His throat had closed up, and he couldn’t get the words out.
Had his vocal cords gotten weaker? Net cafés didn’t require much talking. Even paying was basically silent, and beverages came from a drink bar at the touch of a button. Organs atrophy when they aren’t used, so maybe this was just a natural consequence.
As Seiji started to get flustered, the boy gave him an angelic smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Shiroshi Saijou.”
“Koff ! N-nice to meet you. Um, I’m Seiji Tohno. Uh…”
“You’ve lost your way, haven’t you? It’s all right. I’ll draw you a map as soon as we’re done here. First, though, would you care for a cup of tea?”
“Wh-what?”
Apparently, he was being invited to a late-afternoon tea.
“People often get lost in this neighborhood, you see. I’d just finished my book and was feeling rather bored. Do join me.”
There was a leather-bound tome from somewhere foreign on the table near the boy. He couldn’t possibly have read that whole thing, could he? Maybe he only looked young; he might actually be older than Seiji.
“N-no, I, um, I think there was…something I needed to, uh…”
It seemed like a shame to refuse an invitation, but he was too self-conscious to sit down to a meal with someone he’d just met, one-on-one. As he was trying to decline, though, his stomach growled rudely.
With exquisite timing, the girl who’d said her name was Beniko arrived wheeling a cart. It held a pot of black tea, which was clearly expensive judging by the smell, and freshly baked apple pie.
Sometimes you just didn’t have a choice. Accepting the invitation, Seiji picked up his fork.
The crisp texture of pie crust and the sweet, juicy tartness of stewed apples instantly filled his mouth. The weight of the succulent fruit settling in his stomach was enough to make him sob for joy.
Unable to stop himself, he asked for seconds, before a stifled chuckle caught his ear.
“Ah, forgive me. I’ve never seen someone have another helping under these circumstances before.”
With a start, Seiji remembered where he was. “Um… Is this a restaurant or something?”
He’d already put away two pieces of apple pie. If they asked him to pay, he’d have to dine and dash.
“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that. Due to reasons I won’t go into right now, I provide a proxy service for ________.”
“Uh?” Damn, he hadn’t caught that last bit. But Seiji didn’t have the conversational skills to casually ask the boy to repeat himself, so instead he chose a different follow-up. “Speaking of proxy services, you do hear a lot about chauffeur services and housekeeping services these days, huh?”
“Mm, this is really closer to outsourcing. They hire me to perform a certain service for them on an ad hoc basis.”
“So it’s a public service?”
“Yes, well, since it’s provided equally to everyone, including politicians and billionaires, I suppose one could call it ‘public.’”
“……Uhhh?”
That had been an extremely roundabout choice of words. What exactly did he mean by that?
“Think of it as a free consultation office. In today’s day and age, the term ‘counseling’ may be more apropos.”
“Huh… A consultation service?”
On the table, hot tea swirled languidly in a white porcelain cup. Realizing he was about to catch a glimpse of its surface, Seiji hastily averted his eyes.
Right— That was a mirror, too.
“Um, go ahead and take this with a grain of salt, but…”
Seiji went on, telling the boy the secret of his eye.
The fact that, every so often, other people looked like monsters to him. The stories about the Candy Man and his thieving aunt. It sounded like a fantasy, except for the fact that it was too tasteless for a descriptor like that, but the boy only nodded and listened to him intently.
Seiji had brought this up because he knew he’d never come here again. However—
“I may know what your monsters are,” Shiroshi said unexpectedly.
“Huh?! R-really?!”
Getting up, the boy took a volume from a bookshelf. It looked like a large artbook of sorts.
“This is a collection of pictures of yokai, drawn by an Edo-period artist known as Toriyama Sekien. The edition I have here contains The Illustrated Demon Horde’s Night Parade and its sequel, The Illustrated Demon Horde from Past and Present, Continued. My copy is a reprinting of the original, though.”
His pale fingers turned the pages.
There were yokai of all shapes and sizes, accompanied by their names and explanatory text. It seemed more like an illustrated guide than an artbook, and the lively, undulating ink lines looked more humorous than frightening… Not that Seiji had any eye for art.
“Now, back to the topic at hand. Look at this picture, if you would.”
“Oh!”
Seiji was so startled his voice deserted him.
Shiroshi was pointing at a comical bald yokai. It stood in an unsteady, chicken-like pose, and a grin split its face from ear to ear. It looked just like the Candy Man.
The name beside it was—
“Hyosube?”
“It’s considered a type of kappa or water goblin; it was modeled on a gibbon and is known to resemble a young priest covered in thick hair. Although it looks quite droll, it’s said to pull passing children into the water and drown them, just like the kappa.”
…Huh? It drags kids into the water and kills them?
Feeling a spark of recognition, Seiji started thinking. At the same time, Shiroshi began leafing through the book again. The next yokai looked like a woman whose arms were covered in eyes—dodomeki. This one was the spitting image of Seiji’s aunt.
“As you can see, this is a female yokai whose arms are speckled with countless birds’ eyes. Long ago, a ‘bird’s eye’ was the popular term for a coin with a hole bored through its center. The dodomeki represents a pickpocket who’s committed so much petty theft that she’s grown a hundred such eyes on her arms.”
This was basically the same as his aunt, then.
If the man who’d drowned the child in the irrigation canal had turned into a hyosube, and the aunt who’d been divorced for her kleptomania had become a dodomeki, then…
“In short, Seiji, your eye seems to detect hidden sins by perceiving the individuals who’ve committed them as yokai,” Shiroshi said quite simply. “Some scholars claim that yokai were originally the darkness of the human heart made visible: resentment, hatred, envy… At their core, yokai may be mirrors that reflect the evil lurking in the world.”
That sounded deeply significant, but Seiji didn’t really understand it. When he made a noncommittal noise just to show that he was listening, Shiroshi gave a little laugh. “Still, you’re quite like a yokai as well.”
“H-h-how come?!” He was so shaken that his voice cracked.
Even though Seiji was clearly rattled, Shiroshi kept chuckling. “There’s one that’s just like you in this book.”
The page he turned to showed something that looked like a bad-guy version of Anpanman. No, that wasn’t right— The thing in the picture was a round mirror with a human face, another type of yokai. Its name was apparently ungaikyou.
“Of all beings considered to be the spirits of objects, mirror spirits are the oldest. The ungaikyou is one such being. It’s the yokai form of the Mirror of Illumination, a magic looking glass that unmasks the true shapes of demons and the evil worked by humans.”
“A…mirror?” Seiji echoed.
Even as he said it, a distant memory came back to him.
He must’ve been about five. He had been playing by himself in the park when, all of a sudden, glittering mirror fragments had begun falling from the sky. Running would have been the smartest move, but like most five-year-olds, his brain hadn’t been all that sharp yet.
It was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen, and so he’d reached out toward the shards. In an attempt to follow the streaks of light, he’d opened his eyes as wide as they’d go.
Then one of those shining fragments had fallen into his left eye—
“Aaaaaah!”
Of course. His eye had definitely hurt. However, when he’d run home in tears, his parents hadn’t been able to find a mark on him, and they’d belted him for making a fuss over nothing. As a result, he’d always assumed it had been some sort of daydream, but what if…?