Chapter 125

Interlude “…That was how I met Mr. Sakaki’s ghost this summer. Afterward, that same day, he spent a really long time telling me all the details.” “You had that long of a conversation with a ghost? Face-to-face?” “Yup. Rain was falling by the time we finished talking…When I was about to leave, he told me I could take the umbrella at his house, but I said no. I don’t mind the rain, after all.” “Hmmm. Even so.” “Something bother you about that?” “Well, of course it does. I just can’t believe—that a ghost…” “You don’t believe in ghosts, Sakakibara?” “Well…” “Maybe you don’t want to believe in them?” “It’s not whether I want to believe in them or not…Oh, but hey, on the class trip, didn’t you say…?” “There are ghosts all over the place in horror novels and movies, no? And tons of stories about people who actually saw or talked to them.” “Well, okay, but…Actually, no. Novels and movies are just works of fiction. And most of the ‘true stories’ are fakes.” “And yet, the truth is that I did meet him.” “Hmmm. You don’t really hear about amnesiac ghosts very often, I guess.” “No?” “In novels and movies, there’s the ghost detective genre…But those are made-up stories. In those, the victim of a murder becomes a ghost and tries to find out who killed them or what really happened to them. The movie Ghost could, broadly speaking, be put in that category.” “—Never saw it.” “Ghost is such a blanket term—there are so many different kinds. And the ones in Japan are really different from the ones in other countries. The classical Japanese ones are all, ‘My wrath shall be avenged!’ And they don’t have feet…Did this guy? This ghost you met?” “Feet?” “Yeah.” “He did. Two feet, just like normal. He wasn’t floating or anything, either.” “Ghosts also differ in whether or not they can exert a physical influence. Since they’re noncorporeal beings, they can’t be touched by anything, and they can slip right through doors and walls and go wherever they want. And then they contrast this ghostly image by opening and closing doors or moving chairs and tables at haunted houses. Those are some other tricks ghosts can pull…The stories are supercontradictory, so even though we call all of them ghosts, they all have some particular specialty, I guess you could say. As far as the ghost you met…” “Is appearing once in a while kind of weird?” “Oh yeah. Now that you mention it, the fact that he’s aware of it himself seems kind of weird. The ghost you met can exert a certain amount of physical influence, right?” “Opening and closing doors or pulling diaries out of drawers is about it…but yeah.” “But he couldn’t answer the phone.” “And he couldn’t use the computer in his library.” “But he could go into a locked room.” “…That’s what he said.” “In any case, what did this guy die of? All this stuff about alcohol and medicine and rope hanging from the ceiling…The stuff he mentioned seems to be hinting at suicide.” “He said the immediate cause was falling from the second-floor corridor and breaking his neck or something like that.” “And that observation, to notice your left eye—it’s, I don’t know, pretty insightful of him.” “That’s true. Insightful and thought provoking.” “When he said your doll’s eye was seeing the same things as him and looking in the same direction as him, he had figured out that was death, right? In other words, he had been constantly looking at death. He had been entranced by it. Do you think we can interpret it that way? So he…” “He ended his own life?” “Or at least he was thinking about it. And then he actually did die.” “…” “And then there’s the question of why his death was covered up. By his older sister Tsukiho and her husband Mr. Hiratsuka.” “…” “They might have hidden his body somewhere. I wonder if that’s what it is. Anyway, Mr. Sakaki’s ghost was looking for it, right? Even he doesn’t know where it is.” “Yeah. It sounds like he was upset about it for a long time, in his own way.” “That’s a weird touch, too. Or at least unusual. Typically, a ghost would know where its body is, and a really common trope is for them to appear so that they can tell someone, ‘It’s over here, please come find it’…Although that’s in fictional stories. Like in that old horror movie classic, Changeling.” “Never heard of it.” “Urk— Oh.” “Still, a bunch of things happened that day that bothered even me.” “Like what?” “When I went to visit Mr. Sakaki at his Lakeshore Manor, the front door was closed and no one came when I rang the bell…But when I went around to the back entrance, it was open and I could just walk right in.” “That was pretty bold of you.” “I was thinking someone would be there…” “But when you went up to the library on the second floor, you ran across a ghost, huh?” “Something like that.” “You saw him as soon as you walked into the room and took your eye patch off, right?” “—Right.” “So all of a sudden, this thing you hadn’t seen just popped up?” “…Pretty much.” “Did it surprise you?” “—Yeah.” “I guess that would startle anyone.” “There were a lot of factors.” “Let’s see…There are a ton of mysteries, just from what you’ve told me so far. Mysteries about Mr. Sakaki’s death, and what happened to his body of course, and other troubling details…” “…” “…” “…” “…Well?” “Hm?” “Tell the rest of the story.” “—You want to hear it?” “How can I not hear the rest? Hmmmm…I wonder what it was like at the time. The story was that Mr. Sakaki had gone on a trip? Were Tsukiho and her husband really hiding the truth?” “—As it turns out, yes.” “So then…” “But I’m going to tell the story in order.” “Oh…sure.” “So with everything the way it was…I decided to do something about it.” “Meaning what?” “I thought, I need to see if this is true. The ghost was appearing at places he had a connection to in life, not just at Lakeshore Manor, so I thought there was a chance. And I wasn’t really thrilled about it, but I asked Kirika and two days later…”