked in a police box, known only by a handful of people. Despite working in an age of massively popular social networking websites, they remained relatively unexposed to both the goodwill and the contempt of the internet. The Asakusa district was peaceful, and most of their work involved searching for missing pets and handling lost items. Or at least, that was how it appeared.
“Now for our next piece of news, dish! ✩ All across Asakusa, there are reports of a strange phenomenon: boxes flying around under their own power. Bo-box!”
The two officers wore composed expressions on their faces, tuning out the bizarre news program.
When he awoke, Enta, too, had become a kappa. “Huh…?!”
“Tsk, tsk. I’ve acquired yet another boring shirikodama, ribbit.”
Kazuki ignored Kappa-Enta, who still hadn’t grasped what was going on, and asked, “What exactly are these ‘shirikodama’?”
“It’s an organ in a human’s body that stores Desire Energy, ribbit.”
“Turn us back right now!” Kappa-Toi thundered, unwilling to tolerate this madness any further.
A dark shadow slunk up behind Kazuki and snatched the box out of his hands, then speedily slunk away.
“Ah! That’s my box!”
Kazuki looked up to see numerous black, flabby creatures soaring through the air, each with a box in hand. A shining red lamp hung from each creature’s head, making the group of them look like a school of deep-sea fish.
“Those are the Kappa Zombies’ underlings, ribbit. Humans can’t see those either, ribbit.”
“My box was flying through the air like that, too!” Kappa-Enta fussed, panicking.
Beside him, Kappa-Toi was secretly losing his composure as well. His precious box was included among those that the underlings—or whatever they were called—were carrying away. “I’ll be in big trouble if they open that box…”
“I want to get my box back!” Kazuki exclaimed, unusually emotional.
Keppi said, sounding almost reproachful, “Follow me please, ribbit.”
“You three will fight the Kappa Zombies for me, ribbit. They cling to the desires from their previous lives, trying to fulfill them, ribbit.”
The red Azuma Bridge, which should have been a familiar sight, had been transformed into a bizarre apparition. Pale, pulsing rings of light surrounded it, and the box-carrying underlings puttered around it. Standing in the middle was a creature, a thing, vaguely person-shaped but with an enormous box where its head should have been. The box had both eyes and a mouth, a mouth that chanted the same incoherent phrase over and over again.
“Boxes…boxes…I want boxes…”
If they were to believe Keppi’s story, then this “Kappa Zombie” must have possessed a strong attachment to boxes in its previous life. And indeed, the underlings blanketed the bridge in countless boxes. But none of this was relevant to their current predicament; what they really needed to know was how to defeat said monster.
Kappa-Kazuki didn’t intend to surrender his box to the creature. Enta and Toi seemed to be of the same mind on that.
“You can destroy a Kappa Zombie by plucking out its shirikodama, ribbit. You can extract them as well, now that you’ve become kappa yourselves, ribbit.”
The only route left for the three humans-turned-kappa was to pluck out the Kappa Zombie’s shirikodama.
“Now, sing the song!” Keppi commanded.
The moment they heard Keppi’s voice, they stopped thinking, and their bodies began to move. Kappa-Kazuki opened his mouth, and a strange song flowed out of him. It was an intense ballad, one he had never heard before, and yet it felt familiar to him, like he’d known it since long ago. Beside him, Kappa-Toi and Kappa-Enta joined their voices to his. As they belted out the lyrics, they felt themselves begin to manifest their full kappa power.
“Kappature it!” As Keppi gave them the signal, the three formed a line with Kappa-Kazuki at the tip, hurtling through the air straight toward the Kappa Zombie’s rear.
“Gyaaaaaaah!” The zombie’s soul cried out, echoing across the Azuma Bridge.
Kazuki plunged inside the Kappa Zombie’s butt. Surrounded by darkness, he squinted his eyes and frantically looked around. It didn’t take long before he spotted an orb of pulsating light flying toward him. In case he had any doubts that this was the creature’s shirikodama, it had the kanji for ‘butt’ written across it.
“I’ve got it!”
With the glowing ball in Kazuki’s hands, Toi and Enta, who were holding onto his legs, braced their feet against the edge of the zombie’s hole and began to pull.
“Heave!” said Kappa-Toi.
“Damn, he won’t budge!” said Kappa-Enta.
The Kappa Zombie frantically clenched his sphincter as tightly as he could to keep them from extracting his shirikodama. “Stop it! Don’t steal my desire!” If anyone had been watching, they would have witnessed a surreal sight: besides having the lower half of a kappa’s body protruding from its butt, the zombie was also leaking a mysterious liquid from the same orifice.
Kazuki refused to give up. “I have to pluck out this shirikodama! I have to, so I can connect with them!”
At the end of their long tug-of-war, the three defeated the creature’s sphincter and extracted its shirikodama.
“We kappatured it!” they yelled in unison.
The shirikodama was cool and moist in Kappa-Kazuki’s hands. “So this is a shirikodama…”
In a flash, the shirikodama seemed to warp the world around Kazuki. Instead of the Kappa Zombie, an unfamiliar man stood in front of him, one whose face he couldn’t quite make out. After a few moments, the man abruptly began to strip. Once the man was completely naked, he took the box that was sitting beside him, one with the logo from that major distribution company on its side. The man turned it over, lifted it up, and gently placed it on his head. The moment he did, Kazuki felt his heart fill with an inexplicable sense of contentment and relief.
Then, just as suddenly, it felt like something inside him was in free-fall, plunging down from his brain to the middle of his chest.
“Now I get it,” he said. “You liked getting naked and wearing stolen boxes on your head!”
Goop.
The Kappa Zombie’s shirikodama began to melt.
“Ugh?!”
Keppi’s resounding voice cut in. “A shirikodama melts when it touches the open air, ribbit! Hurry and transfer it to me, ribbit!”
“T-transfer?! How?!”
As the three panicked, not knowing what to do with the melting shirikodama, Keppi’s voice resounded inside their heads again, “Sarazanmai, ribbit.”
Instinctively, all three shouted loudly.
“Saraaa!”
“Saraaa!”
“Saraaa!”
And then all together, “Sarazanmai!”
As Kappa-Kazuki swallowed the shirikodama, a blinding light radiated out of his body. In the next moment, their consciousnesses seemed to melt like chocolate.
Who could say if it was real or a dream? It was a strange feeling—like becoming one with the universe, as if his body wasn’t his own. He wasn’t sure if he was Yasaka Kazuki, Kuji Toi, or Jinnai Enta. All three of their consciousnesses were harmonizing in perfect synchronicity. It was as if they were molecules drifting in a hot, primordial ocean, smacking against the thin membranes separating them, and combining into one.