1

A short distance from the main business district of Iidabashi stands a run-down old building. On the first floor is Trabzon, a Turkish restaurant. The second floor houses a Thai massage parlor. Above that, on the third floor, is where you’ll find my office, the Sasaki Agency. As befits its shady surroundings, the agency is a rather sketchy place. Our specialty is cases dealing with paranormal phenomena.

I majored in folklore studies when I was in college, but I’m not confident I can identify the truth behind a supernatural incident any more effectively than the average person. I don’t approach my cases with an especially scholarly viewpoint, either. So why did I choose to make this my profession?

One reason is that I’m totally unsuited to regular employment. I’m not attractive, I don’t understand social cues, and I have a habit of deliberately saying things I know people aren’t going to like. Just like the parents who brought me into this world only to inflict pain on me, I’m a totally garbage human being.

After my birth parents disappeared, I was taken in by my adoptive mother and learned what it was like to be raised in a loving family. These days, I actually have real friends who I can trust. But that doesn’t change who I am at my core. My true nature is something I’ll have to deal with for the rest of my life. If I got a normal job, I would only be adding to the list of unfortunate souls I cause trouble for.

The other reason I went into this line of work is that I possess so-called supernatural abilities. I can see gods, demons, and the souls of the dead. But it doesn’t stop there; I can interact with them, too. I have a closet inside my head where I lock up these entities when they misbehave. Bringing that up in everyday conversation would probably get me sent to the loony bin, but I can’t think of any other way to describe it.

My mental space is based on the closet of the dirty little apartment where I lived with my birth parents. That was where I spent most of my time when I was a child. When my mother had visitors, she would shut me in there with the rest of the garbage, and I would sit there trying not to make any noise.

It was on a day like that when the Mermaid Princess appeared. She was a character from a picture book my mother had bought me in a rare moment of kindness. The princess had a delicate, pretty face. I tried to make the closet into a palace for her, decorating it with old banana peels, advertising fliers from jewelry stores, anything I could get my hands on.

The Mermaid Princess would do anything I asked her to. She killed my garbage parents. She killed the girl who’d been tormenting me at school. Except that wasn’t really what happened. I’d simply used my powers to get rid of anyone I didn’t like. Once I realized that, the Mermaid Princess disappeared, and I was left to reign alone as Queen of the Closet.

Thanks to the influence of my adoptive mother, I’ve stopped hurting people since then. But that doesn’t mean my violent urges have gone away. All that’s changed is that I now direct them toward the supernatural—to any god, demon, or spirit that dares to get in my way. This will probably make me sound like some kind of pretentious YouTuber, but I found a way to make a career out of doing what I love.

This building may be old and shabby, and there’s no elevator, but it’s in a pretty good location, not too far from Iidabashi station. I’m only able to have my offices in a place like this because I got rid of some supernatural presences that were bothering the owner, Mr. Izumi. He now rents us the place for cheap and regularly sends new cases our way. Even when work is slack elsewhere, I can afford the rent and a salary for my partner.

My partner, Kouki Aoyama, is the most inherently good man I know. His virtue may have something to do with him being raised by a Protestant minister. Even discounting his religious upbringing, he’s still a very kind person. He was my underclassman when I was a grad student, and has been good enough to stand by me, warts and all. When I mentioned the idea of a consulting agency, he said he wanted to work with me and soon took over the admin side of running the business.

At first I thought of him as nothing more than an errand boy who was useful to have around. But the longer I’ve spent with him, the more I’ve come to realize he trusts me from the bottom of his heart and will stay with me all the rest of my life. Once my mother, Yuriko, dies, he could step in to fill that “mother” role in my life. That’s just how important he is to me.

“So, Rumi, what’s this surprise you mentioned?”

“Why don’t you try and guess?”

Aoyama was swinging his arms around excitedly. He’d probably figured out it was something to do with his birthday already. His boyish face and childlike enthusiasm were really quite adorable. You would never think he was a man celebrating his twenty-eighth birthday.

The door opened down on the first floor. In a building as old as this one, everything creaked horribly, loud enough for us to make out even several floors up.

“Hear that? He’s almost here.”

We stood in silence for several minutes, listening to the slow, leisurely footsteps coming up the stairs until our guest arrived. It was Toshihiko Katayama—the most inherently beautiful man I knew.

“Those stairs really take it out of you. Aren’t you ever going to get an elevator?”

“Aren’t you ever going to get in better shape?”

“You can’t hold me to the same standard as a powerhouse like you. I’m pretty average for someone in their thirties.”

Next to me, I heard Aoyama take a sharp breath. I didn’t blame him. No matter how many times I laid eyes on Toshihiko, his beauty still blew me away, too. Describing him as an oil painting wouldn’t even begin to do him justice. I’d known him since high school, and considering some of the things I’d learned about him in the years since then, I no longer got nervous in his presence. Aoyama wasn’t so lucky. He was still unsettled to be in the presence of this inhumanly attractive man, who seemed to grow more beautiful by the day.

“T-Toshihiko…?”

“I heard it was your birthday, so I got you a cake. It’s not much, but Sasaki didn’t give me much notice. I hope you’re okay with a last-minute present, too.”

Betraying no particular emotion, Toshihiko laid onto Aoyama’s lap a plain envelope with the words GIFT CARD printed on it.

“O-oh, it’s fine. I’m grateful, really. I mean, you were good enough to get me a cake, so…”

Aoyama continued to fumble his words but eventually managed to thank Toshihiko properly, albeit quietly. He seemed happy enough with the situation.

“Well then, let’s turn out the lights and sing the song for you.”

I ignored Toshihiko’s protests that I’d never mentioned singing to him. I lit the candles on the cake and flicked the light switch. Unlike Toshihiko, who sang so quietly as to be barely audible, Aoyama sang along loud and clear. He was probably used to this kind of thing from spending so much time with children at his church. Those kids must be living very happy childhoods indeed.

“All right, blow out your candles. I’m recording.”

“I have to make my wish first.”

“Is that how it works?” I asked. Aoyama nodded.

On my birthday—the anniversary of when I was adopted—Yuriko would always bake a big cake to celebrate. Even back in the orphanage, the adults would hold some kind of party for kids who were born in the same month. My garbage blood-related parents never bothered to register my birth, but even without knowing the day I was born, I at least knew what a birthday was.

Wishing on birthday candles, however, is a custom that originated in the western world. Aoyama’s family ran a Christian Protestant church, so he might have absorbed some of that culture along the way. It was no wonder he was more familiar with it than me.

I watched Aoyama carefully. He pressed his hands together as if in earnest prayer. Just as I was about to hurry him up, he took a deep breath and blew the candles out. The room was plunged into darkness. I got up to turn on the light, when someone caught hold of my arm. Even in the darkness, I could tell it wasn’t Toshihiko. His hands, just like his face, were cold and smooth like marble.

No, this had to be Aoyama. Despite his baby face, his hands are quite bony, with rough palms, probably from all the cooking he does. Wondering what was wrong, I turned to face him. In the dark, I could only vaguely make out his silhouette.

“Take a good look.”

That was his voice, and it seemed like his mouth was moving. His rough skin moved away from mine, leaving only the faintest trace of warmth. A moment later, the lights were back on.

2

About a month after Aoyama’s birthday, Mr. Izumi rushed into the office in a highly agitated state of mind. It was late summer, and after several days of sweltering heat, I was just about fed up with it. The building did have an air conditioning system of a sort. But no matter how low I set the thermostat, it only moved the balmy air around apologetically.

“Rumi!”

Izumi came running over to where I lay asleep in a pool of my own sweat on the sofa. His heavy footsteps and flustered entreaty soon woke me up.

“What is it, Mr. Izumi?”

“It’s, well, the thing is…”

“Take a moment to calm down first. Aoyama, do we have any cold drinks?”

Wiping away copious amounts of sweat from his forehead, Izumi drained the iced tea my partner offered him. He let out a sigh of relief before speaking again.

“I’m sorry for coming charging in like this. But something terrible has happened.”

Looking at his face, I thought ruefully that this man never changed. He had the kind of plump, roly-poly figure that seemed to exude good health. When we first met, I found it hard to believe such a jolly-looking gentleman really “suffered” from any problems, let alone paranormal ones. The fact I wasn’t expecting his “something terrible” to be anything too serious was also probably due to his appearance.

“Is it a problem that’s affecting you this time, or somebody else?”

The first problem Izumi brought to me involved one of his exes being possessed by a spirit. Ever since I helped to resolve that, he’d put an inordinate amount of trust in me, and he would frequently bring new cases to my attention.

“A friend. An old friend of mine. She’s really having trouble.”

He took several deep breaths, then began to tell his story.

I own another building over in Setagaya. On the first floor, there’s a bakery called Entremet Setagaya. Their chocolate gateau is to die for. Oh, sorry, I’m getting off track. Anyway, the lady who runs it is called Momoko Niwa. She was my classmate back in elementary school. She was like the queen bee of our class. Do people still say that? She had a kind of star presence, you know?

These days, Momoko is a single mother, and her daughter Yuika has some kind of heart disease. It’s hereditary. She used to go to the Moriya Children’s Hospital regularly for treatment. You probably know the name Moriya from that food corporation, but they also do charity work and medical research. They sound like a real nice company. I’ve heard the stuff they say about them on the news, but it seems to me like people should focus more on the good they do…

Oh, are you wondering why I said she used to go there? Don’t worry, I’m getting to that part.

Yuika’s symptoms manifested shortly after Momoko got divorced—the girl would have been around three at the time. The two of them had recently moved back to Tokyo, so taking her to Moriya seemed like the natural choice. Yuika’s father was a Frenchman. He was the manager at a store Momoko had trained at. Guess that makes her the same as Aoyama, huh?

What? His parents are both Japanese? It’s his great-grandfather who was a foreigner, you say? How about that.

The point is, that poor girl had been going to the hospital ever since then. I met her a couple of times, and she always struck me as kind of…pale, I guess the best word is. I never saw her run around or laugh or play like a regular kid. But all that changed about six months ago. I was visiting the bakery to get a cake and to see Momoko, and I noticed there was a bicycle outside. It was small, so I figured it might be one of those folding types.

“So Momoko, you’ve started cycling, huh?” I said offhand at some point.

“Oh really, Mr. Izumi! That’s obviously not mine. It’s Yuika’s.”

I took another look at it, and it was a child’s bike. On top of being small, it had a pink frame and was decorated with cartoony characters.

“I thought Yuika couldn’t play outside…”

“You’ll never believe it, but she got better all of a sudden. She doesn’t even need to go to Moriya anymore.”

Honestly, I was confused more than anything. She’d suddenly gotten better? Could you just “get better” from a congenital disease? I asked Momoko for more details, of course, but she didn’t know very much about her daughter’s sudden recovery, either. Yuika hadn’t started seeing a different doctor or taking new medication or anything like that.

At the time, I just thought how nice that was for Yuika, and made a promise to come play with her sometime. But the thing is… As time went on, Momoko started looking less and less happy. You’d think she’d be over the moon that her daughter was living a normal life now. I couldn’t help worrying, so I invited her out to tea so we could talk it over. We met up at the bakery, sat down, and she burst into tears.

“Mr. Izumi, I… I don’t know what to do.”

I’ve never known how to handle women when they’re stressed out, so I just sat there at a loss and waited for her to go on.

“It’s Yuika… Yuika, Yuika, Yuika…!”

“What? What’s wrong with her?”

She kept repeating her daughter’s name over and over again, then fell face forward onto the table. Fortunately, it was close to closing time, and there weren’t many other people around. Any other time of day, and the whole room would’ve been staring at us.

“Did something happen to Yuika? Has her condition started causing problems again? If it has, I’ll do anything I can to help you out. I’ve got plenty of time on my hands, and if you’re strapped for cash, I can do something about that, too.”

“Y-you’re so kind… You’ve always been so nice to me…,” she managed to choke out between sobs. “But…this isn’t something that can be solved with time or money. The way things are now, I don’t think there’s any helping Yuika anymore…”

“Listen, Momoko,” I said, looking her straight in the eye, “just tell me what’s going on. I might not be able to do anything about it, but talking to someone might make you feel better.”

She was silent for a moment, but then she started talking all at once, like a dam had burst.

According to her, Yuika has started going out on her own at night. She’s out of the house before Momoko even notices she’s gone. Momoko started locking Yuika in her room, but it doesn’t do any good; she still gets out somehow. The lock isn’t broken or anything, the door just seems to get unlocked at some point. There’s only so much she can do to stop her from leaving. It’s not like she can stay awake on guard all night.

She went to see a doctor about it, of course. Medically speaking, they chalked it up to sleepwalking, or somnambulism to give it the proper name. It’s usually caused by stress or fatigue leading to a lack of sleep. All they could really do was tell her not to let Yuika play video games late at night and to remove any major sources of stress at home. They also said that most cases like this usually resolve themselves once the patient grows up.

That’s all well and good, but Momoko’s worried out of her mind in the here and now. She’s a good mom, and Yuika’s a good kid. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they don’t have any stress in their lives, but from what I’ve seen, they have a really solid mother-daughter relationship. Sometimes there’s more going on than just what you see, I know, but whatever this problem is, it’s not something a doctor can fix.

One night, Momoko followed Yuika. Her daughter walked out of her locked room like it was nothing, went downstairs, and left through the front door. Momoko rushed out after her and saw Yuika swaying around unsteadily on her feet. She made it all the way to the bike racks and actually got on her bike. That was another strange thing—the bikes were locked up at night, and Momoko didn’t have the key to them.

There was no way she could stay quiet any more at that point. She yelled her daughter’s name and went over to try and stop her. But Yuika cycled away at the kind of wild speed you wouldn’t think a child was capable of. Momoko didn’t stand a chance of catching up to her; it was all she could do to stop Yuika from getting out of sight.

That’s when the real tragedy happened. A motorcycle came tearing through an intersection and rammed into Yuika full force.

“Yuikaaa!”

Momoko told me she screamed so loud that it felt like it was going to rip her throat apart. She ran over, expecting to see the mangled body of her poor daughter in a pool of blood. The motorcycle had come to a sudden stop and flipped onto its side. But Yuika was totally unharmed, still on her bike and staring down at the motorcyclist.

Momoko had no idea what to do. I mean, obviously. It was the opposite of what you’d expect—the victim was absolutely fine, while the one who caused the accident had gotten injured instead.

“Y-Yui…”

She didn’t even have it in her to use her daughter’s name anymore. She tottered over to the poor girl, and…

“What the hell?! That really hurt!”

It was the biker yelling this time. He staggered to his feet and started yelling at Yuika.

“What do you think you’re doing, coming out of nowhere like that, you damn brat?!”

He had every right to be angry, I guess. Yuika was the one who’d cycled into the middle of the road without stopping to check for traffic. It wouldn’t have been unusual for that to result in them both getting seriously injured, even killed. That moment, it looked as though the man was going to hit Yuika, so Momoko jumped out in front to protect her.

“I’m so sorry! This is my daughter. Please, I’m sorry!”

She bowed in apology over and over again, but he didn’t reply. Almost scared to check, she slowly brought her head back up to face him. There was a sound like all the air going out of a balloon, and the man was hanging by the neck. She could hear him gurgling, and something was leaking out of his mouth.

Momoko froze up, unable to do anything but stare. She could see he was hanging, but she couldn’t tell what he was suspended from. There weren’t any trees around, and the electricity wires were too high up for him to have gotten snagged on them. Even if they weren’t, there wasn’t a rope or anything around his neck. Despite the darkness of night, the streetlights were still on, so she would have seen if there were a rope. The man had just been hoisted several feet into the air and left to dangle there like a figure on a keychain.

That was when Momoko became aware of what she called a creeping, oppressive atmosphere, and turned to look at Yuika.

“He got in my way.”

It was Yuika’s voice, but it didn’t sound like her. This wasn’t the voice of a cute, sweet girl talking to her mother. It had a quality to it that sounded more like that of an adult woman… Or like something was making her sound that way.

“No one can be allowed to get in our way.” She smiled awkwardly.

“Get in your way?” Momoko repeated in bewilderment. “Whatever he might have done, you can’t just…!”

Yuika looked back and forth between the man and her mother, then sighed. A moment later, there was a thump as the man fell to the ground.

“Are you all right?”

Momoko ran over to check on him, and he seemed to still be breathing. But his eyes were darting around crazily. She realized he needed an ambulance and had already taken her phone out of her pocket, but someone grabbed her arm.

“You can’t be allowed to get in our way, either.”

She was too terrified to even scream. Yuika’s eyes were just like the man’s, each one moving back and forth, out of sync, in different directions. Momoko somehow managed to get through to the emergency services and called for an ambulance. She got in the vehicle with the man, and she told the EMTs, the police who turned up later, and even the people from the insurance company what she’d seen. Yuika had run off so fast she was long gone by the time the ambulance arrived.

At first, everyone treated Momoko like she was lying or crazy, but eventually they managed to pull some footage from a nearby car’s dashcam. It wasn’t very clear, but it was enough to verify her story. But then they started treating her like an unfit mother instead. Since no one could confirm how the biker had gotten into the state he was in, there was no danger of him suing. The police just warned her not to let her daughter go out at night on her own. The whole thing was so unfair—anyone could see Momoko was more upset about this than anyone, so why were they blaming her?

That’s about the gist of what she told to me.

“And how’s Yuika been since then?” I asked.

“The police were right… I’m a terrible mother. The absolute worst.”

“That’s not true. Don’t listen to them; they don’t know you. Yuika’s such a good girl. You’ve worked hard to raise her—”

“But I’m frightened,” Momoko cut in. “I feel like she’s not even my daughter anymore.”

“You shouldn’t be saying stuff like that…”

“I know. Even I can see that. That’s why I’m a terrible mother. Of course, I still love her, of course I do. That goes without saying. No matter how hard things get, a mother has to protect her child. She has to. I know. I just wanted to tell you all this.”

“Sorry for getting ahead of myself…”

“Every day…every day, I make Yuika breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But she hardly eats anything. She says she doesn’t need to. She says she’s fine so long as no one ‘gets in her way.’ She says that a lot these days. Whatever I do, it’s ‘don’t get in our way.’ Then her eyes start spinning around like they did before.

“What kind of mother am I? Would it have been better if I never gave birth to her? Everyone tried to stop me, but I went ahead with it because I liked kids… Even her father didn’t want her. Was it all pointless from the start? I’ve tried to be the best mother I can be. I’ve taken care of her to the best of my abilities. When she got sick, I promised I would do whatever it took to make things easier for her. I’ve tried so hard. And now she tells me that I’m ‘in the way.’

“She still goes out at night, pressing her hands together like she’s praying. What could that mean? She does it so often, it’s honestly a little creepy. She says everything is in the way. I’m starting to think there’s no hope. Not for Yuika, I mean. It’s me who’s hopeless. The reason I say that is…I don’t care about her like I used to. I’m starting to feel like I don’t care what happens to her. The fact that I could feel that way frightens me. I just wish somebody would help. What am I supposed to do?”

After Momoko got all that out of her system, she started sobbing, apologizing repeatedly. I think she’d finally reached her limit. I know this was probably overstepping my bounds, but I listed her store as a subsidiary business of mine, with Momoko as an employee. I figured that way, it wouldn’t seem strange for me to visit her so much. She said she didn’t want to bother me, but I insisted. It was the only way of helping I could come up with.

At the rate things were going, I felt like if I left the two of them alone… Well, “abuse” is an ugly word; I don’t even like to talk about it. But it does happen. There was that case recently, with the…influencer, is that what they call them? She was always posting lovingly crafted handmade bento boxes on Instagram. Her daughter seemed totally normal. If anything, she seemed happier than the average kid her age, but it turned out, all that time she was…

What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t want something like that to happen to Momoko and Yuika. But people outside the family circle rarely ever notice stuff like that. That’s why I brought her into the fold, so I could keep an eye on her. Or if not me, my mom and my staff would be around, too. She’s still working at the bakery like usual, but it feels like she’s hanging on by a thread. The problem hasn’t gone away, either.

Just between you and me, I initially didn’t 100 percent believe everything Momoko told me. You hear about how people can see strange things when they’re tired or stressed, and I thought that might be the case here. But once Yuika started staying with us, I realized that incident had been no hallucination, but the stone-cold truth.

Yuika really does go out on her own at night. We’ve tried every lock on the market, but none of them do any good. And if anyone tries to stop her, she uses some unseen power to send them flying, or knock them back, or string them up. She even tried to hang me once. Lucky for me, I fell down right away. Maybe I was too heavy for her? It’s weird, but during the time I was hanging, it didn’t hurt. It felt more like I was unconscious or just sleeping. That’s probably how it was for that biker guy, too.

The thing about her telling people not to get in her way is also true. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I have no idea what to do anymore. She still goes to school, but it’s like something is calling to her. And she has the same problems in class, too. She’s hurt some kids, and their parents have complained, although they’re assuming it’s just regular violent behavior. Momoko’s already at her limit, so I kept that a secret from her and went to apologize for Yuika’s actions myself.

“She’s been away from school for so long, she’s probably finding it hard to adjust to being in a big group.” That’s the kind of thing some of the teachers and parents told me. “I thought this might be because she doesn’t have a father, but it looks to me like she has a supportive man in her life after all. Perhaps it would be better for her to just stay with her family for a while.”

I got the feeling the staff didn’t want her coming to school anymore. From their point of view, she’s just a violent kid acting out, so I guess it makes sense. I couldn’t have let Momoko be subjected to that kind of talk. It would only make things worse for her, and she probably wouldn’t be able to keep working. In the end, I came up with some excuse, and Yuika hasn’t been to school for the last two weeks.

I don’t know how things got so out of hand so fast. Yuika really is like a different person now. I have a feeling that something’s going on here that science can’t explain. Once I made that connection, I thought of you, Rumi. I’m asking you, no, I’m begging you: Can you find a way to get Yuika back to the way she was?

Izumi finally finished speaking and glanced at me, an imploring look in his eyes. He never took my help for granted or tried to throw his weight around just because he was the owner of the building. It was one of the things I liked about him.

“I can’t very well refuse a request coming from you, can I?”

His face lit up.

“Really? You mean it? So, then…”

“I’ll talk to her, but I can’t promise anything more. I’m not all-powerful, by any means. Someone on Mononobe’s level might be able to wave his hand and make the problem go away. Me, not so much.”

“Mononobe? Oh, that handsome young onmyoji?”

Narikiyo Mononobe was a shaman ten years my junior who lived in the remote mountains of Shikoku. He wasn’t quite so attractive as Toshihiko, but his looks were good enough that they were a defining feature of his. Everyone who’s anyone in our line of work knows about him. If the mention of his name doesn’t provoke any reaction, you can tell you’re talking to a rank outsider. Mononobe has never received any formal education or training, but he can resolve most supernatural problems with innate talent alone. He’s practically on a higher plane than us mere mortals.

Some years ago, Izumi had a problem with a building he owned in Ochanomizu. For some reason, no tenant ever stayed there for longer than three months. Looking into the building’s history, I’d discovered it had been a locus for accidents and other nasty incidents since the Meiji era.

Whether that was cause or effect, for the past hundred-plus years, impure energy had built up there. There was so much that it was impossible to determine where the energy was originating from or what to do about it. My opinion was that trying to exorcise it was a lost cause, since there wasn’t any specific vengeful spirit attached to the place. The problem would probably sort itself out given enough time.

While this was going on, however, I received word that Mononobe happened to be in Tokyo. Izumi was clearly disturbed, and there was no point in dragging the case out if we could solve it sooner, so I got in touch with Mononobe. I only wanted to ask him for advice; I didn’t expect him to actually get involved. Even so, fifteen minutes after putting down the phone, he’d hopped in a car and arrived at the scene.

I’d spent the past six months slowly but surely purifying that place and had made negligible progress. It took Mononobe just five minutes to completely dispel all the negative energy that had accumulated there. He’d been in Tokyo for a job, and he was wearing the accoutrements of his trade. Izumi had seen his costume and assumed he was a traditional onmyoji exorcist.

“Things oughta be all right here now,” Mononobe said when it was done, firing off some quick-fire advice with a bright smile. Izumi had nodded along enthusiastically with every word. “I went ahead and stuck a protective mark ’round the back. Ya should offer flowers there once a month, jus’ to be safe.”

Mononobe was usually about as arrogant as they came, but for some reason, he was very mild and accommodating toward Izumi. It made me wonder if he was up to something. Perhaps he just saw the inherent goodness within Izumi and acted friendly because of that. He’s friendly toward Aoyama, too. It’s part of the reason I have such a hard time dealing with him. I don’t like the idea that all my faults and shortcomings are laid bare anytime we meet.

An inquiry from Izumi jolted me out of the labyrinth of my memories and back to reality.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking. He’s not really an onmyoji exactly, but he could probably solve this incident without much trouble. I could ask him to take the case for you. But his consulting fees are rather high…”

Izumi furrowed his brow in worry.

“Did the two of you have a fight?”

His body was far from athletic, but his mind was quick as a whip.

“No… Not exactly.”

“Putting my case aside for a moment—and I’m sorry if I sound like some meddling old man—you should try to make up with him. Assuming whatever happened wasn’t totally unforgivable. You’d be surprised how hard it gets to make new friends as you get older.”

“I’ve never been the type to make friends anyway.”

“Sorry, I went too far, didn’t I?”

Izumi looked at me contritely and apologized several times.

“No, it’s fine. Let’s get back to the business at hand. I’ll have to meet with the main parties concerned, namely Momoko and Yuika. I won’t be able to make a proper judgment until I’ve done that. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but it’s still possible this isn’t even a supernatural issue.”

“Right… I guess that makes sense.”

Izumi sounded a little peeved that I’d brought up that possibility, but in the end, he didn’t voice any actual objections, simply nodded.

“You’re right. There’s bound to be some bias in my account. I’ll let Momoko know, but… I know I’m in no position to be making demands, but Momoko’s already stretched pretty near her limit, so…”

“I understand.”

I knew what Izumi was trying to say. He was worried about my blunt way of speaking to people. I wasn’t offended. It was perfectly true, after all. Plenty of potential clients have stormed out on me the past because of how I spoke to them. Even when I know it will sound insulting, if I find fault with someone, I have to point it out. It’s a habit I haven’t been able to kick.

“I’ll bring Aoyama along. He’ll make sure I don’t say anything…indiscreet.”

Aoyama smiled vaguely and said he’d do his best.

3

“Why didn’t you save me?” the girl asks.

“I don’t know,” I answer.

“Why did I die?”

“I don’t know,” I answer again. I do know, though.

Just like when she was alive, the girl’s smile is pure and carefree.

“You know, I loved you.”

She runs her fingers through my hair.

“Your hair is so pretty. It’s sleek and smooth, and it shines when the light hits it. Like the sun. You were like God to me.”

“Don’t say that.”

She’s wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I don’t deserve to be thought of that way. I couldn’t do anything for her. I didn’t notice the signs. I never saw it coming.

“Maybe you’re right. After all, you couldn’t do anything for me in the end, could you?”

The girl’s face melts away into the darkness. Her plump cheeks, round eyes, and sleek black hair all seem to distort as she glares at me.

“Do you know where this is?” she asks. “Do you think it’s heaven?”

“I don’t know.”

The same words keep spilling out of my mouth.

“You told me—over and over again—that good people go to heaven when they die. So is this heaven?”

“I don’t know.”

I don’t know anything.

“It’s not… There’s no way this is heaven.”

Her eye sockets, dark and empty like gaping holes, seem like they’re going to swallow me up. She’s laughing now. Ridiculing me.

“It’s so dark here. The worms have eaten my eyes, and now I can’t see anything. Just like you.”

“I don’t know…”

“I think you do.”

She’s right, I do know. I just hope she won’t finish that thought. If she says the next part, then…

“It’s all your fault. I had to go to hell because you couldn’t see the truth.”

I don’t have any right to apologize. I am responsible for her ending up in this hideous state. I’m the one who turned that sweet, innocent girl with the carefree smile into something like this.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I? I didn’t want to go to hell. It must be your fault.”

She opens her mouth wide, bearing down on me… And then I wake up.

Every time I wake up lately, I find myself wishing that I hadn’t. It would have been better if the girl had swallowed me whole, and I’d disappeared forever. But she’s dead now. And the dead can’t do anything. They can’t come back. Everything I did was meaningless. All my prayers didn’t amount to anything.

I realize I need to pee, so I go to the bathroom. When I lift the lid, I see Jesus on the cross. The crucifix is splattered with urine. Ignoring the petty sense of satisfaction I get from seeing it there, I bend down to pull it out. The fact I consider this blasphemous, or that I feel there’s some kind of revenge to be had from blasphemy, is proof that I’m still bound by my faith.

“It’s hard to let go,” I mumble.

Now that I think about it, I was indoctrinated into the Christian faith from the very beginning. My father, grandfather, great-grandfather, even generations before that, they all belonged to this religion. It’s practically a genetic trait at this point. That’s probably why it’s so hard for me to discard my attachment to God and leave everything behind.

“All you do is watch.”

I look at the crucifix, still wet with toilet water. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus said on the cross when he felt that his death was imminent. Even Christ himself was abandoned by God.

“All you do is watch…”

I say it again. God watches, but he never does anything to help. It was all meaningless. She went to that dark, terrible place anyway.

“I won’t make the same mistake next time.”

My insistence there will be a “next time” isn’t a sign I’m hoping to be forgiven someday. I wish I could have died instead of her. Someone as useless as me, who didn’t see the truth, couldn’t see the truth, is far more deserving of death than that girl. But I didn’t die. That means there will be a next time. A next time for me.

Looking through the hole in my hand, I see a beautiful face squeezing itself through the cracks in the walls. It gazes upon me with benevolence. This is something that really will help people—a god worthy of worship. It will save not only me, but others, too.

“I understand.”

The face smiles back at me, showing rows of perfectly even teeth. More of the things come crawling out, the noises they make sounding like beautiful music.

I understand.

I get ready to leave and put my gloves on. When I do, the things disappear. There’s nothing in the gaps between the walls except darkness. I can only see them through this hole.

There are all kinds of humans out there in need of saving. But the children come first. As I put my arms through the sleeves of my black gown, it almost feels like I’m still a priest. The thought provokes a sardonic grin from me. My time as a priest was meaningless. But dressing this way makes people less wary of me. It helps me to carry out my good work.

“All life is precious. I offer my body to those who uphold it.”

I utter the prayer through the hole in my hand. Now I know I won’t stray from my path.

4

Miss Momoko Niwa looked as tired and stressed out as Izumi had said. Her bakery, Entremet Setagaya, was a mere ten minutes’ walk from Moriya Children’s Hospital. Naturally, the name Moriya reminded me of another case. The one Izumi had heard about in the news. Both Aoyama and I had been intimately involved in the whole incident.

Several months ago, a large number of people had died in a building owned by the Moriya Foods group, and the company was investigated. The building had been the headquarters of a religious group, and numerous bodies were found there, along with evidence the believers had killed one another.

The CEO, Hidemitsu Moriya, disavowed all knowledge of what happened there. No evidence was ever found implicating him, but he’d stepped down to save face, and another man from outside the company had taken over as CEO. Even after Moriya’s retirement, some remained suspicious that he’d been bankrolling the cult and possessed deep ties with these murderous fanatics.

The truth was, however, Hidemitsu Moriya really hadn’t been involved. He genuinely didn’t know anything about what had happened. The religious group in question was called the Church of the Octagram, and they followed teachings loosely based on Catholicism. It had started out small, perhaps the size of ten households, but grew rapidly once a young man—then nineteen years old—named Haruki Kashiwagi took over as its leader. Despite its growth, the cult still remained under the radar. This was because Kashiwagi, like me, possessed special powers.

I had received the case from an old college classmate, who said his sister had been indoctrinated into the cult. This eventually led to me and Aoyama confronting Kashiwagi directly. His power was much, much stronger than mine. He’d used it to thoroughly brainwash Mr. Moriya, who’d granted them the use of a large building complex and its extensive grounds all without knowing it.

The thing that set the cult apart from normal religious groups were the “miracles” Kashiwagi was able to perform. Right up until the end, he believed they were all something from a higher power, an answer to his prayers to God, rather than a manifestation of his own will. This idea only made his faith stronger, warping him to the point where hurting or killing others no longer meant anything to him. He wasn’t a bad person, really. Just incredibly immature.

With a little help from Aoyama and Mononobe, I was able to resolve the matter, but I still think of that young man as a pitiable child. Like me, he was just another victim of a poor upbringing.

“Come on, Rumi, it’s time to go,” Aoyama said, pulling me forward. I apologized, then noticed there was something different about the texture of his hand. Looking down, I realized he was wearing gloves made of a material that gave off a fine luster.

“Oh, these? They were a birthday present,” he said.

“From who?”

“Mononobe.”

“He actually has the good sense to send a friend a birthday present?”

“Oh, don’t be like that.” Aoyama rebuked me with a wry smile. “And try not to leave me behind today.”

We saw Izumi waving at us from underneath a red sign reading ENTREMET SETAGAYA. After some perfunctory greetings, we went inside. The bakery was meant to be closed, but Momoko had allowed the three of us to go in and speak to her. She looked unsteady on her feet, and even pulling out a chair to sit down seemed to be a chore for her. Could she really keep baking cakes in that state?

“These are just some things I happened to have on hand, but please, help yourselves.”

She placed three small flans down on the table, each in a dish shaped like a swan.

“Thank you so much,” Aoyama said. His voice was so bright that I was certain he was putting it on to make Momoko feel better. “Wow, this is tasty. Really delicious. I was at a fancy hotel in Shibuya a while back, and their flans cost seven hundred yen. This is so much better than those ones, though. You’re really something.”

I picked up my spoon and tried a mouthful. It wasn’t really worthy of the praise Aoyama was lavishing on it, but it was tasty enough. The egg flavor was prominent, but the sweetness wasn’t cloying. The bitterness of the caramel was understated, too; most people would probably love it. Taking the flavor and the presentation in the cute dishes into account, three hundred and fifty yen did seem like a steal.

“Thank you. Even if you’re just saying that, it still makes me happy.”

“Oh, I’m not just flattering you. I know I’m just a layman, but I work at a church, and I often have to prepare light snacks for our congregants. Just from the little experience I’ve got from that, I can appreciate how much of an achievement it is to create something of this quality and offer it at such an affordable price.”

Aoyama maintained steady eye contact with Momoko as he spoke, and I saw her blush a little. There was no falsehood in his words. He has a real talent for telling people the honest truth in a way that doesn’t come across as rude. Wherever he goes, people always seem to like him.

Izumi cleared his throat to get us back on track.

“Now then, about Yuika…”

Once Momoko heard her daughter’s name, her face clouded over again. I watched her carefully as her shoulders sagged in dejection. She certainly was beautiful. Her hair was shorter than most women would feel comfortable with, but it looked good on her. She had none of the seductive quality that Izumi’s description of her as a “queen bee” had conjured up, but she had a clean, fresh vibe about her, almost like an actress you’d see in a commercial for healthcare products.

There was no denying that Momoko had a pretty face, but it was her hands that made an impression on me. In contrast to her delicate facial features, they were somewhat rough, her fingertips broad. Her fingernails were cut short. She also had slightly discolored spots on her hands—probably scars left behind by burns suffered during her time in the kitchen.

She struck me as the type of person who was serious about her job. I doubted she had opened her own store just because she thought it would be fun. And even with the current demands on her psyche, she probably didn’t consider her circumstances an excuse to hold back when it came to her work.

“Could it be… Can you see something?”

Momoko looked around furtively. I must have been staring at her a little too long.

“No. Not at the moment, anyway.”

“I see. Well, then…” She paused for a moment. “I’m really not sure where I ought to begin.”

“Mr. Izumi’s told us about everything up to the collision—or lack thereof—with the motorcycle. Yuika went out on her bike at night, and you followed her, only to see a motorcycle ram into her. However, your daughter was unharmed. The driver of the motorcycle bounced off her and was sent flying. When he got angry, he was strung up by some kind of unseen power. Yuika seemed to be the one doing it, and she’s been acting strange ever since. I’m sorry if I’m not summarizing this very well, but it also seems that she—”

Aoyama cut in before I could mention the incidents at school.

“She keeps saying that things are in her way, yes? And goes around with her hands pressed together?”

That was a close one. I’d almost spilled the beans about Yuika hurting kids at school with her powers. Izumi had been very insistent that he didn’t want Momoko to know about that.

“Yes…”

After a short silence, Momoko gave her reply in a voice no louder than the buzzing of a fly.

Another silence.

“What I’d like to know is: What was the catalyst for all this?” I said.

“The catalyst…?” Momoko asked.

“Yuika seems to have changed out of the blue. Right when it seemed her body was healthy again, she started wandering around at night. What marks the boundary between those two states? For example… Maybe you went to the supermarket that morning and someone said something to her? It could be something as seemingly trivial as that. If you can remember anything even a little out of the ordinary, I’d like to hear about it.”

The moment that the words “out of the ordinary” were out of my mouth, Momoko gave a short gasp.

“Have you thought of something?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, almost too quickly. “The day it started, she went to the hospital. Yuika, I mean. The nurse suggested she attend an event that was being held for the kids there. Yuika knew a lot of them from back when she was still getting treatment. They do that kind of thing a lot—sometimes they have a storyteller, or a magician, but on that day, there was a children’s counselor at the hospital.

“Events like that are geared toward the children, so the parents don’t really get involved. I had to talk to someone about our expenses as well, so I told her to go along without me, and I’d come collect her when it was over. She started wandering around that very night. Why didn’t I draw that connection before now? I’m sorry, that’s probably important, isn’t it?”

“There’s no need for you to apologize. You said they hold those events at the hospital all the time, right? You did well to think of it. I don’t know if there was some kind of issue at that event, but it seems like it’s worth looking into.”

“Please do. Thank you.”

She bowed her head in gratitude, even though we really hadn’t done anything for her yet. Momoko may have said she was a terrible mother, but that clearly wasn’t true. If she had really started to hate her own child, there was no way she would meet with a shady character like me or have that look of concern on her face.

“E-excuse me, but…”

Momoko hesitantly took out her phone. On the screen was some contact information under the name Yuumama.

“This is one of my mom friends—she has a little boy. We met when Yuika was around three years old. I haven’t seen her so much since Yuika stopped going to the hospital, though. She’s a very nice person, and I’m sure she’ll be able to tell you something. She was at that event, too, with her son Yuu. If you’d like, I can contact her and ask her to talk to you.”

I agreed to the suggestion and ate the rest of my flan in one bite. Momoko smiled sheepishly and said she still had two more left if I wanted them.

5

It was still light out when we returned to the office.

“Feels like we get more done now that the days are longer, huh?”

“They’re only going to start getting shorter from here.”

I turned around to look at Aoyama. He’d opened the refrigerator and was taking out some chilled perilla juice. His comment wouldn’t have been anything special coming from a normal person. But the fact that it was him saying it gave me pause. He was always so positive that it felt unnatural for him to come out with such a gloomy sentiment.

“Is something wrong?”

Aoyama looked back at me, confused.

“Before you ask, I’m not making you another milkshake. You’ve had enough calories for one day, considering the three flans you ate at Ms. Niwa’s—not to mention that entire pound cake!”

“She gave it to us. It would have been rude not to,” I said, covering my mouth to hide my expression.

“I’m pretty sure she meant we could take it away with us.”

Seeing him smile, I concluded I must have been imagining things. Aoyama mixed the juice with some soda water to create some lovely purple-red beverages. His gloves tracing along the smooth surface of the glasses produced a high ringing sound. He wasn’t looking at me now—he was too focused on his hands.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

It was such a minor irregularity, but I didn’t want to risk ignoring it.

“Huh?” he replied, the ends of his lips turning up. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the case this time does involve a young girl, so…”

“Hm, yeah…”

Aoyama cleared his throat quietly and sat down opposite me. The ice in the drinks was already starting to melt.

“I guess we should consider that. Misfortune affects everyone the same, both kids and adults. When you’re an adult, you have a lot more problems you can’t solve on your own, so you would think they’d be the ones who suffer more. But when children are involved, I can’t help feeling that much more sorry for them. I end up wanting to solve the case as soon as possible, for their sakes.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I studied his face carefully. There was no way a case involving a young girl wouldn’t evoke certain feelings in Aoyama. Why was he smiling his typical puppylike smile as if there was nothing out of the ordinary?

“Mononobe would probably have a different attitude to all this, wouldn’t he? He seems like the type to be extra nice toward children.”

I agreed with Aoyama’s assessment, but more to stop an awkward silence developing than anything else.

On the day I was scheduled to speak to “Yuumama,” I got a message from Aoyama right before the appointment.

I need to take over a sermon today. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to come with you. Sorry.

1

Momoko’s friend—who I still only knew as “Yuumama”—was quite different from Momoko herself. Her hair was tied loosely, dyed with brown highlights, and her clothing seemed to mark her as a student. Momoko waved her over, and she greeted us with an unenthusiastic nod.

“Hello, my name is Sasaki.”

I handed Yuumama my business card. She took a quick glance at it before muttering that she didn’t have one of her own to give me.

“It’s been a while, huh?” Momoko said, her voice bright, as if she was trying hard not to let the mood sour.

“A month and a half, actually.”

Still unperturbed by the other woman’s attitude, Momoko went on.

“Wow, that long, huh? Wait right here, I’ll get us some cake.”

Momoko went behind the counter and returned with a tray laden with several slices of cake.

“Help yourselves to anything you want.”

Despite her offer, Yuumama didn’t take anything. Unsure of how to begin the conversation, I also felt reluctant to reach for any of the delicious-looking cakes. Momoko seemed to be the only one who was happy and talkative, perhaps because she was seeing her friend again.

“When was the last time we got together like this? Do you like the cakes? How is your husband—I mean, your ex-husband? Have you had any more trouble with him? He’s not coming around unannounced anymore, is he? Is your job going all right? I’ve got plenty of snacks, so feel free to take some if you want.”

There was sharp bang as something slammed onto the tabletop. Momoko flinched in surprise, her large eyes trembling. Tea spilled from her angel-winged teacup, leaving a stain on the polished wood. Yuumama’s fist was clenched tightly.

“What’s the matter?”

Momoko looked at her friend dotingly—or maybe that was just the impression I got. She looked at her the same way a parent might look at her child.

“You’re a psychic, huh? Ain’t that something.”

The way Yuumama spoke made it seem like she was poking fun at me. The broad smile spreading across her face combined with the way she rolled her eyes made her look like a toad. I was about to tell her this but stopped myself just in time. A while ago, I’d told a lady who came to the agency that she looked like a monkey, and she hadn’t taken it well. Aoyama had told me that people don’t generally like being compared to animals, even if you mean it in a positive way. Since then, I’d been trying to hold back on those kinds of comments.

“What even are you, a man or a woman?”

Yuumama waved a hand in front of my face as if she wasn’t sure if I was listening to her.

“H-hey, don’t be rude. Miss Sasaki is…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know she’s a woman. Her first name’s on the card. Tell me, Rumi, what do you think of this lady? She’s kind of annoying, isn’t she?”

I appraised Yuumama carefully. I was the type to say things that were considered rude, but I had the feeling this woman might be even worse than me. Perhaps she’d gotten so used to spewing insults that she did so even when she didn’t mean any harm.

“You really shouldn’t speak like that. I’m sorry, Miss Sasaki, she’s not usually like this…,” said Momoko.

“I’m just having a regular conversation, same as anyone else. And what do you mean by ‘like this?’ You think you’re better than me or something?”

Momoko meekly lowered her head in apology. The other woman glared at her the whole time, keeping a mirthless smile on her face.

“I don’t mind. Unlike Momoko, you seem to be in good health and high spirits, Miss Yuumama.”

“Was that supposed to be some kind of insult? Also, you’ve got no right to call me that. I have a name—it’s Rikako. Rikako Shiozawa.”

Yuumama—or rather, Rikako—clicked her tongue in frustration. Momoko mumbled again that she wasn’t usually like this, quietly this time, so that only I could hear. Personally, I suspected Rikako wouldn’t have acted this way if I’d brought Aoyama. It was obvious why she was being so confrontational. The mood was already so firmly set that I doubted there was any way to improve it now. On the bright side, I never got offended by people’s attitudes toward me. Perhaps because of my appearance, people tended to look down on me. I was used to it by now.

“My apologies, Miss Shiozawa. I’d like to ask about the sudden changes in your son’s behavior.”

Rikako gave another derisive snort and glowered at Momoko.

“You must be doing pretty well for yourself if you’ve got time to gossip about me. You even have the cash to hire psychics or mediums or whatever. Guess this bakery is making good money, huh?”

“N-not really… And besides, it was my old classmate Mr. Izumi who introduced me to Miss Sasaki…”

“Oh, Mister Izumi? Women with good looks have it easy. Men just come running to help them when they’re in trouble. Or is it just because you’re a baker?”

“What’s happened to your son?” I asked.

I wasn’t trying to cover for Momoko. Rikako’s rough speech and general bearing dimly reminded me of my garbage birth mother, but the sentiments she was sharing weren’t completely alien to me, either. She clicked her tongue again.

“If you’re that interested, why not come see him for yourself?”

She raised her teacup to her lips, gulped down the contents, then got to her feet.

“W-wait a minute. Does this mean Yuu’s all right now?” Momoko asked, hurrying to get up as well.

From what she’d told me, this Yuu had a neurological condition that affected his motor functions. He was in a wheelchair and couldn’t do anything physically demanding, but he was good at drawing. He and Yuika would often draw together when they were both in the hospital.

Despite her foul mouth, Rikako clearly loved her son. As a fellow single mother, Momoko evidently felt some kind of affinity toward her, and the two of them had formed a friendship. They did their best to support and encourage one another or to lend a sympathetic ear when balancing work with hospital appointments got too stressful. That was Momoko’s version of events, anyway. Seeing the two of them in person, I couldn’t say her portrayal of their relationship was accurate in the slightest.

“Yeah, same as your Yuika. He’s better now. He’s home alone.”

“A-alone? All on his own? What about your hus—I mean, your ex?”

Rikako continued out the door, not even stopping to answer the question. She only spoke again when we reached the train station, a five-minute walk from Entremet Setagaya.

“I’m doing you a favor by hearing you out, you know. Shouldn’t you call us a cab or something? Isn’t that common courtesy?”

“I’m sorry for being so inconsiderate.”

I uttered an empty apology and ran over to the nearest taxi rank. I took the passenger seat, while Momoko and Rikako sat in the back. While we were in the taxi, I deliberately directed my attention at the scenery rolling by to keep myself from overhearing their conversation.

Momoko was clueless, really. There are exceptions, but when someone doesn’t want to talk about something, most people can pick up on it subconsciously. It was no wonder Rikako felt frustrated and that she’d been firing back in such an aggressive way. She didn’t have to say anything; it was obvious that being forced to talk about all this was unpleasant for her. But without Aoyama here, I had no idea what to say to make anything better. My helplessness scared me.

That taxi ride felt like it lasted for hours, but when I checked my watch, only about ten minutes had passed. We finally pulled up outside a municipal housing estate.

“Well, this is where I live. Sorry I don’t live in a fancy place like you, but I don’t have any big strong men to help me out.”

Momoko cast her eyes about, clearly feeling nervous. Even I could tell her behavior was starting to get on Rikako’s nerves. We ascended the stairs and eventually came to Rikako’s apartment. She unlocked the door, making as much noise as possible, then entered without a word. Momoko and I followed, only to stop in our tracks. There was so much junk on the floor we weren’t sure where to walk. The number of empty cans spoke to how much alcohol Rikako drank during the course of her day. Strangely, however, despite the messy, disordered state of the place, it was filled with a pleasant floral scent. Not the artificial aroma of an air freshener, either.

“Don’t just stand there staring. Step on my clothes if you have to.”

I did as she said and stepped over—sometimes on—the things scattered around the entrance and went into the apartment proper. Momoko followed apologetically a few steps behind.

“Do you hear…a sort of noise?” she mumbled uncertainly.

I could hear something. It was a child’s voice. He seemed to be singing, but it sounded unnaturally flat.

“Yuu,” Rikako called out.

One edge of a low table piled high with various plastic containers shifted in place.

“Come on, Yuu.”

This time, she kicked over the table and yanked away a large towel that had been underneath it. I heard a sharp intake of breath behind me. If Momoko hadn’t been there, I probably would have screamed. A boy with close-cropped hair stared up unblinkingly at us, his eyes darting around in different directions.

“Don’t get in our way.”

The child spoke without hesitation and wrapped himself up in the towel again.

“I’m not ‘in your way,’ am I? Sheesh…”

Rikako continued to curse but didn’t try to disentangle the boy from the towel again. Instead, she sat down on a nearby pile of clothes.

“So yeah, this is what he’s like now.” For some reason, she sounded strangely satisfied.

“But… You said Yuu was better.”

“Yeah, what about it?” Rikako responded to Momoko’s choked-out query with her customary aggression. “This is better, isn’t it?”

“Not really… Look at how thin he is.”

In a flash, something came flying at us. It grazed my arm, leaving behind a dull ache. I looked down to see it was the remote control for the air conditioning.

“Just how much do you want to make a fool of me, huh?”

Rikako fixed her eyes, alight with animosity, on us.

“He can move, he can talk, he can sing, all on his own. He’s even okay to eat without my help sometimes. He’s doing great.”

“Is that enough…?”

Rikako opened her mouth to say more but seemed to think better of it and simply clicked her tongue.

“The point is, he’s fine. Yeah, he mumbles to himself a lot now, but he doesn’t need the wheelchair anymore.”

“Right… I’m glad to hear that, too. It’s like how Yuika can go out and play outside now.”

“Excuse me,” I said, butting into the conversation. “You said your son used to be in a wheelchair?”

“Yeah. Cerebral palsy. His right hand was the only part of his body he could move properly. He couldn’t really talk right either. Now it’s all cured.”

“So he’s completely recovered from his condition?”

“That’s what I said, didn’t I?” she replied bluntly.

This whole thing felt impossible, even more so than Yuika’s miraculous recovery. Cerebral palsy was a condition that resulted from damage to the brain before birth, during delivery, or as the result of some inherent disorder in the brain. Symptoms and severity differed from case to case, but they all brought about problems with motor function. Physical and occupational therapy could help people affected by the condition live more easily, but it wasn’t something that could be cured yet, so far as modern science knew.

“Glory, glory…”

A shrill voice rang out, flat, with no real intonation.

“Divine compassion grants us the key, and with it, a promise…”

The towel was wriggling around.

“Waxing and waning, the moon’s light illuminates all. Glory be, glory be…”

I quickly switched on my voice recorder. I’d turned it off so that I wouldn’t have to listen to Momoko and Rikako’s insipid conversation, but I was regretting that now. Yuu was singing. Judging by Momoko’s reaction, she’d heard Yuika sing the same song. Her lip quivered, and she leaned against the wall as if clinging to it for support. Her gaze remained fixed on the towel.

“Lady Osara, where will you shine your light tonight…?”

The song came to an end, and the towel fell still. Neither Momoko nor Rikako said a word. I took a step closer and pulled the towel away, expecting to see the small boy with the restless eyes underneath.

There was nothing there.

The towel fluttered to the floor, and then there came a scream that sounded like ripping silk and the sound of footsteps running outside. I was about to turn around and call Momoko back, when…

“Don’t get in our way.”

All of a sudden, the kid with the strange eyes was right behind me, clinging to my back. I instinctively closed my eyes and shook him off. He let go, but I could tell he was still looking at me. My back was burning. The sight of his eyes, brief though it had been, had left me with chills that still hadn’t gone away. I felt terrible, like my heart was about to leap out of my mouth. I didn’t know why. I just felt a nameless fear that made me want to start begging and pleading and promising that I wouldn’t “get in the way.”

I tripped on the things scattered around and may have fallen more than once on my way to the door. I got right back up, though. I ignored the pain in my knees. My head was empty, apart from the desperate desire to get away from the song I could hear behind me.

“A fervent wish made to the shining moon, calling Kannon to appear…”

Somehow, I made it out of the entrance hall, at which point the pain in my back abruptly disappeared. At the same time, I sensed people nearby and finally dared to open my eyes. Momoko and Rikako were both crouched down, huddled against each other.

“A-are you okay…?” Momoko asked, her voice quivering.

“Are you?” I asked.

She shook her head weakly in response. Rikako didn’t say anything. She just looked back and forth between me and Momoko. The three of us stayed there in silence for a while, until Rikako opened her mouth again.

“Leave. Just go.”

“Huh? But…”

“Go.”

She staggered back to the door and made to go inside.

“Wait!”

I reached out and grabbed her arm. She didn’t try to shake me off, but the “what?” she directed at me seemed to convey bottomless depths of weariness.

“The event your son attended. Can you remember who was there and what they were doing?”

Rikako still looked dazed as she answered.

“I think… There was a guy in black, talking about something? Wait here a sec.”

She went indoors and returned almost immediately. She held a piece of paper in her right hand, which she handed to me like she was only too happy to be rid of it.

“Yuu drew this. Take it and leave us alone.”

Pushing us away, Rikako staggered back inside and closed her noisy door behind her.

“Ms. Sakaki…”

Momoko was unable to finish whatever question she was about to ask and once again fell silent.

“There’s nothing more we can do here. Let’s go.”

“Okay…”

We headed down the stairs and eventually came out of the building and onto the street. Momoko looked back several times. We got on a bus, and she remained stiff and nervous for the entirety of the journey back to Entremet Setagaya, not saying a word. I was in no mood to try and encourage her to talk, either. We didn’t have to discuss it to know we’d encountered something supernatural at Rikako’s apartment.

The worst thing was, I hadn’t seen anything. Or, more accurately, I hadn’t been able to see anything. Seeing things that aren’t human has always been the most natural thing in the world for me. Even if it wasn’t ghosts or Yokai or creatures of that stamp, I could always sense when people were under their influence. But this time, I’d been in a blind panic. It was like I’d been punched in the head or pierced with a sharp object. I’d felt so terrified, it was like I was staring death in the face, and I hadn’t been able to do anything.

Even among the more talented of my profession (Mononobe included, of course), it wasn’t out of the question to encounter an ill presence that was too much to handle. More powerful practitioners than me have faced down creatures that threatened to end their lives. Although I was still having trouble collecting my thoughts, I already knew that wasn’t what I’d just experienced.

It wasn’t the kind of fear that came from realizing one’s opponent was too powerful. It was something more spontaneous, more instinctive. The trigger was the child—that seemed clear enough. Looking back on it, the moment I met Yuu’s eyes, something had welled up from deep inside me, overwhelming my sense of reason and forcing me to make that ignominious retreat.

“I’m sorry.”

Back at the bakery, we sat in silence for a while before Momoko spoke up again. Presumably, she was apologizing for Rikako’s nasty attitude. Or perhaps for running out of the apartment and leaving me behind. If it was the former, it really had nothing to do with her, and if it was the latter, that was understandable, too. For a normal human with no supernatural abilities, just seeing me flip aside a towel that had been wriggling a moment before to reveal nothing underneath must have been unsettling. I didn’t blame her for running.

“It’s all right… Anybody would have acted the same,” I said.

“No, that’s not what I meant.” She hesitated. “I don’t know why I forgot about something so important… I think I might have made myself forget, somehow.”

Momoko continued to speak without really saying anything, making excuses and reproaching herself. I found myself getting annoyed with her. It seemed like she was a little too used to people letting her ramble on as much as she wanted. No one had ever told her to stick to the point, that much was clear. I attempted not to let my frustration show.

“Momoko, please calm down. What are you trying to tell me?”

“When I heard that song, I remembered. Yuika said the same thing…”

So she was apologizing for not remembering that her daughter had sung the same song?

“It’s fine, sometimes you remember things like that suddenly. In this case, I assumed Yuu and Yuika might have both sung that song anyway. There might even be other—”

“That’s not what I mean, either.”

Tears were streaming down her face.

“She didn’t sing it. She said it. I didn’t think anyone would believe me, and it worried me so much that I must have just…blocked it out. I was really busy, too, though I know that’s no excuse. I thought that if I just ignored it, maybe it would go back to normal.”

“What did she say, exactly?”

“Lady Osara.”

Lady Osara, where will you shine your light tonight?

Yuu had sung those words in his strangely flat voice.

“When she came home from the hospital that day, Yuika seemed really happy. I thought it might be because she’d gotten to see Yuu again. But that wasn’t it. She told me ‘Lady Osara is coming tomorrow.’ I asked her what that meant, but she suddenly got bashful and said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ I couldn’t work it out. Was she talking about an imaginary friend? I thought it was safe to ignore it, but now…”

Momoko’s account was becoming less and less coherent. I took out my voice recorder and started listening to the audio clip from earlier. Evidently, I was going to have to give some more thought to this “Lady Osara” character. Lady Osara. Osara-Kannon. Kannon, goddess of mercy…

Suddenly, I remembered the picture I’d been given. In all the confusion and my hurry to get away, I hadn’t even looked at it yet. I smoothed out the paper and laid it out in front of me. The moment I did, a little cry escaped from my throat.

It was a good drawing, for one done by a child. You could clearly tell what everything was supposed to be. It was a picture of a group of children all standing in a ring and talking. But that wasn’t the significant part. My eyes were drawn to a strange black shape in the middle of the ring. A human figure of pure black, with only its eyes visible, big, and wide, and both facing different directions.

2

3

After interviewing Rikako, I returned to the office, but Aoyama still wasn’t there. I didn’t see him at all until two days later. During that time, I tried to interview anyone who’d been involved in the event at the hospital. I asked them about the event itself and whether anything usual had happened since then. In most cases they refused to talk to me outright, but I was able to collect a handful of testimonies. I played back the recordings for Aoyama. He sat through them in silence, nodding occasionally.

“I was thinking of keeping up this interviewing process tomorrow. The next few days, too, if I have to.”

“Rumi,” Aoyama interrupted. “I really am busy with church work right now… I don’t think I’ll be able to come to the office again for a while.”

I took a long, hard look at his face. As usual, his complexion was nicer than that of most men his age, with not a single outward sign of worry. I still had a faint sense there was something off about how he was speaking. That might have just been due to stress from being so busy. This was the first time he’d claimed to have been too busy with his family business to help me, though.

“Oh, really? I’m sorry. I didn’t realize this was such a hassle to you.”

“No, not at all.”

He said no more, and after a few more moments of silence, stood up.

“Wait a minute.”

I fumbled for the right way to ask him to stay without sounding desperate.

“What’s the matter? I was just going to go make you another café au lait.”

“O-oh…”

Why did things feel so awkward between us all of a sudden? I should be able to conduct myself better than this. For some reason, just talking to him made me feel uncomfortable now.

“You were saying?”

Aoyama flashed me a gentle smile. Maybe that was why the Pádraig Aoba Church was so busy these days. People would line up in the rain to speak to someone who would smile at them like that.

“Oh, nothing… It’s probably going to be the same kind of deductive process as usual.”

“I’ve never known your deductions to be wrong before.”

That was because I’d never told him about any of my major failures. I wanted to show my partner my best side, after all. No… Maybe I just wanted him to praise me for doing a good job, as though I was a child and he the parent. Had he realized that was what I’d been doing? I hurried to change the subject, speaking a little more loudly than I meant to.

“You might be a little more qualified to investigate this case than me, though. The holes in the man’s hands that one witness mentioned—could they be stigmata?”

Stigmata generally refers to the wounds inflicted on Jesus Christ during his crucifixion. The term can also be used when people with particularly strong faith start manifesting similar wounds. Stigmata are generally limited to five spots on the body—the places where nails were driven into Jesus’s hands and feet, plus his side, where the soldier Longinus pierced it with a lance. Sometimes, the term also includes the wounds on Jesus’s back from where he carried the cross along the Via Dolorosa, or the punctures around his forehead from where he was mockingly declared King of the Jews and forced to wear a crown of thorns.

Purported cases of stigmata have been around since the thirteenth century. One theory is that they manifest psychosomatically and that the subjects were particularly suggestible to begin with. There are also plenty of reports of self-inflicted stigmata, making the whole phenomenon rather dubious.

“No, I don’t think so.” Aoyama replied. “There’s no way they could be.”

His way of speaking was just as soft as usual, but his rebuttal was unusually blunt.

“Wh-what makes you so sure?”

He didn’t seem to notice how shaken I was. He undid the cuff button on his crisp white shirt and neatly folded back the sleeve. His arm looked strong and well-muscled, so at odds with his soft golden hair and delicate face. He turned his palm toward me and pointed to his wrist with the other hand.

“It’s a question of anatomy. The forearm contains two long bones—the radius and the ulna.”

He extended his pointer and middle finger and ran them from his elbow toward his wrist. As I followed the movement with my eyes, he stopped at the wrist.

“If you drove a nail in above the wrist, there’d be no bones to stop it, and it would rip right through. That hand would just dangle down loose. You can hardly crucify someone that way. It’s generally accepted that the nail would have gone in below the palm, between the carpus bones of the hand and the long bones of the forearm.”

For a moment, I just stared dumbfounded at Aoyama’s grayish eyes. Anyone else would probably have replied to that question with “Because stigmata aren’t real,” or “Because stigmata only manifest in suggestible patients who already know about the phenomenon.” Not Aoyama.

Even though Christianity was his area of expertise, it was strange that he’d talk about this in such a carefree manner. Yes, that was what was wrong—throughout his explanation, his voice had sounded ever-so-slightly more chipper than usual. It made me feel uneasy. I wanted to analyze this situation in a calm, rational manner, but my heart was beating so fast that it was interfering with my thought process.

“Rumi?”

Aoyama’s voice brought me back to reality; I’d given some generic reply before I even knew it. I had no idea what I should really say to him in that moment.

“Are you coming down with something? You’re looking a little pale. We are in that awkward period when the seasons are changing. I was surprised at how cold it got after it rained yesterday. I know you prefer your lattes iced, but maybe it would be better if you had it hot today.”

Still smiling, he made a comment about how even I could get sick if I didn’t take care of myself.

“Maybe I’ll take today off to rest a little,” I managed to choke out. My voice was trembling, and it sounded absolutely pitiful.

“That might be a good idea. There are sports drinks in the fridge and some smaller dishes I prepared. If there’s anything you like the look of, feel free to help yourself.”

He offered to escort me home, but I declined. He said not to push myself too hard and smiled like a holy mother before leaving. I didn’t feel like stopping him this time. Doubts and paranoid notions drifted up in my head and disappeared almost as quickly. No, they didn’t quite disappear. It wasn’t going to be that easy to dispel them.

I knew I was being paranoid, delusional, even. Due to the terrible way I was raised, I tended to focus on the negative and see the worst in people. Aoyama was good at taking care of people, and despite his delicate appearance, he was robust and steadfast. Quite simply, he was a good man. I was imagining things. Making deductions based on such scant evidence was little more than empty, irrational guesswork.

“It’s fine. I’m fine. This is…fine.”

Nobody replied. I was alone in the office. I took several deep breaths and forcefully removed Aoyama from my wildly spiraling thoughts.

“I still need to hear as much as I can from different people.”

I knew I was blabbing to myself. I had to calm myself down somehow.

“Can I still handle talking to people, even without Aoyama?”

I doubted it. My appearance made people naturally suspicious of me. Not only that, but every time I opened my mouth, I ended up saying something rude. The only people who would speak to me were those who needed to talk to someone and weren’t too picky or those who considered me their last hope. Those were the only kinds of people I’d gotten anything out of over the past two days.

“I do need to hear from people like that, too, but I need more to go on. People who are excited or desperate tend to think in extremes. They see special meaning where there might not be any; it’s like emotional noise that gets in the way of the truth.”

“Yeah, I think so, too.”

Somebody touched my left arm. I shoved them away. There was a loud bang as whoever it was stumbled into a chair and fell to the floor.

“M-Mr. Katayama!”

He was lit by the setting sun, and the shadow of his tall nose fell across his face. Grumbling against the pain, Toshihiko got to his feet.

“I think this every time I see you, but do you think you could quit the Golgo 13 act? There are other ways to communicate than physical violence.”

“Why…?”

“Why am I here? Is it such a bad thing for me to come visit a friend?”

Toshihiko turned to me, his already beautiful face elevated to something transcendent because of the angle I was seeing it from.

“Not a bad thing, no, but… I thought the door was locked…”

“Locks in a building this old are easy enough to pick. You should ask that jolly-looking guy who owns the place to look into changing them.”

Toshihiko’s outward beauty was plain for all to see, but on the inside, his values were somewhat skewed. Most—if not all—normal people would forgive him a little criminal activity if he looked at them the right way. He did it because he knew he could get away with it. Or maybe I was wrong about that. It was far likelier he’d always been inherently abnormal, regardless of how he looked or how people reacted to him. That was probably why I’d been able to maintain a friendship with him for so long.

“I passed Aoyama on my way here. Is that why you’re looking so down today?” he asked.

“No, of course not.”

“Come on, it totally is. I couldn’t make out whatever you were mumbling just now, but I’m pretty sure it was something along the lines of, ‘Will I be okay talking to people on my own?’ right?”

“If you want to come with me, you can just ask.”

Toshihiko smiled at me. It wasn’t like Aoyama’s smile. Not a kind grin, more one of amusement or intrigue. I was probably better suited to spending time with people like him anyway.

“If you do want to come along, I can pay you for your time. It won’t be much, though.”

“I don’t need your money. I’m doing okay for myself, you know.”

Toshihiko and I had known each other since our high school days. In my spare time, I’d made a website that collected and examined occult incidents in the news. We got talking on the forum there and eventually met up in person, too. It was crazy to think we’d been friends for more than fifteen years now.

He went on to a good university and got a good job after graduating, but he quit almost right away. Most of his income now came from investments he’d made. He maintained his connection to society by working temp jobs in his free time. I wasn’t surprised when I heard he’d quit that other job. His appearance always made it difficult for him to integrate with larger groups, and his personality made him fundamentally unsuited to working a nine-to-five.

“Think you could tell me about this case you’re working on? Just a rough outline will do.”

“All right. Thank you for helping,” I said.

I bowed my head, but Toshihiko waved away my show of gratitude. When I told him the basics that I’d grasped so far, his eyes sparkled. I knew he didn’t feel any sympathy for the children who were involved. He was just thinking that this sounded like an interesting case. He probably would have gone along with it regardless, but his heart wouldn’t have been in it. In that sense, I was glad that this had managed to pique his curiosity.

“And you’re off to gather more testimonies tomorrow?” he asked.

“That’s the plan. Having you there should make it a lot easier. With a face like that, I bet you’ll be able to draw out all kinds of intel.”

“I’ll do my best,” he assured me, but then seemed to fall into thought for a moment.

“Is something the matter?”

“It’s probably nothing… I was just thinking, you seem a little off today, but so did Aoyama when I saw him.”

“He seemed ‘off’? How so?”

Toshihiko was a lot smarter than me. If he was thinking the same thing I was, it probably wasn’t a coincidence…

“It’s nothing important, really. It’s just that he didn’t notice me. Nothing to get worked up about; it’s probably because I was wearing my mask today.”

That would have sounded arrogant coming from someone with merely average looks. In Toshihiko’s case though, his confusion was entirely warranted. Any person with a normally functioning brain would find it hard to pass by him without taking notice. His face was dazzling enough on its own, but he also carried himself in a way that was both carefree and maddeningly alluring. The only reasons I could think of for anyone not noticing him would be that they were in a hurry, had poor visual acuity, or were thinking over an incredibly serious matter.

“I’m a little worried about him,” Toshihiko muttered. “Aoyama’s such a nice guy that I kind of want him to be his normal happy self all the time.”

Toshihiko wasn’t the type to concern himself with the well-being of others. It was a sign of Aoyama’s absolute virtue that he could provoke feelings of concern even in someone like Toshihiko. I nodded but decided not to voice my concerns for now.

“Apparently he’s terribly occupied with the family business.”

4

Sometimes, I dream about Him. Usually after the Great Ones have appeared. On nights when I dream about the girl—or is the girl real and everything else a dream?—I’ll dream about Him, too. He appears diminished in body and spirit, clad in rags. He wears an expression like He bears the weight of the world on His back. It’s insufferable. This idea that He’d make a show of how self-sacrificing He can be is so vulgar.

There’s no such thing as truly selfless devotion. People only save others to satisfy themselves. And making someone happy means making somebody else miserable in their place. Where was He when I couldn’t save the girl? She was like a wilted flower, mercilessly trampled underfoot. What did He ever do for her? If He were truly a force for good, if He wanted to offer others salvation in the truest sense of the word, He wouldn’t have let her die.

He failed me, but He won’t leave me alone. That’s the part that really makes me mad. I wish He’d disappear. Begone! For all I may scream and wave my arms around, I know He’ll appear again. He’ll keep haunting me until my wish is granted, maybe even afterwards.

“Don’t look.”

He sees all.

How can a person such as Him…? Yes, he was just a person, just a mortal man. He was venerated because he happened to be born with abilities unlike those of normal humans. But in the end, he only thought of himself. It’s maddening people can put someone like him on the same level as the Great Ones.

I hear a high voice, a kind of ho-ho-ho. The Great Ones are laughing.

“I’m sorry.”

I hear the laughing again. Ho-ho-ho. I remove my gloves and look through the hole. One of the Great Ones gracefully draws near to my hand, still laughing. Ho-ho-ho, ho-ho-ho.

“I’m sincerely sorry. But things are proceeding according to plan.”

The laughing abruptly stops. The Great One’s face twists into a sulk.

“I understand.”

It comes to me in an instant. Someone is trying to get in our way. And after all our warnings not to.

“I will see to it that we succeed.”

I catch myself about to make the sign of the cross and slam the hand I’ve raised toward my head against the wall. There are tears in my eyes. Not from the pain. From the despair of knowing such gestures still mean something to me.

“All life is precious. I offer my body to those who uphold it.”

That, too, is a lie. I’m even deceiving the Great Ones. I don’t consider all life precious in the slightest. I feel no sense of duty toward the children I’m saving. She was the one I really want to save. That poor girl who was trampled on by this world and disappeared from it.

Maybe I never really knew her. Was the kind, earnest girl who I remember, who acted so mild and mature, nothing but an illusion? Is the one who torments me in my dreams with her putrefying body and words of resentment her true self? I just wanted her to be happy. Even if she secretly hated the world and wanted everyone to die, she still deserved to be happy.

In truth, I know nothing of her reality. All I know for certain is that she’s dead now. I didn’t see anything. The hole in my hand tingles painfully. These regrets are all meaningless now. I just have to do what must be done.

I utter a prayer through the hole in my hand. I know I won’t stray from my path.

5

Toshihiko and I met up at Gatsugo, the nearest station to Entremet Setagaya. Izumi had been scheduled to come along with us that day, but I’d gotten a call from him at six in the morning explaining that Yuika had gone missing again. A few minutes before our meetup time—ten thirty AM—I’d received word that she’d been found. I could do this kind of interview work without Izumi, so I’d told him to forget about coming and to get some rest.

Izumi was beside himself with worry for Momoko. I couldn’t imagine putting up with all this stress for the sake of someone else’s child, no matter how much I might care about them. Infatuation that spanned from childhood all the way into adulthood was powerful stuff. Knowing Izumi though, he probably would have done this for anyone in need, former crush or not.

While I was considering that point, somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a pair of eyes that sparkled as the sun hit them.

“You’re wearing your mask today, huh?”

The black face mask looked unusually large on Toshihiko’s slight frame.

“I thought about it and figured this would be for the best. I know you said I’d come in handy for getting intel, but lots of people find it hard to talk when I’m around. I decided to hide my face until we really need it.”

A meaningless gesture, really. The line of his mask ran gently along his well-defined nose, accentuating it. Toshihiko was astoundingly attractive even with just his eyes on show. The glances at us I’d felt since he arrived were proof enough of that. But I supposed this was his way of showing consideration, so I held my tongue.

The longer we stopped in any one place, the more attention we would attract. It was the inevitable result of Toshihiko’s sublime beauty and my remarkable ugliness. I hurried on through the shopping district.

“Whoa, you’re fast. Wait up.”

“You should be used to it by now. You’ve known me long enough.”

Toshihiko obliged and sped up to match my pace.

“Sure is buzzing today. I don’t come here often, so I can’t say for sure, but I’d thought a shopping district near a little station like this would be emptier.”

“You’re right… I came here last month, and it definitely wasn’t like this back then.”

I looked up and noticed some small banners hanging from the streetlights.

“‘Moon Festival…?’”

“Ooh, they’ve got pamphlets, too.”

Toshihiko took a flier from a stack placed in a box outside a real estate agency. On it was an illustration of a smiling family looking up at the moon. Inside the moon, in red letters, were the words “Gatsugo Shopping District Moon Festival.”

“I thought you were all about festivals and all that traditional stuff,” he remarked.

“I don’t know all that much about the small local ones. Especially when it’s just the place name with ‘festival’ tacked on the end.”

“That’s fair. But what’s the origin of this place name?”

“Who knows? I can look into it later if I need to. Even in this day and age, the harvest moon is still a familiar concept, and culture relating to moon viewing can be found pretty much everywhere, so I don’t think there’s any need to get fixated on this one.”

“Actually, this is a bona fide traditional festival.”

Somebody inserted themselves into my and Toshihiko’s conversation. It was a short, balding middle-aged gentleman.

“Oh, it is? For real?”

Toshihiko deliberately charged his voice with a sense of excitement, and a dopey smile flashed across the man’s face. He smiled again and slapped Toshihiko on the back.

“That’s right. They say a samurai of great faith and dedication lived here in olden times. One day, he got it into his head that he wanted to see Kannon, and after many nights of prayer, the goddess came down from the moon to see him. The samurai ran off to fetch his family so they could see her, too. But by the time they arrived, Kannon was no longer there.”

“Oh wow, you know so much about this.”

Toshihiko tilted his head to show off his best side, the man visibly becoming more infatuated with him by the minute. What are you, a cabaret girl in a hostess club? I held myself back from voicing my comment aloud. He’d already proved how worthwhile it was for me to bring him along.

“It’s nice of you to say that, but it’s all written here in the pamphlet.”

“It is? Thanks, I’ll have to sit down and read it later.”

“Even if that old story is true, where does the ‘tradition’ of the festival come in?”

I was already checking my phone as I asked the question. This was the first year this so-called Moon Festival was being held. The local website was very modern and stylish. The man’s attitude very clearly changed when he turned to look at me.

“Yes, this particular festival is something the young people came up with to try and reinvigorate the shopping district.”

He spoke shortly and without warmth. Toshihiko dutifully parroted back “Young people?” turning it into a question that the man—his face lighting up again—was only too pleased to answer.

“Yes, yes. Gatsugo-ji Temple, just a little ways from the shopping district, that’s where they’re holding it. Originally, it was called the Ninth Day Something-or-Other, I don’t quite remember. But it was a traditional festival with a kind of moon-viewing ceremony. If you’re interested in learning more…”

At that point, Toshihiko pulled down his mask, shamelessly unleashing his beauty to its full effect.

“Thank you so much for telling us all this!”

While the man stood there as if suddenly struck with a fever, Toshihiko grabbed my hand and swiftly led me through the crowd.

“So you can move fast after all,” I remarked.

“We got what we wanted out of him. I had a feeling he was just going to waste our time with irrelevant chatter if we let him.”

He pulled his mask back up over his mouth, which was now wearing a stoutly neutral expression.

“Thank you. That guy would never have spoken to me if I was on my own. We’ve obtained some promising information. After we’ve concluded the interviews I’ve got lined up for today, we should pay Gatsugo-ji a visit. I’m curious about it.”

“Because of the moon connection?”

I nodded.

“We can’t assume everything is connected just yet, but considering the strange moon models that appeared in Aya Tsutsui’s home, and the “moon’s light” in Yuu’s song, I can’t help wondering. Hopefully, it will turn out to just be a local variation of tsukimi moon viewing, but…”

“I get what you’re saying. Even if it has historical origins, it’s weird for this festival to be revived now, of all times. It seems like it’s worth checking out anyway. Ooh, this is fun! I’ll see what I can do to draw anything moon-related out of our witnesses.”

Checking the address as we went, we walked down an alley next to a traditional grocery. Once we were off the main street, things got a lot quieter.

“Is this the place?”

“Looks like it.”

We were outside a restaurant. It still had a sign up on the first floor, but the place had most likely gone out of business some time ago. The word UDON could barely be made out on the faded sign. Though the curtains on the second floor were closed, there were several potted plants on the windowsill, so somebody had to be living there. As I looked around for the entrance…

“Excuse me.”

I turned to face the owner of the voice. A rather haggard-looking woman was standing there, swaying in place slightly. For a moment, I’d thought she was a ghost, but I swallowed that thought before I could say anything I would regret.

“Are you Hisako Masuda?”

She nodded. Even that simple act seemed like it would make her head fall off. Her eyes were unfocused, too, and her body was still swaying gently. Toshihiko reached out a hand to steady her.

“Are you all right? You seem a little shaky.”

Hisako was unmoved by his concern. She didn’t make any attempt to remove his arm, though. I didn’t get the impression she was overjoyed to be touched by someone of such era-defining beauty. It was more like she couldn’t muster the energy to shake him off.

“All right? I’m…”

She mumbled something, but I couldn’t make it out. I offered her my business card. She stared at it for some time, creating an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, before she finally took it, as if she’d only just remembered it was there.

“Well, then…”

She tottered forward into the disused udon restaurant. We hastened to follow her. Unlike the exterior, everything inside the building was tidy and well organized. There wasn’t a speck of dust, suggesting people still came and went in the course of everyday life. The tables and chairs that customers must once have used were still there, now with various cardboard boxes and cleaning appliances stacked on top of them.

“Using it for storage…,” Hisako muttered vaguely.

“Oh, I’m sorry for staring.”

“No, it’s fine… It’s too expensive to get it demolished…”

She evidently still had some semblance of normal cognition. She understood what I was saying, and her responses were rational. We walked on through to the kitchen, where the stairs came into view.

“Up there…”

Hisako stopped at the bottom of the stairs, pointing up to the second floor. We waited a while, but she didn’t move.

“He’s up there?”

Her head flopped down. Her eyes still empty, she nodded weakly, if such subtle movement could even be called a nod.

“Should we…?”

“I…can’t look at him anymore. I’m going…”

She suddenly lowered her arm and exited the scene with surprising speed. She was barely out of sight before we heard the front door closing. I never even had a chance to try and stop her.

“What do we do now?” Toshihiko asked after a considerable pause.

“I was holding back from saying anything so I didn’t offend her, but now that she’s gone, I’ll be honest: The situation here is more serious than I thought. It’s a more severe case than with Momoko’s daughter anyway. Miss Masuda leaving is actually good news for us. Before we go up, let’s discuss how we’re going to talk to this child without his mom here. Quietly.”

I sat down on the stairs, but Toshihiko just stared at me.

“What’s the matter? Even I might get the wrong idea if you keep looking at me like that.”

“Get any idea you want.”

He sat down next to me. We were both sitting on the same step, but his long, slender legs reached long past where mine stopped, and he had to fold them up.

“I was just thinking that you’ve really changed,” he said.

“In what way?”

“Back in the day, you probably would have rambled on and on about whatever deductions you’d made whether that lady was here or not.”

“I’m sorry if that ever made you feel uncomfortable.”

“Nah, it’s fine. I actually like that side of you. I guess it’s because I’m a little like that myself.”

Toshihiko pulled down his mask and took several deep breaths. His perfectly shaped lips moved up and down slightly. It was almost impossible to believe that he and I were members of the same species.

“Mommy Aoyama’s really something, huh?”

“What?!”

I inadvertently raised my voice. I couldn’t stop myself.

“M-m-mommy? What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“I dunno, I just think he gives off that kind of vibe. Why, did I say something weird?”

Ho-ho-ho, somebody laughed, in a high voice. I tensed up and looked behind me. There was a fusuma door at the top of the stairs, completely plastered over with green adhesive tape. The voice seemed to be coming from the other side.

“Did you hear that…?”

Ho-ho-ho. That laugh again. It sounded like a woman’s voice.

“It’s a boy who’s upstairs, right?”

I nodded. Reon Masuda, age eleven. Healthy in body but stopped going to school one day out of the blue. Nothing to suggest he was being bullied. While both his parents were often busy with work, he seemed to have a happy home life, too. Descriptions of his home environment came from his mother, so there was some room for doubt. But she’d been worried enough about him to take time out of her schedule to take him to a child psychologist at the hospital. Reon attended the sessions without complaint, apparently enjoying talking to the hospital staff and the other children there.

Reon was also one of the children who’d attended that event. The main difference between his case and Yuika’s was that he hadn’t been exhibiting any strange behavior. He didn’t sing that weird song or tell anyone not to get in his way. He could hold perfectly reasonable conversations. However, he’d developed a sudden terror of being around people and was no longer able to leave his room, let alone go back to the hospital.

Hisako had said that she knew why he couldn’t leave his room. She hadn’t told me the reason, presumably assuming I’d understand once I met him. Apparently, Reon had holed up in a room that was no longer being used.

Even as Toshihiko and I stood looking up the stairs, the eerie ho-ho-ho continued. Someone was laughing. And not because of something they found fun or amusing. It was terrifying. The scariest part was that I didn’t sense anything. Not a thing. I didn’t see a strange woman, or a monster, or anything. I didn’t even have the vague sense of discomfort I usually got when I was on holy ground.

“Reon?”

When Toshihiko called out the boy’s name, the radio static-like laughter stopped.

“Reon, are you all ri—”

“Stay away!”

A strained voice came from behind the door. I took a step up the stairs, hearing the wood creak beneath my feet. The boy seemed to notice and yelled again.

“No, don’t! You need to stay away!”

I did my best to put on a calm front.

“It’s okay. We’re here to help you…”

“It’s fine, I’m fine! Just go!”

Toshihiko ignored Reon’s voice and dashed up the stairs. He started peeling away the tape. A barely audible scream followed.

“I—I said I’m—”

“I don’t really care about you. I just want to see.”

There was a loud clatter as Toshihiko threw the screen open, then a violent coughing. Motes of dust danced in the air, catching the light and sparkling. I was about to call the boy’s name again, but what I saw robbed me of the power of speech. Toshihiko also fell silent.

In the room beyond the door, a boy in his underpants had fallen backwards onto a pile of cloth. His hair came down to his shoulders, and though there was a hint of body odor, he didn’t look malnourished or underdeveloped. There was one thing that was obviously abnormal, though. Various incantations, written in red, covered every inch of his unhealthily pale skin. My attention was immediately drawn to his eyes, which were both covered with paper talismans.

“Those look like goumafuda…”

On each of the talismans was drawn a fearful presence that looked like a monster at first glance. In fact, it was Ryogen, the monk who took the form of an ogre in the Heian period to vanquish gods of pestilence. Talismans adorned with his image became one of the most popular methods to ward off evil during the Edo period. They were typically used to stop evil coming into the home and pasted outside a building’s entrance hall or immediately inside the front door. These ones had to be stuck to the boy’s face with some kind of adhesive. There were slight wrinkles in the ends where clear tape had been applied to stop him from taking them off.

“Reon… Did your mother do that to you?”

Reon nodded. He bit his lip, which was trembling.

“I’m sorry for coming out. I tried to stay hidden, but now that you’ve seen me, it’s too late.”

“Do you feel anything, Sasaki?”

Toshihiko seemed to have lost interest in Reon already, and was now gazing into the dark, dusty Japanese-style room beyond.

“No… Nothing.”

“Nothing, huh? Reon, this lady is a paranormal investigator. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes… We’ve had them here before. But none of them could do anything…”

“Don’t worry. She’s not like the others.”

I tried to curb Toshihiko’s enthusiasm, but he went on talking.

“Those other mediums probably said you were possessed by a lady’s spirit or that there were impurities in the house, right?”

Reon swallowed.

“How did you know?”

“That’s what most of those nasty scam artists say.” Toshihiko took the boy’s hand. “But this lady just said she can’t sense anything bad here. She’s not the kind of person to make up problems or tell you what she thinks you want to hear. It may take her a while to sort everything out, but you have to believe in her, okay?”

A tiny groan escaped the back of the boy’s throat. Toshihiko tried to pat his head, but he contorted away and retreated from the incoming hand.

“I can’t cry… If I cry, it’ll ruin the talismans.”

“What’s going on under those, huh?”

Reon opened and closed his mouth wordlessly. After repeating that action several times, he finally seemed to screw up his face, raising it toward us.

“Will you listen to my story?”

Although he probably couldn’t see it, both Toshihiko and I nodded.

I’m gonna go under this blanket while I talk, but don’t worry about that. It’s just because I’m scared. You heard that I can’t go to school, right? And that I went to the hospital before? Okay, good.

My mom and dad are both nice people. So are my friends. But one day, I suddenly couldn’t go through the school gate anymore. I really tried, and I got as far as the shoe lockers, but then I threw up. The day before, my stomach hurt, and I went to bed early, so everyone seemed to think it was just a cold and let me go home to rest. But the same thing happened the next day, and the day after that.

Like I said, my parents are nice, and they did their best to find ways I could still study without going to school. But just thinking about it made my stomach hurt again, and before I knew it, I couldn’t go out at all anymore. That’s when Dad started looking for a hospital to take me to.

It’s weird, but I was able to go to the hospital just fine. The doctors and the nurses and everyone I met there were really nice. A lot of the events they held were aimed at kids younger than me, but I would always go along if they had one when I was there. I was just lonely and wanted to be around people.

One day, I heard a lady who made paper clay miniatures was coming. I don’t tell people in case they think it’s too girly, but I actually really like that kind of stuff. I was looking forward to it. But when I went to the room where it was being held, there was a man in black clothes there.

One of the little kids asked him what country he was from, and he smiled and said he was Japanese. I guess he was mixed race or a naturalized citizen or something? His hair was light, almost gold, and he had light-colored eyes. I thought he looked more American, or European maybe. He spoke Japanese really well, though; in that way, he didn’t seem any different from us. There’s this other girl there, Yuika, who’s half French. You can kind of tell with her, although she speaks Japanese fine, too. This guy smiled when he saw her.

“Where’s the clay models?”

I don’t remember which of the kids asked that. Whoever the man in black was, he hadn’t come with any art supplies.

“Sorry, the lady who was going to do that can’t come today. She’s sick.”

Everyone said stuff like “Oh, poor her” and “I hope she gets better soon.” Like I said, they’re all real good kids there.

“So I came to have a little talk with you instead.”

“What kind of talk?”

“First of all, take a look at this.”

He pulled down the projector screen and played a movie for us on the computer. It was a superhero movie. The kind with lots of action scenes with Captain America and Iron Man and all those guys. There were enough cool set pieces that even the kids who didn’t know the characters could still enjoy it. We were all getting pretty into it, but the man stopped it after ten minutes.

“What do you think of these people?”

He got some pretty standard answers. “They’re cool,” “I want to see more,” that kind of thing.

“Why do you think they’re cool?”

“Because they’re strong,” “their suits are cool”… Again, it was pretty much what you’d expect.

“No, not quite,” he said. “It’s because they don’t rely on others. They’re heroes, so they don’t need anyone else. They don’t complain, and they always give it their all. That’s what makes them cool. Just like all of you.”

His eyes kind of sparkled as he looked at us. It was a pretty corny line, like something you’d find in a manga, but it felt good to hear him say that. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Everyone was…moved, I guess you’d say.

“All of you here have things that make you sad, don’t you?”

I felt a little twinge of pain in my chest when he said that. I looked around, and it seemed like the other kids were feeling the same. Everyone started answering, saying stuff like “No,” “Not me,” “Me neither.” That seemed to make him sad.

“You feel obliged to hide your true feelings. But I know that you suffer misfortune. Why hide it? Is it so you won’t cause trouble for your mothers and fathers? Or because the people here are so kind to you?”

The room went quiet for a moment. I think even the really little kids understood what he meant, like he really knew what we were going through.

“You can tell me how you really feel. You’re working so hard and suffering a lot, so you deserve the right to be honest.”

The things he was saying really did seem kind of rehearsed, but it was still nice hearing him say them.

“Let’s talk about paradise, shall we?”

I don’t know why he suddenly started talking about something different, stuff we didn’t understand. A lot of the kids had never even heard that word before.

“Paradise? What’s that?”

The man told us all to gather around him, and he spread his arms out wide. He was wearing black leather gloves on both hands.

“Maybe you’d understand better if I said ‘heaven’ instead? It’s a wonderful place. The kind of place where heroes like you belong.”

Thinking back on it now, I don’t really know what he was getting at, and it was kind of creepy. But at the time, it all made complete sense. I guess I was just caught up in the moment. He had such a nice smile that it made me want to listen to him. Anybody probably would have looked at him and recognized he was a good person.

Then he took off his gloves. He had a big hole in each of his hands.

“Don’t be afraid.”

He spoke gently and held out his hands in front of us.

“What are those?”

“Keyholes.” He looked at us all through the holes. “They show the way to paradise.”

Suddenly, everything got really bright. I have no idea what actually happened, but I felt really happy. This happiness filled up my body, and right when I was feeling like nothing really mattered anymore, I fell over. One of the kids behind me must have pushed me. I was really annoyed. It was like getting interrupted when you’re playing a really cool video game. So I turned around to yell at whoever it was.

The whole room was crawling with these…small brown people with smooth faces. They had lots of arms, too, more than they should have. And the bits around their eyes were kind of flabby and melty-looking—those parts were sticking to the kids. I screamed. I couldn’t take it. I didn’t want to look at those things anymore, so I tried to cover my eyes, but they were swarming around me.

I kept them away from my left eye somehow, but they managed to crawl into the right one. As soon as they got inside me, I felt that happy feeling filling me up again. But it was also like something was eating away at me. I opened my eyes.

The man in black was gone now, and no one was talking. All the other kids looked dazed. Soon enough, everyone’s moms came to collect them, and they all went home. The right side of my body still felt happy, but only the right. The man hadn’t mentioned the name “Lady Osara,” but I couldn’t get it out of my head. Or maybe…it was more like I knew what Lady Osara looked like. I still do. But the left side of me was so disgusted by her that it felt like I might die.

It’s my fault my mom went a little crazy. The next day, I got up at seven o’clock like usual and said good morning to her, and she fainted. I knew why. It was because Lady Osara was there. That’s why I can’t let anyone see my right eye. I’m worried about how the other kids are doing. It’s bad enough for me with just one eye, but those things probably got into both of theirs.

My mom knew she couldn’t be around me anymore, but she tried to keep taking care of me, and it messed with her head. If you look at my right eye, Lady Osara will get into you, too. I know I’m beyond help. Dad noticed it pretty much right away. He was never the type to believe in that kind of thing before. My grandpa died last year, but while he was alive, he told my dad he should say a prayer. None of the praying or charms have done any good, though.

There was this one lady who claimed to be a medium. She was really something. She brought along a stuffed toy—a teddy bear. She said she could seal the evil spirit that was haunting me inside it. I just had to sleep with it for the next seven nights. A week later, she came to the house to collect the bear, smiled, and thanked us. She looked happy then, but she came back later that night and was really angry.

Or maybe not angry, more worried? She asked us where the bear was, and when my mom said she came by earlier to get it, she burst into tears. She apologized a whole bunch, and we haven’t heard from her since. I wonder what ever happened to her…?

Of all the specialists we asked for help, there was only one of them who could really see Lady Osara. He said there was ‘something’ in my eye, but he also said there was nothing he could do about it. He thought hard, then said it was best if no one looked into my eyes. That’s when he gave us these talismans to put over them. But we still can’t get those things out of me, so my Mom’s and my situation isn’t really better.

“You said you know what Lady Osara looks like?”

Toshihiko asked this immediately after Reon finished his account.

“Yeah… Smooth, brown face… One, but many. With big eyes. Flabby skin that looks like it’s melting. Eyes that follow you no matter where you look.”

“I don’t really get it, but…”

Toshihiko made a note of the characteristics Reon described and made a quick sketch. The monster taking shape on the page resembled the thing Yuu had drawn when I’d visited him with Momoko. I had to look away from it.

“Reon, thank you for talking to us.”

The boy shook his head.

“I’m sorry for telling you about it.”

“It’s okay; I’m the one who wanted to know what was going on.”

“That’s not what I mean. Lady Osara has seen the two of you now.”

Ho-ho-ho.

“If you hadn’t seeen meee, you would have been fiiine, but nooow…”

The boy’s face twisted into a smile. The talismans over his eyes were becoming wet and blotchy.

“It’s too late, too late, it’s opening…”

Ho-ho-ho. Ho-ho-ho.

“I’m sooorrryyy…!”

Toshihiko slid the door closed. A knocking came from the other side. Without speaking, we made our way back down the stairs into the storage room-like restaurant. The laughing didn’t stop the entire time. The bustle of the shopping district outside was a comforting change.

“How was it? Did you see anything?”

“No… Still nothing.”

“I think I did. Just for a second.”

I looked at Toshihiko, startled.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean I saw a monster or anything. Just something about the way his mouth moved. It was Reon who was laughing.”

Toshihiko sighed.

“His mouth only moved a little bit. He’s pretty small for a boy his age, so I figure he could probably imitate a woman’s voice like that. Seems like some weird and unexplainable thing is going on here, and his condition’s far from normal… But it’s important to consider the problem from different angles, right?”

“You mean we should take a more realistic approach?”

He nodded.

“I’m no doctor, so I don’t know for sure, but couldn’t this be a case of mass hysteria? The stuff about this blonde guy going to the hospital and speaking to the kids seems true enough, but beyond that…”

“At any rate, I’d like to hit up Gatsugo-ji next. Are you still up for it?”

“Sure. Just for the record, I came along with you out of my own curiosity, so there’s no need to worry about me. Just act like I’m not even here. You can ignore my mass hysteria theory, too, that’s fine. Carry on however you want.”

“Nice of you to say so, but ignoring you is virtually impossible.”

He laughed and pointed to his face with both hands.

“I do love this face of mine. It sure can come in handy. Feel free to use it as you see fit.”

Gatsugo-ji turned out to be a very small temple, the kind of place you could easily miss at first glance. The moment you stepped through the front gate you could already see the main hall. Next to that were buildings with tiled roofs that were most likely residences, and a handwritten sign directing anyone with business to step that way. We pressed the intercom and only had to wait a few seconds before somebody came out. It was a gentleman in his sixties wearing Buddhist monk robes. He had a shaved tonsure, and his upper eyelids drooped so low that we could barely see his eyes.

He asked us what we wanted, and we told him we were interested in the Moon Festival. I gave the name of the university I was previously affiliated with and said I was a folklore researcher there. The man explained that he was a resident monk at the temple.

“People do seem to be excited for the Moon Festival, although I suspect that’s more to do with the food and stalls we’ve shown in the photos. It’s rare to meet someone who’s interested in its historical origins.”

Still smiling, he directed us toward the auditorium. I had a vague notion that something was off—probably the fact the monk wasn’t moved by the sight of Toshihiko. Even virtuous people like Aoyama tended to get a little dazed in his presence. Not that he did it deliberately. Everyone, young or old, male or female, was unable to resist the effects of his beauty. But this monk was treating the two of us with equal courtesy. I could only surmise his eyesight wasn’t very good.

“Please, step inside.”

He laid out two purple-colored cushions and bade us sit on them.

“This really relates more to the Gatsugo area than the Moon Festival, but it’s a good place to start.”

He handed us several laminated sheets of paper. I thanked him and took them. Fortunately, the handwriting was fairly legible. I couldn’t read anything that was written too elaborately, so I occasionally had to ask others to help me decipher older texts.

Abbot Yukimitsu and the Revelation of Kannon

In the age of Eisho, Gatsugo was beset with bad harvests, starvation, and epidemics. The people’s spirits became muddied, and social uprisings followed. A monk called Yukimitsu, who had observed the land from Deusuyama’s Gatsugo-ji Temple, found the people’s suffering unbearable and performed some ritual fasts, one of seven-and-thirty and one of one-and-twenty days.

By Kannon’s grace, the grounds of Gatsugo-ji were sanctified and became holy ground, and the monk—now Abbot—Yukimitsu achieved enlightenment, becoming a living Buddha. He made a solemn vow to now and forever protect the people of Gatsugo from fire and flood, gathering a multitude of plates and arranging them into the shape of the lotus sutra. There he committed himself to the flames and was enshrined as a human pillar.

After a span of three years, Gatsugo was once more blessed with prosperity, until the abbot’s ashes were disturbed by the careless blow of a shovel. Yukimitsu then appeared whole again, and looking upon the people with a beatific expression, said hehad beheld Kannon. In honor of the plates used in the formation of his sutra, the goddess became known as Osara-Kannon or Migawari-Kannon from that day forth.

Atsunobu Saemon and the Ninth Day Memorial Service

Between the ages of Keicho and Genna, there lived an ascetic by the name of Saemon, who in his youth had left Gatsugo with his mother and traveled the provinces of the land, before settling at last in his old home. He was a naturally bright fellow and delighted in the study of Confucianism. Through the auspices of the six ministries, he opened a school of instruction and began accepting students. The following year, he became passionate about Buddhism and came to revere the Ekādaśamukha incarnation of Kannon.

As the days passed, he recited the lotus sutra many tens of thousands of times and became enamored of the Saigoku Kannon Pilgrimage. This pilgrimage, being an annual tour of thirty-three sites sacred to Osara-Kannon starting on the ninth day of the tenth month, was a practice of ancient times revived by Emperor Kazan. In the second year of Genna this Saemon, determined to participate, performed abstention for seven days and arrived on the thirtieth day of that month in the place where Abbot Yukimitsu was said to have beheld Kannon.

For years, Saemon had believed in Kannon’s powers of compassion and salvation, and he hoped to witness her as Yukimitsu had before. He chanted sutras and performed fervent devotions into the night. When it seemed sleep would finally come to his exhausted body, his surroundings fell quiet, and a dazzling purple cloud descended from on high. With it came a sound not unlike the gagaku music performed at ceremonies, and raising his head, Saemon beheld the very image he had seen at the thirty-three sites of his pilgrimage—Osara-Kannon herself,attended by myriad bodhisattvas on either side, being of such divine beauty as to defy description.

Kannon held in her hand a golden key to the Pure Land. As she opened the gate and allowed the enlightened deities to enter, Saemon’s eyes were dazzled by a brilliant light alike to a hundred suns, and he was filled with happiness.

“Oh!” he cried, “They say the Pure Land lies far beyond the horizon, but here I see it before my very eyes!”

Kannon then spake, saying, “This paradise is revealed unto you as a result of your faith and skillful means in following the path of enlightenment, and for those who intone the name of the Buddha, is never far at hand.”

Rejoicing, Saemon made haste to share this revelation with his wife and child, but on returning to that spot, the gate to paradise had closed, and they could no longer enter. Feeling as if he had wakened from a dream, tears came to Saemon’s eyes and fell like rain on the dry ground.

From that day, he dedicated himself to the Buddha’s teachings with renewed vigor, retiring from Gatsugo proper into Deusuyama, building on the mountain a humble retreat for himself and his family. There he spent his days chanting the sutras. Three years hence, his wife and child in turn beheld the Pure Land and joined Saemon in his devotions.

Throughout the years and decades that followed, Saemon and his family forsook worldly matters for the sake of the people, eating but one meal each day and donating any other food to the needy even as they themselves wasted away.

It is written that two years after they began their devotions, the village was able to produce enough to feed four persons, six months hence portions for three more, and two more than that in the two years that followed. By the time eleven years hadpassed, the village could pride themselves on a harvest fit to feed every belly.

In days hence, Saemon’s complexion remained hale and hearty, and he bore no outward grief when his family departed this world ahead of him. When asked of what had come to pass, he told of diverse miraculous events, and the villagers were gladful of the dedication he had shewn them. He continued to chant his sutras, dedicate Buddhist images, and make varied sacred ablutions.

On reaching the fine age of three-and-seventy, Saemon expired on the ninth day of the tenth month in the eleventh year of Kan’ei. In memory of his benevolent deeds, the day was dedicated the Ninth Day Memorial, being a day known even in these latter times as one on which devotees of Kannon gather in Gatsugo to recall that miraculous appearance and the promise inherent in the golden key to paradise.

This Ninth Day Memorial, carrying with it the associations of the Saigoku Kannon Pilgrimage and the goddess’s descent from the moon, came also to be known as the Moon Festival. Much alike to the moon’s changing phases, the festival may change and shift in time as new ways are found to honor it.

To summarize, the story began in the Eisho era (toward the end of the Muromachi Period), with a monk named Yukimitsu. He saw the people in Gatsugo suffering from starvation and disease and sacrificed himself to put a stop to the famine. To become a “human pillar,” he would have sat cross-legged in a formal posture and been cremated alive. Three years later, the famine subsided.

But then one day, somebody accidentally disturbed the place where the monk’s ashes had been buried. Miraculously, Yukimitsu was still alive, and he said he had seen Kannon. From then on, the people of Gatsugo began to refer to Kannon as Osara-Kannon, because of the plates (or sara) that Yukimitsu had laid out for his ceremony. The name Migawari-Kannon was also used, literally “substitute Kannon,” because of how Yukimitsu had chosen to suffer in the people’s place.

A hundred or so years after that, somewhere between the Genna and Keicho eras, a man by the name of Saemon appeared on the scene. He was deeply spiritual and intelligent. He wandered around on pilgrimages but finally returned to his home region of Gatsugo. He’d heard about Abbot Yukimitsu seeing Kannon and hoped he could do the same.

He prayed in the same place and on the same day Yukimitsu’s vision had occurred, and the goddess appeared before him. She took out a golden key and opened a door to paradise. Saemon wanted to show his family and ran to get them, but by then, the gate had closed. Three years after that, his wife and child were also able to see paradise, following which he built a hermitage and spent the days with his family, living a humble life of prayer and devotion.

Saemon died at seventy-three, beloved by the people of Gatsugo for his piety. In all likelihood, the real reason his story was passed down was because his death occurred on the ninth day of the tenth month, the same day he and Yukimitsu had seen Kannon. It was considered an auspicious day, and a ritual known as the Ninth Day Memorial Service was established. Since the tales spoke of Kannon coming down from the moon, it was also sometimes called the Moon Festival.

They both sounded like story archetypes I’d heard before, but I felt the detail of the plates must have some kind of special meaning. I didn’t know of any religious ceremonies that involved being buried with plates. As I sat there thinking, the monk called out to me.

“What did you think of it?”

“Oh, sorry. I’m not very good with archaic language. It took me a while to read it all.”

I looked up from the documents to see the older man smiling.

“To tell you the truth, there have been other episodes like the ones written here.”

“Really? If it’s not any trouble, would it be okay for us to see those as well?”

He shook his head.

“Um, if renumeration is an issue…”

“Oh no, it’s nothing like that. I mean that I literally have nothing to show you. It’s just stories that I’ve heard.”

Having clarified that point, he launched into his account.

“In the Horyaku era, there was a great fire here that destroyed a lot of our records. It’s said a man came to help fight the fire, but the blaze had become so fierce by the time he got here that everything had been burned to ashes. He saw there was nothing to be done and turned to leave, when he noticed one place that was still smoldering. He heard a woman’s voice coming from that direction—a kind of hoooh hoooh noise—calling to him.

“Curious about what it could be, he took a look around, but he found no one and turned to leave again. The moment he did, the voice called to him again. It went on like that until he got frustrated and a swung his scythe down on the burned patch. When he did, several plates sprung up from that spot.”

“Plates again…,” Toshihiko murmured. “Do they have some kind of special significance in Buddhism?”

“Not really, no. So far as I know, Gatsugo is the only region that makes special mention of them. When it comes to plates in general though, you can find other stories around. Cholera was widespread throughout the Meiji and Taisho periods. There are tales of people dipping ceramic plates in the water and drinking it while the moon was reflected in it. It’s said that they instantly recovered after doing that.”

“I see. You’ve given us some very valuable information. Thank you.”

I bowed to the monk. Toshihiko did the same.

“There is just one thing I’m curious about.”

Toshihiko took off his mask and smiled.

“Why did Gatsugo-ji suddenly decide to revive the Ninth Day Memorial in such a flashy way? It’s been observed fairly quietly for several hundred years, right?”

“I’m not sure if I can answer that… It was the young people who suggested it. They said it would be a good way of reinvigorating the area.”

Toshihiko took the monk’s right hand, enveloping it in his own.

“Who exactly were these young people? College students?”

The monk’s stiff smile twitched just a little.

“S-sir, please, you’re rather close…”

“I just want you to tell me the truth.”

He caressed the monk’s hand like it was some precious treasure. Then, in one graceful movement, he turned his head to the side and brought his ear toward the monk’s face.

“You can whisper so only I can hear it.”

The monk’s barely-open eyelids quivered.

“It was…a foreign gentleman. I thought he might be an exchange student. He was very well versed in these matters. He knew about the memorial service, and…he said we should gather everyone together on the night of the festival. Said we should pray. We should gather. We should pray. We should gather. We should pray. We should gather. We should pray. We should gather. We should pray. We should gather. We should pray. We should gather. We should pray…”

My hand instinctively shot out to drag Toshihiko away from the monk. The older man’s eyes were both spinning around in strange directions as he repeated the same words over and over again.

“To-shi-hi-ko Ka-ta-ya-ma…”

He was speaking in a totally unnatural cadence now. Toshihiko was about to reply, but I slapped my hand over his mouth. This was not something he should be talking to.

“Wrong… Can’t be allowed… Toshihiko Katayama. You take without giving anything in return. You must not… You have transgressed…”

Someone made a strange croaking noise like a frog. It was Toshihiko. His eyes were bloodshot, and his mouth was opening and closing repeatedly, gasping for air. He was strangling himself with his own hands. The moment I noticed that, I whacked him on the side of the head. I didn’t pause at all and hit him again and again. On the third strike, he collapsed and fell, hitting the floor hard. I put my hand in front of his face. He was breathing. I got to my feet to help him up, when…

“Ru-mi Sa-sa-ki…”

That strange, womanly voice was still coming out of the monk’s mouth.

“Poor pitiful child.”

Pitiful child? The moment I heard those words, I saw red. I raised my hand and made a sweeping movement from left to right—opening my closet. I could sense something in front of me very clearly. I didn’t know what it was, but that didn’t matter.

“Even if I don’t know what you are, I can tell you’re weak.”

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t risk seeing whatever it was that boy had seen.

“You can’t even speak without using somebody else to do it. That’s a sign of weakness if ever I heard one.”

I began to focus harder. In my mind’s eye, I saw an image of a Kannon statue. Whatever this thing might be on the inside, that was how it was choosing to represent itself. Carved from wood, with a mild, feminine face and delicate hands. It had an undeniable feeling of divinity about it, but it also exuded warmth, as though it would accept and embrace anyone just the way they were.

“Osara-Kannon.”

Calling the thing’s name was my way of dragging it in, of shutting it into that dirty little closet in my mind. Once that was done, the case would be over, and I’d forget all about this particular entity. It should have been a simple matter. But I couldn’t form the final words of my little incantation. I couldn’t say “come on in.”

I felt a gentle impact against my face and opened my eyes. A sight of almost aggressive beauty blazed across my vision. Toshihiko was slapping me to wake me up. I sheepishly turned my eyes away from him. It was a good thing my glasses had come off. I groped around for them and sat back up. As Toshihiko helped to steady my head, I asked him how he was feeling.

“My head hurts so much it feels like death. Last thing I remember was listening to that monk’s story…”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I hit you.”

He looked at me dumbfounded for a moment, then shrugged it off.

“Knowing you, I bet you had a good reason for doing it.”

“Tell me, Mr. Katayama, why did you suddenly start acting like a needy prostitute around this man?”

“Because he was lying to us. Well, maybe ‘lying’ isn’t quite the right word. It was more like someone was making him say all that.”

The monk still hadn’t regained consciousness. Toshihiko shook his shoulders gently.

“He’d been acting weird the whole time. I did that to try and break through whatever was affecting him so he’d tell us the truth.” He sighed. “Looks like the idea backfired on me.”

“I disagree. I think you did splendidly. We’ve been able to confirm that the same person is involved with both the festival and the incident at the hospital.”

Toshihiko was muttering a half-hearted “I guess so” when the monk regained consciousness with a start.

“Are you all right?”

Toshihiko put a hand on the man’s shoulder. The monk screamed—actually screamed—and batted his hand away.

“What do you think you’re doing?!”

His face flushed as red as a maple leaf in autumn. The stiff smile he’d been wearing before had disappeared without a trace. Undaunted, Toshihiko lunged forward, once again invading the older man’s personal space.

“You passed out while we were talking. I was just trying to take care of you. I’m sorry if you didn’t like how it felt.”

“O-oh, no…” The monk reassured him, unable to resist the look in Toshihiko’s demurely downcast eyes. “I was just a little confused…”

“You were telling us about the history of the temple? Do you remember that much?”

“Well, I… I remember that you were a very handsome young— I-I’m sorry, I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.”

“Don’t worry about it. I do think that you should pay a visit to the hospital just in case. But before you do… Try to remember. You gave us some valuable information about the moon festival and the traditions around it.”

“The Moon Festival… Yes, of course. It’s strange, really. All through my life, and my father’s, and his father’s before him, it was just a day to offer prayers while looking up at the moon. This year, they’re suddenly making it into a big event to help publicize the shopping district.”

He left the room for a few minutes and came back with another document.

“I don’t believe I showed you this yet. Do you think you’d find it useful?”

What joy to step out of this world of shadows and into the light!

The moon shines down, carrying the promise of salvation to the weary.

We commend ourselves to Kannon, her golden key, and the treasures that lie beyond.

Devote yourselves to the way and pray that your sins will be cleansed.

Lady Osara, where will you open the door to the Pure Land tonight?

“What is this?”

“It’s the Moon Festival song that’s been passed down in this temple.”

I wondered if it might be the same song the children had been singing.

“How does the tune go?”

“Well, we don’t actually sing it, technically. It may have been set to music in the past, but that part of the tradition has been lost now. These days, we just recite it, like a prayer, while looking up at the moon. It’s…strange, though. I wonder when it changed…?”

He began to pace around the room.

“A man definitely came here—a young man with light-colored hair. Or was it a woman? I can’t seem to remember…”

Toshihiko shot me a look. I nodded silently.

“I think we’ve taken up enough of your time. Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us; it’s been very informative.”

We left the monk behind, still looking puzzled, and exited the temple grounds. Toshihiko spoke up while we were on our way back to the office.

“I probably don’t even need to say this…”

“Then don’t.”

“Just listen. I’m being serious here.”

He didn’t look at me when he spoke.

“It’s not good to play favorites. If one of your own goes astray, you need to tell them so.”

Almost the moment we arrived back at the agency, he collapsed and had to be rushed to hospital.

1

“Hey,” the girl asked me, “is there anything that makes you thankful for who you are?”

The words got stuck in my throat. I had to think for a while before answering.

“What do you mean?”

“I guess that’s a no. You’ve probably never even thought about stuff like that.”

What did I say to her then? I don’t remember. My memory’s gotten fuzzy, details obscured by rose-tinted glasses. My answer was probably meaningless anyway. All I know for sure is that I’ve forgotten. It just goes to show how carelessly I treated her. I don’t remember what I said to her—the real her. She was just another face in the crowd to me, nothing more. Maybe I didn’t think that consciously, but that was how I acted toward her.

Now, in the present, she glowers at me with those gaping black eyes and laughs.

“You know there’s no point thinking about the past.”

She makes the sign of the cross.

“‘The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit…’ Hee-hee. None of that meant anything to me. I just went along with it for you, I think. It seemed to make you feel better.”

“That’s not true.”

I know that it is, though. I know better than anyone.

“What you’re doing now is nothing more than masturbation.”

“Where did you learn that word?”

She laughs. She cackles.

“What kind of girl do you think I am? Just an earnest, well-behaved child who does whatever she’s told? Is there any reason I shouldn’t know about that stuff?”

I shake my head.

“I’m in hell now. I can never go back to where you are.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh, but it is.”

The edges of her empty eye sockets begin to squirm.

“There was a lady all skin and bone,

And such a lady was never known;

It happened on a holiday,

The lady went to church to pray.

“She saw a dead man upon the ground;

And from his nose until his chin,

The worms crept out and the worms crept in.

“Then the lady to the sexton said,

‘Shall I be so when I am dead?’

And the sexton to the lady said,

‘You’ll be the same when you are dead.’”

“Stop it.”

“It’s just a nursery rhyme. You’re the one who taught it to me.”

No matter how much I beg, she won’t stop talking. Countless worms come crawling out of the holes where her eyes should be.

“Everything you taught me was true. I went to hell. When I died, the worms ate my flesh, and now I’m surrounded by dark and cold and agony.”

“No, it was all lies.”

“It was true. Every word of it.”

One half of her body starts to melt away, dripping a muddy-colored liquid.

“Nothing you told me was a lie. It was all true.”

She stretches her arms out toward me. They wrap around my arms, my legs, my head, my torso, my mouth, even my mind.

“I want to be with you forever.”

God failed to grant that innocent wish of hers. And I failed to realize she’d even made it. He did nothing but watch. I never saw the truth.

I open my eyes.

My gloves are off. It’s not the girl crawling through the hole and trying to wrap herself around me, but the Great Ones. I put my gloves back on and look around.

It’s the same old room it always is, littered with dictionaries, English conversation books for children, poetry collections, that one Christmas sweater I could never bear to throw away… I’ve thrown away my Bible so many times, but I always end up retrieving it. It’s not an issue of faith. I just feel attached to it because I received it from my grandfather.

I look at the leather-bound book that Grandfather treasured for his entire life, with its worn corners and spidery cracks running through the embossed cross and grail on the front. I remember him less as a priest and more as a kindly old man. Recalling him at all makes my heart ache. My sentimentality toward my departed relative vies with the seething hatred inside me, neither quite beating out the other.

For now, I don’t want to look at it. I throw it into the closet and bring up the calendar app on my phone. I’ve been to most of the places on my schedule already. The hospital, the kindergarten, the elementary school, the orphanage. They all have children who suffer unjustly, like the girl did. Physically, mentally, emotionally, it’s all the same. They suffer, and they have no one to turn to. Many of them can’t even admit how hard it is on them.

Hence, I borrow the power of the Great Ones. They go inside the children, and they grant the child’s fondest wish. They don’t communicate with me directly, but I know that’s what’s happening. The first of the Great Ones’ miracles that I witnessed was what cemented my faith in them.

I saw an elementary school boy with a twisted leg that made him limp along awkwardly, ridiculed by his peers. When I approached him, he looked frightened, but when I said, “That must be very hard on you,” he burst into tears. One of the Great Ones got in through those teary eyes. A week later, I saw the boy again, from a distance. He was walking straight as an arrow, his former bullies trailing behind him.

I found myself asking questions aloud, even though I was in public.

“Are you a god?”

I received no answer.

“Are you real…? A real god?”

I’m not a fake.

I heard someone say that. Or at least, I think I did.

“What should I do now?”

After a while, the reply came.

I won’t just watch.

I was so happy. It was all so simple. Whatever this thing was, it had given me what I wanted most in that moment. Gods probably don’t go around telling people they’re gods. So this must be a god. Not that I even cared about that anymore. The boy with the bad leg had been healed and could now move around freely; that was good enough for me.

Ever since then, I’ve kept calling on the Great Ones for help. They tell me prayer is important to them. I still pray a lot, just like I used to, but this is different. I’m no longer praying blindly to a god that ignores me. By praying to the Great Ones, I invoke their name. Their name gives them form. It gives them power.

I asked them once why they were doing all this, but all they said was “the Pure Land paradise.” It was frustrating, not knowing what they meant. I don’t even hear them speaking, really. It’s more that their words flow directly into my mind on rare, seemingly random occasions.

One morning, the words flowed into me the moment I woke up. Moon Festival. Ninth Day Memorial. I looked them up online. I found a website made by someone who was collecting old legends and folklore. A man living in Gatsugo named Saemon met the goddess Kannon, who showed him paradise. To this day, Gatsugo-ji Temple still held a memorial service for him on the ninth day of the tenth month, also celebrated as the “Moon Festival.”

I knew there was a district in Setagaya City called Gatsugo, but this was the first time I’d heard this story. I looked into it a little further and turned up some old documents written in archaic language that took a while to decipher.

Pure Land. Moon Festival. Ninth Day Memorial.

I finally understood what the Great Ones were asking of me. They wanted to take people to paradise. What had happened in those distant days of the past was going to happen again today. Faith had been stronger back then—no one doubted the existence of gods and yokai and curses. That belief was what allowed Osara-Kannon to appear and reveal the way to paradise.

I’m not interested in seeing paradise myself. What good would it do? You can’t do anything by just looking. But if that is what the Great Ones want, I’ll make sure they get their way. After all the children they’ve healed, this is the least I can do to repay them. I doubt they even need or desire repayment. This will simply allow them to save all the children, even the ones who can’t ask for help themselves.

The first step was getting as many people together as possible. To do that, I needed to spread the word about the Moon Festival. I met with the resident monks at Gatsugo-ji, people from the town council, and even some kids from the local schools who fancied themselves as influencers.

I met with them, nothing more. Once I was close enough, the Great Ones could get inside them and do the rest. No one was suspicious of me—if I did or said anything odd, they put it down to me being “not from around here.” Looking the way I do really comes in handy sometimes.

Suddenly, the Moon Festival became the talk of the town, and once we entered September, everyone started looking forward to the night of the full moon. The crowning event on the final day would be the tour of paradise.

“Ho-ho-ho.”

I try laughing the way the Great Ones do. Ever since the girl died, I haven’t been able to laugh with any real joy in my heart. I can put on a convincing semblance of a smile when I have to, but it’s just to placate the people around me. If she were here now, what would she think of what I’m doing? I already know the answer to that. It’s nothing more than masturbation.

She was just a child. That slight tremble in her voice when she spoke to me, it wasn’t simply because she looked up to me like a parental figure. I knew she had romantic feelings for me as well. Obviously, I had no intention of ever reciprocating. But I have to admit, I was genuinely flattered.

It reminded me of a question one of my teachers had posed back in my student days. Let’s suppose a lady tells you she’s so depressed that she wants to die. What should you do to help her? One person replied that the quickest and most efficient solution would be to start going out with her. Or even skip the dating and just sleep with her. I remember I said that didn’t seem like a realistic long-term solution. You’d have to be prepared to care for that woman and remain by her side for the rest of her life. The teacher had agreed. I no longer remember what the “correct” answer he’d told us was.

All I really know for sure is that I made a mistake. The girl I see in my deluded dreams is proof of that. Sexual desire tends to follow as an extension of romantic feelings; it’s only natural. She no doubt had experienced those kinds of emotions, too. But I ignored that, taking love and sex out of the equation and wanting her to stay “pure,” more like an avatar or an ideal than a real person.

I wish her fleeting love could have been a happier memory, that I could have acted as some kind of emotional support for her… What a ridiculous idea. I wish I’d thought things through a little more. She was such an intelligent girl! I’m the one who was a fool. I trampled over her feelings just as much as anyone else.

“All life is precious. I offer my body to those who uphold it.”

Once again, I utter the prayer through the hole in my hand. Now I know I won’t stray from my path.

Almost all the people around me are housing the Great Ones now. I leave the house. Most everyone has it in them now. Nobody says good morning or good night. They’re too happy for that.

…If only she could be happy, too.

2

“It’s awfully noisy outside. Was there some kind of accident?” Aoyama asked as he stepped through the door to the agency.

“Toshihiko isn’t feeling well. I had to call an ambulance for him.”

“Oh, I hope he’s all right. I mean, obviously he’s not if he needed an ambulance, but, you know…”

He shifted his gaze uncomfortably. With those big, round eyes and that open, compassionate face, everything about him seemed to scream “good person.” Anybody who saw him would probably trust him right away.

“Rumi?”

Aoyama took my hand. It was cold. He was still wearing those gloves.

“Are you all right? You’re not feeling sick as well, are you?”

I shook his hand away on reflex. He looked hurt, like he was genuinely shocked that I’d done it. I couldn’t bear to see him like that, so I made a show of losing my balance and collapsed onto the sofa.

“Oof, that smarts…,” I groaned theatrically. “I guess I hurt my hand at some point. Sorry about that.”

Aoyama’s expression changed from despair to mere bewilderment.

“So, uh, what exactly has been happening?”

“Let’s start with Toshihiko. I’ve contacted his mother, and she’s on her way to the hospital. He should be fine. As for me, it’s just a little cut I got in a moment of carelessness. No need to worry about that, either.”

“I see…,” Aoyama mumbled, not sounding completely convinced. “What would you like to drink today?” he asked, changing the subject and opening the tea cabinet.

“Nothing right now.”

“Okay, but I’ll make some anyway. Just let me know if you change your mind.”

Aoyama took out several tins with geometric patterns on them. With a skill borne of long practice, he set to work. He poured hot water into his cup to warm it. While he was doing that, he measured the tea leaves and put them in a pot. After pouring hot water on them and leaving them to steep, he picked up the strainer and poured the contents into another teapot. He threw the water in the mug away and replaced it with the freshly brewed tea. Finally, he put a tea cozy—which I believe he had embroidered himself—over the teapot to keep it warm.

“No matter how many times I watch you do that, it’s always just as impressive.”

“Aw, it’s nothing, really…”

Aoyama reacted to the praise the same way he always did, his pale skin blushing a bright red. Nothing about him felt off. Considerate toward others, good at brewing tea, honest and kind—the same old Kouki Aoyama as always. There was no need for me to tell him about my suspicions. I’d just investigate my own way, like I always did.

“How about you catch me up on what you learned today?”

He looked at my notes and photos and asked if I had any recordings. When he reached the end of those…

“Ho-ho-ho.”

I froze. That was Aoyama’s voice.

“I hear a kind of ho-ho-ho noise. Don’t you?”

He didn’t look up at me, but he seemed completely calm. What was I doing? I’d gotten these weird ideas, these weird suspicions into my head, and now I was getting hung up in details that probably didn’t mean anything.

“In that last part, it was Reon himself laughing.”

“Right, but that noise appears in the other recordings, too, not just the one of Reon. And the monk also mentioned a hoooh hoooh noise in one of his stories. Is it really just a laugh? It’s a little creepy to think of all these people laughing in exact same way.”

I’d intended to listen to the recordings more carefully this time around, but I’d been too fixated on watching Aoyama’s every move to pick up on any of that.

“Rumi, do you—”

“Aoyama.”

I cut him off before he could say anything more. I didn’t want to think about the implications.

“I’ll be honest with you: I don’t think I can get to the bottom of this on my own. I thought I might ask Mononobe for help.”

The words came pouring out of my mouth before I could stop them. Mononobe was supposed to be my last resort, held in reserve for when I was really desperate. And if anyone was going to ask him to join the case, it really should have been Izumi. The two of them already knew each other, so there would be no need for me to act as a go-between.

Aside from all that, I just didn’t like Mononobe very much. I didn’t want to speak to him unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Unlike me, Aoyama had formed something approaching a genuine friendship with the man. It had been a shock to learn they were close enough to exchange birthday gifts now. Mononobe hated his birthday. It seemed so strange to me that he’d go out of his way to celebrate someone else’s.

I thought that the mention of the shaman’s name would get a positive reaction out of Aoyama. Maybe he’d even offer to get in touch with him for me. If my suspicions did turn out to be true, Mononobe would no doubt pick up on it, too.

“I don’t think Mononobe will be able to figure this out, either,” Aoyama replied, clearly and calmly.

“Oh? Why’s that?” Despite my aversion to Mononobe, I suddenly felt the need to defend him. “Mononobe’s the greatest practitioner of his generation; you ought to know that. He’s helped us out plenty of times before. Despite his insistence that he’s just some dumb yokel, his mind is incredibly sharp, and he can exorcise things without worrying about the rules the rest of us have to stick to. If anyone can see through to the truth, it’s him.”

“Somebody who just watches could never understand,” Aoyama said.

There was a sharp clinking sound. It was the teacup being set down on the table.

“Somebody who just watches…?” I parroted back his words like some kind of idiot.

Aoyama nodded.

“Yeah. That’s all he does, isn’t it? Watch.”

“But what about all the times he’s—”

“Sorry Rumi, but I really need to run. I’m short on time.” He interrupted my question before I could finish, tapping his watch.

“More work at the church?”

He gave a self-conscious little laugh.

“Sorry to leave you high and dry. I know I’m supposed to be your assistant, but when my dad asks for my help, I can’t exactly turn him down, either…”

“I know I’m no expert, but I’m not aware of any major Christian holidays around this time of year. What are you so busy with?”

“Counseling. I’ve been doing a lot at the hospital lately. My father and grandfather did the same thing back in their day, but I don’t have very much experience yet. I mostly just sit in on the addiction meetings and—”

“Does this mean you’ve decided to take over at the church after all?”

I had interrupted him again. My question came out sounding harsher than I’d intended, and I instantly regretted it. Aoyama was by no means obliged to start this agency with me and handle all the business side of things. He was a devout Christian and belonged to a family of Protestant ministers—of course he was going to follow in that tradition someday. That was the natural course for his life to take. The right path.

Most people go their whole lives without ever having to worry about supernatural issues. But everyone has times when they’re feeling low and need something to cling to. At times like that, religion plays an important role, offering emotional support and a sense of community. Aoyama’s work at the church was far more worthwhile than anything he got done with me. In my head, I knew all that, but part of me wanted him to put the agency first, for things to carry on the way they always had.

“I’m sorry.”

I was afraid to hear what he might say next.

“I still don’t know.” He replied in a quiet voice. “I think I might not be suited to the work after all.”

“That’s not true,” I said, and I meant it. “You’re a good person, Kouki Aoyama. You’re kind to everyone you meet, and even if you’re not an exorcist like your grandfather, you can make people in distress feel better just by talking to them.”

“Thanks. It means a lot to hear you say that. But…”

He got to his feet and smoothed down the hems of his well-tailored trousers. It looked like he was ready to leave at any moment.

“I’m starting to think that’s not enough.”

Aoyama began washing up the tea supplies he’d been using. He kept talking while he did it, his eyes still downcast.

“I’m sorry I disagreed with you about Mononobe. How should I put this…? I don’t have any special power like the rest of you, so maybe I get a little hung up on that stuff sometimes. He probably could give you some good advice on how best to use your abilities here. Again, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine…”

The conversation was devolving into meaningless small talk. This wasn’t what I’d meant to discuss at all.

“It’s not good to play favorites.”

I heard Toshihiko’s voice in my head. Clearly, he’d had the same suspicions I did.

“Um…”

Aoyama had already picked up his bag and was on his way out when I called out to him.

“What is it?” he asked, turning to face me with a smile. I hesitated a moment or two before answering.

“Be careful on your way back. The roads can be dangerous at night.”

3

“So, you finally decided to show, huh?”

The moment I saw Narikiyo Mononobe, I wanted to throw up. The disgust I felt was accompanied by an intense, simmering rage.

“Kinda thought you’d be bringin’ Aoyama, too, though.”

Mononobe had referred to me as “creepy” before. He’d looked into my mind without asking, seen right through to my heart of hearts, and wasn’t impressed with what he found. He said that my thinking of Aoyama like a mother—like someone who could be a mother to me—was creepy.

Someone like Mononobe could never understand. Even after losing his legs, he still maintained his altruistic nature and was loved by those around him. He had no idea what it was like to have next to no support network and feel like you were constantly on the verge of some kind of meltdown.

He didn’t understand anything—never mind my feelings, he didn’t even understand basic human emotions. That was why he could do such repulsive things with a straight face and not a hint of malice. You’re the one who’s really creepy. Once that thought occurred to me, I couldn’t stop myself.

“Really? In spite of what you said about me last time?”

I skipped the pleasantries and got right up in Mononobe’s space. The young man by his side tried to insert himself between us, but Mononobe held him back.

“What I said? What’d I say, exactly?”

He looked at me, the same maddeningly compassionate look in his eyes as always. I wished he wouldn’t look at me with such beautiful eyes. It just made me feel more and more foolish by the minute. I chose to ignore his question and keep on talking.

“You’re the one who’s really creepy. Every day, you’re thinking about how much you want to die. You talk about there being no hope. And there really isn’t for you. So what possessed you to do this?!”

Mononobe let out an exasperated sigh. In his arms, a baby wrapped in a white sheet babbled up at him.

“Is that your child? How on earth could you do something like that? You made a person just to satisfy your own ego. How very creepy.”

“Who do you think you are, talking to Mononobe like that?”

The young man raised his hand.

“Leave her be,” Mononobe said, grabbing his companion’s hand and gently lowering it. “It’s only natural you’d say that, I guess. It’s true enough that this kid’s genes came from me. But I ain’t his father. That’d just be a way of satisfyin’ my own ego, right? Pretty much anyone can see that.”

He lifted a finger and pointed straight up.

“But y’know, considerin’ I was born here, considerin’ what I am, I didn’t get a lot of choice in the matter.”

The baby on his lap reached out and grabbed his finger.

“Truth is, I kinda feel terrible for this kid. His momma, too.”

He looked down at the baby, a sad smile on his face.

“She’s doin’ everything she can to bring him up right. With my body like this, I can barely even hold him. I only go see ’em every now and then. Just seven— No, six times since the little guy was born. And somehow, he still seems happy to see me every time…”

At that point, his voice began to falter. Tears were forming in his eyes. The man next to him wore a similar expression and put a supportive hand on Mononobe’s shoulder. I was aware of an uncomfortable kind of pressure to conform. There was an unspoken implication that any normal person ought to sympathize with what the young shaman was going through.

Mononobe was born with the kind of power on par with gods and Buddhas and had a benevolent personality to match. He’d saved a great many people who’d been in dire straits throughout his life. But that selflessness had also cost him his arms and his legs, and even now, the rest of his body was being eaten away by evil forces. He probably wouldn’t live another ten years.

His family had been doing this work for generations, though, and as such, he was obliged to provide them with a successor. He had told me so himself, once before. A lineup of compatible women from our industry had been selected for him, everything decided and arranged on his behalf. I’d likened him to a stud racehorse, and he’d said I wasn’t a million miles off.

I didn’t feel much sympathy toward him now, though. More than anything, I was just confused. If he was really suffering so much that he longed for death every day, why bring a child into this world? He had to know it would suffer just as much as him, if not more. It was the destiny of any child born in his line. I felt so much anger and disdain for him.

The world wouldn’t go to hell if the Mononobe clan died out. People were more resilient than that. But he’d evidently convinced himself that this was something he needed to do. My racehorse comparison didn’t seem quite so apt anymore. He was more like a bee. A drone with no will of his own, working to benefit the hive that was the Mononobe family. Except he probably believed it was for the good of the world at large.

That was the part that disgusted me the most. That was why I called his child a way to satisfy his own ego.

“You have some nerve calling me creepy when you’re just as—”

“I never said nothin’ like that.”

Mononobe gave a quizzical tilt of his head. The deliberate gesture only incensed me more.

“Do you think you can make a fool of me because of your dialect? I looked it up. Nou ga warii, those were your exact words, weren’t they?”

“Criminy, is that why you’re goin’ off on Mononobe?”

“Knock it off, Tamotsu.”

So the young man’s name was Tamotsu. He was probably Mononobe’s carer or something. He clicked his tongue and glared at me.

“Listen up, you haughty bitch. Nou ga warii don’t mean ‘creepy.’ It means sick—Mononobe was sayin’ he felt bad. Only natural someone in his condition’d be sayin’ that, ain’t it?”

I felt a rush of blood to my head. I hadn’t understood the dialect. I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick and started resenting him over nothing.

“Hey, ain’t no need for name callin’. We cleared up the misunderstanding. ’Sall good now. Sorry fer givin’ you the wrong idea, Rumi. Gets real hard for me sometimes, not bein’ able to move around like I want to. I can see how I might’ve let a comment like that slip, and why you might’ve interpreted it that way. Probably felt like the most natural way to take it at the time.”

“Now, hold on. Who would even call a person ‘creepy’ or ‘disgusting’ anyway? That’s the kind of thing your parents oughta teach you not to do way back in kindergarten.”

“Not everyone’s the same, Tamotsu. I got a foul mouth on me, too. And you just called someone a ‘bitch’ out of nowhere. Besides, Rumi’s parents were… Well, she’s been through some stuff herself.”

I should have apologized right away, but Mononobe’s infinitely patient attitude just made me dig in my heels even more. Before I knew it, the opportunity to apologize had passed me by, and the momentum of the argument wasn’t slowing down.

“I’ve ‘been through some stuff’? Why don’t you just come right out and say it? I had a terrible upbringing. What, are you looking down on me because of that?”

“You come stormin’ in here, mad as heck, and start throwin’ insults around? Course we’re gonna look down on you. I don’t know nothing about you, but you seem like a prize fool to me. As for your upbringing, I don’t know what kinda folks your parents were, but you’re an adult now, ain’t you? If you act like trash, it’s no one’s fault but your own.”

Tamotsu fired off a string of abuse, his voice sharp enough to cut diamonds. I had nothing to fire back at him.

“Enough. You’re goin’ too far, Tamotsu. Anyway, Rumi, let’s get down to business. You came here ’cause you had somethin’ to ask, right?”

Rebuked by Mononobe, Tamotsu sulkily shut his mouth. For my part, I was still feeling ashamed of myself and couldn’t keep my voice from shaking.

“It’s about Aoyama…”

“Ah, so that’s it. I need to take the kid someplace right now. It’s not far, so you might as well come along.”

Tamotsu clicked his tongue in a show of pure contempt as he took hold of the handles of Mononobe’s wheelchair.

It was a full ten minutes before anyone spoke up again.

“People don’t come up this way so much anymore,” Mononobe commented.

From the look of things, he was right. The rustic little hut where I usually visited the young shaman couldn’t be reached by car, but it still had pathways that were somewhat maintained. It was off the beaten track, but at least there was a track. The terrain we were traveling through now was overgrown. I had to push away weeds as high as my waist and duck under low-hanging branches to make my way forward. I’d been surprised before that Mononobe could make it down the mountain so fast in his chair, but he actually seemed more at home here than on paved roads.

“Is it okay for—”

“Ain’t the kind of place someone like you would be allowed normally. Same goes for me, though.”

Tamotsu anticipated what I was going to ask and answered in the least polite way he could.

“Eh, don’t worry about it. The gods are in a good mood today.”

All of a sudden, the baby started crying. Mononobe dandled it on his knee.

“There, there, don’t you be cryin’ now, or the bad things’ll hear ya.”

I watched as Mononobe soothed the infant in a voice unlike anything I’d heard come out of him before. I felt a fresh wave of nausea. And of course, Tamotsu glared daggers at me the whole time. Feeling his gaze burning into me, I kept my eyes down and walked in silence. So long as I didn’t actually say anything, he would have no choice but to put up with me a while longer.

“Phew, I’m beat. Thanks a bunch, Tamotsu.”

Finally, we came to a stop. I’d had a feeling we were getting close to our destination. The place had an unusual feel about it. Not a bad one by any means. But there was a kind of solemn atmosphere that made one want to bow one’s head. Even the trees didn’t grow there, as if they were maintaining a respectful distance. We were in front of a hole in the living stone of the mountainside that seemed to mark the entrance to a sacred space. Mononobe put his hands together and intoned something under his breath.

“Okay, y’all wait here a sec. We’ll be back in a minute.”

Still with the baby on his lap, Mononobe and his wheelchair disappeared into the hole. The inside was pitch black, so profoundly dark that it was impossible to make anything out. I stole a sideways glance at Tamotsu, who was looking into the hole with an angry expression on his face. It wasn’t long—no more than fifteen minutes, most likely—before we once again heard the sound of wheels turning, and Mononobe came into view.

“Hoo boy, no matter how many times I do it, this always takes it out of me.”

I noticed that Mononobe’s skin looked more pale now than when he’d gone in. Tamotsu ran up to him and handed him a sports drink. The young shaman took it gratefully and drained it dry.

“Tamotsu, you take Takakiyo and head on back.”

“But…”

“Mighty sorry for the trouble, but he’s at his limit. I could keep going, but I gotta think of the kid. It’s gotta be tough on you waitin’ around doin’ nothing, too.”

The baby allowed himself to be folded into Tamotsu’s arms without the slightest whimper.

“You can come meet us again after we’re done talkin’.”

Still looking far from satisfied, Tamotsu took his leave, casting several glances back at us. Lucky for me, the baby started fussing, and he forced himself to smile and comfort it as he began trekking back along the path we’d come by.

“Okey dokey, then…”

Mononobe skillfully maneuvered his wheelchair around to face me.

“You curious about what I was doin’ just now?”

“If you want to tell me, I won’t stop you.”

“That’s how we’re doing it, huh?” he said with an exasperated smile. “Takakiyo—that’s the kid’s name, by the way—he’s… To be completely blunt, he’s got no ability whatsoever.”

“As in spiritual powers? That must have come as quite a surprise to you. Is that the sort of thing you can tell right from the moment somebody’s born? Maybe it’s only because everyone seems powerless compared to you?”

“That might be part of it, but even then, his power’s much weaker’n my mom and grandpa.”

Mononobe looked at me, his eyes their usual curious mix of colors.

“Now, if you don’t got enough of something, what d’you do?”

“Uh… Get more?”

Whatever quality that Mononobe’s son was lacking was probably the same kind of spiritual power I possessed. I wasn’t too well versed on this subject, but I had heard of special training that people could undergo to gain such powers or enhance the powers they had. Was that hole some kind of training ground where he was doing something to the boy to make him a more appropriate successor to the Mononobe clan?

“It ain’t training.”

Mononobe butted in as if he’d read my thoughts.

“There are folks out there who can train to get stronger, for sure. Don’t know too much about it, but I get the feelin’ they always had a little somethin’ in them. They just found a way to draw it out. Takakiyo ain’t like that, though. He ain’t got nothing to begin with. No amount of trainin’ or study’ll change that.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“You can’t create somethin’ from nothin’…” He turned back to look into the hole. “But equal exchange is a different matter.”

“Huh?”

“Get one, lose one; get two, lose two; get three, lose three. It’s somethin’ I heard about from some folklore professor from Tokyo—maybe you took a class with him yourself? Anyhow, he went on about the law of preservation of mass or somethin’. Lot of it went over my head.”

“Ah yes, that sounds like Professor Saitou.”

Professor Haruhiko Saitou was an authority on folkloric matters who had taught the seminars where I’d first met Aoyama. He was a little eccentric, but friendly, and a genuinely good person. Not someone Mononobe would take a dislike to. He was an earnest man, the type whom Mononobe could have talked to without any kind of reservations. I was starting to see where this was leading.

“So going into this hole allows you to gain something, but you have to give up something of equal value in return. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m glad you catch on so fast. That’s right; that’s how it works. Thing is, there’s no absolute measure of value. Some folks can get into a fancy university like Todai without ever studyin’ much. On the other hand, there’s folks who’ll never get smarter no matter how much they study. People are all built different, y’know?”

“I…see?”

“Carryin’ on that analogy, then… Damn, this is embarrassin’. Wish I’d gone with some other kinda example now. But I’m the type who’d get into Todai first try without studyin’ at all.”

“Yes, I think I can see that.”

In other words, a god that Mononobe believed in resided inside that hole, and it was able to grant requests, for a price. Mononobe acted as the mountain god’s spokesperson, although personally, he seemed more like an extension of the god’s power. That would explain why he was having trouble—from the god’s point of view, there was no point in granting requests in return for something that essentially already belonged to you.

“You’re asking the god to give power to your powerless son? That’s hardly fair to the boy.”

Mononobe nodded. That same squirming irritation came welling up in me again. When you got right down to it, Mononobe’s power was the reason for his suffering. In my case, my power was how I did my job—I’d never regretted being born with it. I wasn’t sure if I would have felt the same if my adoptive mother, Yuriko, hadn’t had similar abilities. Without her, my psychological balance would probably be in an even worse state than it was now.

“Oh, don’t worry, I ain’t done nothin’ to him. Or rather, there ain’t nothing I can do.”

His gaze drifted down to the ground.

“My li’l session just now clinched it for me. I thought this god could grant any wish, but it turns out that ain’t the case. There’s limits, even for a god. There’s some stuff that just can’t be done. Maybe I’ll try it again a couple of times just to make sure. Could be it was just this request that was rejected. You know me, I ain’t too bright, but there is one thing I’ve learned. It’s somethin’ I understood for the first time after havin’ a kid. If you can’t do somethin’ yourself, it’s okay to ask others for help.”

I still was not sure what Mononobe was getting at, and I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. He smiled a genuine, childlike smile when he saw me like that. Apologizing for doing all the talking, he continued.

“So, Rumi, does all this remind you of anythin’?”

“Huh?”

My voice came out like a hysterical shriek. The sudden change in subject had caught me off guard.

“What? I don’t know what you—”

“Lady Osara.”

My heart leapt. I’d faced all kinds of paranormal phenomena in my time, endured all kinds of terrors. But hearing that name spring from Mononobe’s lips made me feel like all hope was lost. Had I stuck my nose somewhere it didn’t belong and gotten involved with something I couldn’t handle? Was I on an inevitable path toward destruction? All of a sudden, I felt like I was stumbling down one of these steep mountain trails without even realizing it.

“What about her?”

“Aoyama asked me about her. Said he’d heard rumors about a god who could grant prayers at the cost of somethin’ of equal value. Lady Osara, Kannon, whatever you wanna call her. He wanted to know what he oughta do if somethin’ like that really did exist.”

“Why would he ask you that without telling me?”

Bitter regret and profound sadness washed over me. It was really no wonder Aoyama had chosen to rely on Mononobe rather than me. The gap between our abilities was like heaven and earth. Given the choice, anyone would opt for Mononobe. What I found unbearable was that Aoyama hadn’t told me. I remembered what he’d said to me during the Church of the Octagram case.

“Why did you do everything alone?”

At that time, I’d been looking down on him. I tried to pass it off by saying he’d become “a little too important to me.” In a way, I’d been saying there was no point keeping him in the loop since there was nothing he could do even if he knew all the details. But I didn’t want to make him sad, and from then on, I started reporting everything I could to him. We’d actually solved several cases thanks to Aoyama thinking about things from an angle I never would have come up with on my own.

I thought we were doing pretty well for ourselves. But now it turned out his excuse about being busy with church work had been a pack of lies. He said Mononobe wouldn’t be able to do anything, but he’d already been consulting with him behind my back. I never thought one of us would ever feel like they were being purposely kept out of the loop again. I certainly didn’t expect to find myself on the receiving end this time. Or that it would hurt this much.

“I figure he didn’t want to worry you. I could be wrong, though. I never really get what folks are thinkin’. That’s one area where you actually got me beat.”

Mononobe’s blunt way of speaking only made my mood sink ever lower. I somehow resisted the urge to sink to the floor and curl up into a ball.

“What did you tell him when he asked you all this?”

The right side of Mononobe’s lips curled up just a little. He raised his hand again and pointed to the hole.

“I asked him if he’d like to give it a try himself and brought him here.”

I was having trouble breathing now. But I finally realized the real source of the anger I felt toward Mononobe. It wasn’t that he’d had the conceit to bring a child into the world, or that he spoke like he was on a higher plane than me. It was the fact that he was trying to steal someone who was precious to me. That was something I could not forgive.

Several months ago, I’d asked Aoyama what he and Mononobe usually talked about. They were such different people, so I was curious about what they had in common.

“I mostly just talk about stuff that’s happened to me lately, and he listens,” Aoyama had said. But then he’d followed it up with “Not that he even needs me to tell him to know what I’ve been doing.”

That had seemed an odd thing to say, and I’d pressed him for more details. That was when he came clean and explained that Mononobe’s vision had been overlapping with his own for some time now. Not only that, but Mononobe knew about it and seemed to be sending these visions to him deliberately.

“That’s pretty creepy.”

I hadn’t been shy about speaking my mind on the matter. My feelings hadn’t changed since then. Mononobe was creepy. To me, at least. That’s why I never felt the urge to apologize for the misunderstanding—because that part was true. I still found him disgusting.

“Aoyama doesn’t belong to you.”

“Way I see it, he ain’t yours, either,” Mononobe replied with a smirk. “So, Rumi, you wanna know what kind of wish Aoyama made when he was in there?”

I ignored him and his mockingly polite attitude, and I turned to leave. If I stayed in that place much longer, I was going to end up sending Mononobe flying.

“This mean you’re gonna try and figure it all out yourself?”

Even at a distance, I could still hear Mononobe’s voice. I covered my ears and dashed down the mountain.

4

I couldn’t count on Aoyama anymore. I couldn’t get in contact with Toshihiko, either. Mononobe was a no-go, too. The office floor was littered with food wrappers, and there were so many books and discarded clothes on the desk you could no longer see the wood underneath. The place had been in a pretty sorry state since I got back from Kochi prefecture.

I felt so alone. That shouldn’t have been any problem for me. I was fine with being alone until a short while ago. Why did it feel so different now? What was wrong with me? It was ridiculous. This was supposed to be a job where I pursued my own interests, at my own pace, without relying on anyone else. When had that changed?

“I should probably clean this up.” Even talking out loud felt futile. I knew no one was going to answer.

A new case had come in today, one totally unrelated to Osara-Kannon. The clients were a married couple in their thirties. When the request came in via email, I’d asked for more details, but all I got from them was that the ghost of a woman was appearing in their room. However, the tone of their message definitely gave the impression they were at the end of their rope, so I’d invited them to the office to talk.

Even when I made an effort to clean up, all I could really do was move the mess around. But that was better than nothing. I gathered the assorted junk together in one place and covered it with a wearable blanket I’d bought a while ago and never used. It made it all too obvious that I was trying to hide something, but I didn’t really care.

Seeing the black mound of piled-up junk briefly called to mind Yuu Shiozawa and my visit to his mother’s apartment. Rikako had tried to cover up something she didn’t want other people seeing, too—namely, her son.

Women with good looks have it easy. Men just come running to help them when they’re in trouble.

I probably had more in common with Rikako than Momoko did. I had a good idea of how she must have felt when she said that.

“I wonder if we’d have been better off staying out of this,” Momoko had said to me after we returned from the Shiozawa apartment.

“I have something of a tendency to withdraw from society myself. I know I run a store and I’ve studied abroad, so you probably think it’s weird for me to say that. But I’m actually not very good at talking to people I haven’t met before. Especially women. For some reason, men tend to be nicer than women are.”

That was likely only the case for Momoko. Almost everyone was at least a little cold toward strangers, regardless of gender, but I held my tongue and mumbled some generic response instead.

“But at the hospital, it’s always the moms who bring their kids. Of course, the children each have different conditions. But since I have to interact with so many people there, I wanted to get along with the other parents, at least. We all know what it’s like to have sick children. I’ve seen them supporting and encouraging each other, and it made me wish I could have that kind of friendship, too.

“When I went to the hospital events, there were plenty of kids who Yuika got along with, but their moms and I never really clicked. I wasn’t sure what to do. That was when Yuumama started talking to me. She came up to me one day and said that it looked like we were the youngest moms there, and things just kind of grew from that point on.”

Momoko’s eyes grew misty at the memory.

“I’ve never had much contact with my old classmates or anything. Just Mr. Izumi, really. This was the first time I’d made friends with a woman my own age. I was so happy. We would go out for tea, and for the first time in a while, I had someone I could talk to about work or things other than my daughter.

“Yuumama’s ex-husband sounds like a terrible man. She left him once she started to feel like her son was in danger. She worked so hard to get qualifications for a better job, but then he came around demanding she pay back all the alimony he gave her. She’s so much more impressive than me. All I did was have a love affair that didn’t work out…”

I was feeling increasingly irritated throughout her monologue. I tuned out Momoko’s voice as she droned on, until it seemed like she was finally getting to the point.

“I think she and I both have an awful lot going on right now. The last time her husband came around demanding money, she said she probably wouldn’t be able to pay for Yuu’s carer anymore. I loaned her some money, but she seemed really guilty about it and paid it back as soon as she could. She really had herself together. I was glad to have such a nice person as my friend. I just hope she goes back to the old Yuumama eventually…”

With that final resigned statement, Momoko fell silent. She was so insensitive. Yes, that was the way I’d describe her. She hoped her friend would “go back” to the way she used to be? Didn’t she think Rikako might feel that way herself? Momoko had never considered what it was like to hate yourself. That was no doubt why she could spout nonsense like that without thinking about how irritating it might sound.

It was also rather concerning that she was willing to share her friend’s private information with a virtual stranger like me. She ought to have realized before that Rikako’s ex-husband was a subject she was better off avoiding. Rikako probably disliked the fact that she’d needed to borrow money from Momoko, too. If she really did “have herself together,” that must have been all the more embarrassing for her.

In spite of all that, here was Momoko, blithely bringing up every single hardship her friend had suffered. It was no wonder Rikako had snapped and given us an earful. Couldn’t Momoko see how condescending her attitude had been? Whatever else happened in this case, I couldn’t save her from herself. She was so clueless and devoid of ill intentions that anything I said would just make it seem like I was picking on her.

Really, it was no surprise Momoko didn’t have many female friends. This woman’s very existence caused stress and harm to those around her. The sight of a beauty like Momoko smiling her subtle, fragile-looking smile made me feel deeply exasperated.

She wasn’t doing anything wrong, of course. She was a loving mother trying her best to give her child a good upbringing. It was admirable that she could run a successful store while doing so, and that she was the type to happily lend a struggling friend money. But even so…

“Right… I hope you patch things up.”

I offered some insincere words of comfort and took my leave of Entremet Setagaya. If I’d spent another minute there, I’d have gotten worked up and said something hurtful, just like Rikako did.

“Oh, this is no good. No good at all…”

I grumbled to myself as I wiped down the coffee table, feeling the frustration welling up in my chest again. What I really needed right now was a change of pace, but with all these little things adding to my stress, it felt like I’d never get out of the slump I’d found myself in.

I lay down on the sofa—which smelled of stale cigarette smoke—with a groan but soon heard footsteps on the stairs. Two sets of them. I took two plastic bottles of iced tea out of the refrigerator and put them on the table, side by side. They’d been in there a while and were nice and cold now. There was a hesitant knock on the door. I answered it and welcomed my new clients in.

They fit the impression I’d gotten from their emails—they were a nice, albeit somewhat timid, couple. They introduced themselves as Akira and Miharu Moritake. I likewise told them my name. They both had such an apologetic attitude about them that I wasn’t sure how to treat them, and we sat down unable to dispel the awkward atmosphere between us.

Akira Moritake was a slim man who wore under-rim glasses and a suit. His wife had a more ample figure that filled out the hempen dress she was wearing. Her hair was neat, with not a strand out of place. Anybody would probably look at these two and know they were a nice, normal couple. A far cry from the paranoid occultists who often visited this agency. Seeing them in a place like this felt unnatural, somehow. Their being here was probably a sign of their desperation.

For me, this was just one case out of many, but for them, this was the only place they could go for help. I forced any thoughts of Lady Osara from my head and put on an unnatural-looking smile.

“Well, then…”

The moment I opened my mouth, Akira spoke up and cut me off.

“Our son has been acting strange.”

Miharu nodded emphatically from her seat next to her husband.

“Strange how?”

They looked at each other and nodded. Miharu began, slowly, to tell their story.

Our son, Wataru, was born with a disability. It’s called Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the eyes and ears. It’s affected his hearing badly, but he’s had surgery on his inner ears to make it better. His vision has deteriorated steadily, and he’s at the point now where he can barely see at all. He’s twelve years old. The symptoms started manifesting when he was around seven, and his vision’s gotten worse and worse since then…

It’s so hard seeing him like that. I’d gladly take his place if I could… I’m sorry, I’m getting off track, aren’t I?

According to the doctors, there’s no way to stop Wataru’s vision from deteriorating further or to restore it. But then, a few months back, he suddenly started getting better. At that time, we’d been going to the hospital attached to St. Eulalia Medical School.

We’d been to other hospitals before. They were all under the same umbrella, just different premises. The procedure on his inner ears I told you about, Eulalia referred us to the hospital where we got that done. They did treatments and training there but also gave advice on how to get financial or legal aid, and they handled all elements of care. The staff and doctors there were like family to us—I think all three of us felt that way.

You might know this already, but Eulalia is famous for its pediatrics department. There’s even a special pediatric center attached to it. There are lots of kids with different conditions there and support groups for their parents. The managing director of the university is a Catholic. He has this policy, “the sick cannot heal the sick,” or something. The place is founded on that sentiment of making sure families stay healthy and happy so they can give their kids the love and support they need.

All of this is just background; I’ll get to the point now. It all really started the day Wataru got his vision back. I had a meeting at work, so I asked my mom to take him to the hospital for me. When I finished work and got home, she was sitting in a chair, looking worried. She saw me and welcomed me home, but her smile looked awkward. I asked her if something had happened.

“Wataru…”

She called my son in, her voice no louder than the buzzing of a fly. He came running in and dashed right up to me. I was so surprised. He’d stopped running altogether once his visual constriction got past a certain point.

“Wataru!”

I wanted to say something positive, congratulate him on how well he looked. But I couldn’t. His face was streaked with tears and twisted in fear.

“Help me.”

He grabbed me and started sobbing uncontrollably. I know I’m biased, but he’s usually such a strong-hearted boy. No matter how hard things get, no matter what he hears about what the future holds for him, he’s always faced it with a smile. He’s amazing, really. I’d never seen him look like this before.

“Huh? What’s wrong? Wataru…”

I could only stand there dumbfounded. I turned to my mom for help.

“I don’t understand it, either,” she said, “After the examination was over, he said he was going to go and talk to some friends. They had their parents with them, and it was still in the hospital, so I thought it would be all right. I was chatting with the parents, and I took my eye off him for one moment… That must have been when it happened. I’m sorry.”

Then she started crying.

“If you cry, too, I won’t have any idea what’s going on.”

Wataru was clinging to me tight and not going anywhere, so I really needed Mom to finish her story. Apparently, he went to one of the reception rooms in the hospital to talk to his friends. After a while, he came rushing back to my mom and the other parents with a terrified expression on his face. She’d been surprised enough that he was running at all, but what he said next shocked her even more.

“Grandma, we can’t stay here. We have to get out!”

He started pulling on her arm and dragged her out before she could even say good-bye to anyone. She said he ran out of there. That was the only way to describe how he was acting—like he was running away. The whole journey home, he kept patting his eyes, like he was trying to wipe something away. When they got back, he curled up with a blanket over his head.

Mom seems to feel responsible for taking her eyes off Wataru, but he was in the hospital the whole time. There was only one way out of that reception room, and she probably could have seen the door from where she was sitting. There shouldn’t have been any problem. But some of the things Wataru’s said since then bother me. He’s not always coherent, so I’ve only been able to pick out bits and pieces, but it’s enough to make me worry.

“I’ve started to see weird things.”

“I know Mom and Grandma can’t see them.”

“If I have to see things like this, I’d rather not see anything at all.”

When I ask him what these “things” are, he says they’re small brown creatures with big eyes. It’s really unsettling. Obviously, something strange was going on with him, but when I suggested we go to the hospital to get him checked over, he started crying and looked like he was going to have a fit. He said he didn’t want to go back to that place no matter what.

My husband coming home didn’t change anything. Ever since then, our whole family has been on edge. When we bathe, when we sleep, it’s all the same. Then one night, I realized that the things Wataru was telling about weren’t lies or delusions, but the truth. I woke up suddenly—I checked the clock, and it was two AM. I thought I’d just woken up early and that I’d roll over and go back to sleep, but then I heard something.

“Ho-ho-ho.”

There was someone right in front of me. A small, brown person. They were small, but their eyes were big. There were lots of them, a whole swarm. They were all laughing the same weird, breathy laugh. I must have screamed, and I passed out right there and then. When I came to, Wataru was in my arms, his face wet with years.

“Mommy…”

He clung to me for comfort, but what I did next wasn’t very motherly, I’m afraid. I should have tried to calm him down or help him understand what was going on. But fear had pushed those feelings to the side.

“I can see them, too,” I said, and we both began crying.

It’s strange, I’d been so worried about Wataru’s eyes before. I’d taken him to several hospitals, and they all told me there was no way to recover or improve his vision. I blamed myself, and I’d even considered a double suicide. And then, all of a sudden, he could see again. But if he was constantly seeing things like that, maybe he really would have been better off blind. I’m ashamed of myself for thinking that.

I didn’t see the creatures again after that night, but they haven’t left Wataru alone. Despite his protests, I made him go to another doctor, but they didn’t find any particular abnormalities. His vision and hearing were recovering so well that they started to wonder if he’d ever really had Usher syndrome in the first place. We had records of his treatments and hospital visits, so it wasn’t like they could accuse us of making it up. The most they could do was recommend we go to therapy together.

I just knew there was something more going on here, though. If we left things the way they were, I felt like everything would fall apart. We needed to do something sooner rather than later. That’s when my mother came up with a strange suggestion. She said she’d been keeping it quiet until now because she thought I wouldn’t like it.

She originally came from Gatsugo, you see. The west side. There’s lots of people living there now, but in the old days, it was mostly just sparse groves and empty lots. When my mother was little, she often went to a shrine in Gatsugo to pray. She also got charms for “convalescence and recovery from disease.” I think that’s what she called it. She said they actually worked, and that she’d seen several miraculous recoveries in her time.

Now, I didn’t believe in any of this. My mother is in her seventies—her childhood was hardly ancient times. Western medicine was firmly established by then, and the country was going through its postwar economic boom period. They should have discarded those old superstitions long before then.

Ever since Wataru first got diagnosed, I’ve had my fair share of encounters with folk medicine practitioners, not to mention outright quacks and scam artists. It was always them who came to me, not the other way around. Trying to sell aromatherapy oils and weird mushrooms and who knows what else. There are a lot of desperate people out there who turn to stuff like that. I know what it’s like to want to do anything you can when a family member is sick. That’s why I can’t forgive anyone who exploits those feelings. It’s so cowardly, so immoral. I hate them.

So far as I was concerned, the shrine my mother was talking about was no different than those scammers. I think she knew I would feel that way, which was why she’d avoided bringing it up for so long.

“It’s called Osara-Kannon…”

Have you ever seen a small shrine on the roadside when you’re walking along? Osara-Kannon was something like that, not a big temple or anything. According to my mom, even her grandmother had gone there to pray back in the day.

I’ll give my mother this—she had grounds for believing in Osara-Kannon’s power. During the war, her father—my grandfather—had lost most of the fingers on his left hand, so he wasn’t able to do his job when he got back. He went around all day with a look of despair on his face. After his family started praying at Osara-Kannon every day, however, his spirits suddenly lifted.

Things then started to get better for him, and he set to work with a renewed sense of purpose and got his business back on track. I was brought up never wanting for anything. But I argued to my mother it wasn’t like Grandpa’s fingers had miraculously grown back. The most you could say was that he’d gotten a new perspective on life.

“Perspective… Isn’t that the most important thing of all?” she replied.

In a sense, I guess she was right. Sometimes there are psychological reasons behind someone’s illness, or psychosomatic symptoms that are all in their head. You could call that a matter of perspective, right? My husband is more open-minded when it comes to this kind of stuff… Or maybe I should say “practical.” He’s the one who found out about your agency, and when I told him about Osara-Kannon, he was all for going to check it out.

To make a long story short, Wataru can’t see anymore. His vision’s back to the way it was, and the things with the strange brown bodies and big eyes seem to have gone away. I’m not sure how to feel about it. I should have been happy for him when his eyesight came back, but so long as he had those things bothering him, he could never lead a normal life.

I want to do right by what Wataru wants. It’s easy for us to talk about what is or isn’t for the best, but really, I can’t bring myself to think that everything’s okay now. I’ll go further than that—I can say with confidence that this isn’t over yet. I wouldn’t have come here if the problem had been solved.

As soon as his eyes went back to how they used to be, Wataru started acting strange. He keeps breaking plates. At first I thought it was an accident, but I now know that isn’t true. He took all the plates in the house and threw them out into the garden, smashing them. I’ve told him to stop, but he won’t listen.

“I need to do this for Lady Osara.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. Please don’t get in our way.”

Those are the kind of things he says now. He won’t talk about anything else. Maybe I sound desperate to you, but more than anything, I’m exhausted. I can’t help wondering where I went wrong, if there’s any way to put things right for him.

I’m begging you, Ms. Sasaki. Please help us.

I wasn’t able to respond right away. This was like a nightmare. The hopeless problem that I’d put aside to deal with something else had forced itself back into my life. Gatsugo, the brown things with large eyes, Lady Osara, the phrase “don’t get in our way”—there was no room for doubt that the two cases were related. Perhaps now that I’d gotten close to the case, the forces behind it were being drawn to me as well.

“Um… Are you all right?” Miharu hesitantly called out to me. I snapped back to reality.

“Yes, sorry. This just reminded me of something.”

I regretted those words the moment they were out of my mouth. Miharu’s face lit up with hope.

“Do you know a way to fix it?”

“No, I’m afraid not… I’m very sorry.”

Her expressive face clouded over just as quickly as it had lit up. She mumbled an apology for getting ahead of herself. An awkward silence reigned, until I was eventually able to choke out some words.

“You’ve made your case clear to me. Thank you for that. If possible, I’d like to speak to Wataru, too.”

“Does this mean you believe us? That you can help?”

Akira was the one who spoke this time. His voice was a lot louder and more robust than his appearance suggested.

“I believe you. As for whether I can help or not…”

Tears sprang to his eyes and he grabbed my hand.

“Thank goodness! We made the right choice coming here. I’m sure it will work out now. Thank you. I’m so glad we won’t have to be tormented by this any longer…”

That was as far as he got before he gave a heavy sob and broke down in tears. If I’d been my usual self—if I’d been any kind of responsible adult, in fact—I wouldn’t have claimed I’d be able to do anything without anything to back it up. Nobody should. The morally correct, honest choice would have been to say that I didn’t know for sure yet. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell the Moritakes that.

Seeing them so worried for their child, the words just stuck in my throat. The concern they were showing was something I hadn’t experienced from my birth parents. I never got sick or injured when I was little. My constitution was actually a little more robust than the average child my age. I envied Wataru a little, for having such caring parents. I knew it was wrong of me to feel that way. I rubbed my temples hard, as if I could squeeze the ridiculous sentiment out of my brain.

“Would it be all right for me to visit your home now?”

Husband and wife nodded practically in unison.

When we got there, I met Wataru sitting on their porch. He took one glance at me and dismissed me right away.

“You’re a medium, right? You’d better leave.”

He spoke quickly and bluntly, then got to his feet. His father grabbed him by the arm and dragged him back, telling him that this was important.

“Important? I have to keep doing this—that’s what’s important. Mom, Dad, I’m sorry. Once I’m old enough to get a job, I promise I’ll replace the plates.”

He took a plate from a nearby pile and tossed it away. The smooth white disc hit the ground hard, cracking but not breaking. Wataru let out a loud sigh. I put a hand on his shoulder.

“I haven’t come to try to stop you doing that.”

Behind me, I could hear the Moritakes fretting.

“I just came here to talk. To hear what you have to say.”

Wataru furrowed his brow but didn’t say anything.

“If you don’t want to talk about why you’re doing this, that’s fine. Maybe you can just tell me about what happened before—about that time when you could see again for a while.”

His body began to tremble.

“Do you not want to think about it?”

“No… It’s scary, thinking back to that time.”

He struck me as a remarkably mature child. His face had twisted in discomfort, and his lip was quivering, but he still managed to remain calm. Asking him any more about a subject that was clearly painful for him would just be cruel. And yet…

“The truth is, there are a lot of children who are suffering just like you did.”

For the first time, Wataru turned and looked at me head on.

“What do you mean?”

“There are other sick kids who spoke to a man in black clothing and suddenly got better. But they also started acting strange afterwards, just like you.”

“Really?”

“Really. A few dozen of them, at least. They all had different conditions from you, and from each other, though.”

“When you say they started acting strange, is it like…”

“Like what?”

“Like they’re better now, but they’re not happy?”

I nodded.

“That’s right. If you ask me, their illnesses weren’t cured so much as—”

“Turned into something else.”

Surprised, I looked intently into Wataru’s face.

“I guess it really is only me who’s okay…,” he mumbled, before looking down again.

I waited a while before he raised his head again.

“I can’t tell you very much. I don’t really understand it myself.”

“That’s fine. You still understand more than me. All I want is to find a way to get you all back to normal. Please, will you help me with that?”

“Back to normal… I guess being like that really doesn’t really count as getting better.”

Wataru nodded.

“I want to speak to this lady alone.”

His parents once again fussed and fretted, but after a quick discussion between themselves, they agreed.

“All right… We’ll be right inside if you need us.”

They slid open the screen door and went in, casting worried glances behind them as they went.

The moment we were alone, Wataru launched into his first question.

“You’re one of those people who can see things, aren’t you? What’s happening to me now, and what happened to the other kids who are acting strange, it’s all because of things normal people can’t see, right?”

“It probably sounds like something a scam artist would say to you, but yes.”

“It’s okay, I believe you. You’re not trying to fool me or my family. I don’t know why, but I can tell. I think that you’ll be able to accept what I’m going to tell you.”

He took a moment to gather his thoughts and began his account.

St. Eulalia’s hospital is run by a Christian man, so there’s a lot of Bible talks and hymn singing and activities like that for the patients. A lot of the staff are Christians, too, not just the doctors. Those Christians are all really good people. They’re kind, and they only say nice things. I think that’s because they have so many other people around to encourage them. I’m grateful for that, and I prefer it to being cursed at, but there’s something about it that bothers me, too.

I kind of wonder if these people really know what it’s like to be sad. I mean, the hospital’s totally different from the outside world. And they know we’re not normal kids, so they treat us differently, too. In a way, it’s like its own little fake world, separate from the normal, real world outside. I felt a little jealous of them. It must be nice to not have to stress about everyday stuff like I did. They’re probably not all like that, and I know I’m being petty, but I can’t help feeling that way.

This isn’t what you wanted to hear about though, right? I guess I have kind of a twisted personality. That’s a problem that has nothing to do with my condition. The other kids are probably just happy to be someplace where people are nice to them.

Then there’s the counselors. The hospital has several pediatric counselors, and they show up on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Sometimes we all speak to them together, but mostly they’ll talk to kids one-on-one about anything that’s bothering them. My personality being what it is, I wasn’t really interested in that. But it was nice when everyone was talking together or when we got to go outside in a group.

Don’t ask me what this guy looked like. I couldn’t see him. But he had a gentle voice. The girls always seemed excited to see him, too, so he was probably good looking. He said that he normally worked at a church, not the hospital. He must have been a priest or a minister or something—he did dress all in black, after all.

One day, he told us about a girl he knew who’d died. He said he couldn’t do anything for her and regretted not seeing the signs earlier. Because of that, he didn’t want any more kids like her to die. Apparently, this girl had a really bad home life, and her death was even featured on the news. I’m not sure of the details. If you ask my parents, they’ll probably know.

Personally, I try to forget about that stuff as fast as I can. It’s hard, you know? Whenever a kid died at Eulalia, the staff would tell us to pray for their soul and not to forget them. They said anyone who died would be watching over us from heaven. It sounds to me like that would get old fast. When I die, I want people to forget me right away. My death will be the end of it, and my soul will just disappear. There’s no such thing as heaven or hell. At least, I want to believe there isn’t. I feel better that way.

I guess I try to forget about anyone outside my family, too. The more I remember, the more I’ll miss once my eyes and ears stop working completely, and that’ll only make it worse. That’s why I don’t remember this counselor’s name, either. Just that he was a slim man.

Sorry, I should get back on track.

This guy had a gentle voice, and I could tell he was a good person. But there was something about him that was stiff, somehow. He wasn’t like the other people at Eulalia. I don’t think anyone else noticed, and it wasn’t that he was tired or forcing himself, either, but I got the feeling that he couldn’t let go of that girl he couldn’t save. I thought he was trying to use us as a replacement for her, which kind of annoyed me.

I think it was a Sunday when it happened. Lots of people come to the hospital on Sundays, and we were always encouraged to go talk to them. This day was just like that, except they got us all together in a dark room.

“Can’t someone turn the lights on?”

No one answered, we were just told to squeeze tighter together and sit in the middle of the room.

“All of you here have things that make you sad, don’t you?”

That was a weird way to start. It actually made me really angry. Of course I had things that “made me sad,” every single day of my life. A counselor ought to know that much. But the others were all good kids, so they answered no. That annoyed me, too. Why should little kids have to act like everything’s fine when it’s not? But before I could say anything, the counselor spoke again.

“You don’t have to hide your true feelings. I know you suffer misfortune.”

I didn’t think he should be saying stuff like that. If he was trying to show that he felt sorry for us, he could’ve put it a different way. That was when I really started to dislike this guy, but weirdly, the other kids didn’t seem to feel that way about him. I got the sense that they were kind of moved by what he was saying. Of course, I don’t know for sure, that’s just the way it seemed.

“It’s okay to admit it when things are sad or painful. You can even get angry at how unreasonable it all is.”

Then there was a weird flapping noise, like a cloth had fallen to the floor. I think perhaps it was a hand coming down from somewhere in front of me. Then, just for a moment, my head felt really painful, like something was trying to force its way inside. When the pain passed, I noticed something—I could see and hear.

Have you ever thought about the sound of silence? People with normal hearing probably aren’t aware of it, but when you’re in a really quiet room, there’s this sort of hush that falls over everything. It’s probably just the breeze or the sound of the air conditioning or something, but this was the first time I’d heard those sounds. I didn’t know what to think of them at first.

I didn’t have time to stop and think because I was too scared. Because I could see them. Small, brown things that looked like dead cats, trying to squeeze into my eyes. I knew I wasn’t going crazy because the same thing was happening to the other kids. I think I screamed really loud. I felt like if I didn’t get out of there soon, those dead cat things would eat me, too.

The door wasn’t locked, so I ran, grabbed Grandma, and got the heck out of there. It was crazy how much easier I could move around now that I could see better. I should’ve been happy about that, but mostly I was just scared.

I could still feel the dead cat things inside my head, even when I got home. And I could hear this creepy sound, a kind of ho-ho-ho. I don’t know if they were laughing or if it was just more like an animal cry. It wouldn’t stop, and I went to bed with the covers over my head, hoping it would go away.

For a while, I had to fight to put up with them pretty much constantly. Whether I was awake or asleep, they were always trying to crawl inside me. Mom saw them, too, for a while. They only went away thanks to Lady Osara’s power.

Grandma took me to Osara-Kannon, and we prayed together. I’m not really religious, and I think praying to gods is a dumb idea, but at that point, I was so desperate to get rid of those things that I was willing to try anything. That same night, I saw a little girl in my dreams.

“Don’t worry, let’s do our best together,” she said.

I was so moved that I cried. Plenty of the people at Eulalia had said that kind of thing to me before. But this was different, somehow. With the people at the hospital, it felt like they were talking down to me since they didn’t have as much to worry about. But this girl seemed like she really did want to try hard to make things better. It was a good dream, the kind that made me wake up feeling happy.

The next morning, there were fewer dead cat things than before. But my vision had gotten worse. The illness I’ve got, Usher syndrome, it’s a little different from regular blindness. It causes this thing called retinitis pigmentosa, and the more it progresses, the less peripheral vision I have. It was like my field of vision had suddenly opened all the way up, and now it was closing again.

After that first day, I had the same dream every night. The girl in my dream taught me a charm. You have to throw a plate and break it. You can keep doing it again and again with more plates. She said I should do it while making a wish. My wish, obviously, was for those creepy things to go away. Every time I smashed a plate, more of them disappeared, and my vision got a little narrower. I did the same thing over and over again.

The girl looked like she was in pain, though. The dead cat things are there in my dreams, too, and they have lots of extra arms, and their eyes are big and keep spinning around. They were always clinging to the girl, but she just smiled at me and said we both had to do our best. When the last one disappeared, she turned into one of them, and I heard her voice say “Sorry,” and then that was the end of it.

Ever since then, I haven’t had that dream, and my eyes have more or less gone back to the way they were before. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I’m okay with it. Mom and Dad and the rest of my family are all nice people; I have a pretty good life. Even if I go completely deaf and blind someday, for now I’m doing whatever I can. I feel like that has to mean something.

It’s that girl I’m really worried about. Osara-Kannon or Lady Osara. She’s a nice girl. I think she must’ve taken my place, letting those things crawl into her instead. That’s why now, just like in my dreams, I’m breaking these plates. But this time, I’m wishing for her to be able to get away from those things. I don’t know if it’ll work or not, but it’s the best I can do.

I thanked Wataru for his time, but I was already thinking about something else I’d remembered—kawarake-nage, a Japanese custom where people make a wish while throwing earthenware from a great height. While there are several theories concerning its origins, one posits the tradition developed from warriors throwing their sake cups to the ground before setting out to battle. During the Edo period, it became a recreational activity for commoners and was often performed at festivals.

Evidence of the custom could be found across the country, but popular opinion had it that Tokyo’s Jingo-ji temple was where it started. It wouldn’t be odd for vestiges of the custom to still exist in this area. Could the plates that Abbot Yukimitsu was buried with in that legend also have been suffused with people’s wishes?

“Did you figure something out?”

“Oh, no… It’s just got me thinking.”

I had a lot of thoughts flying around my head. How should I respond to this boy looking up at me, so smart and open and pure? He’d shown trust in me by telling me all this. I didn’t want to lie to him. But if I told him the theory I’d come up with, it would hurt him. The more I thought about it, the less sure of myself I was, so I decided to charge ahead with an honest approach.

“Have you ever heard of a hero complex?”

“A hero complex…?”

I started to explain that this referred to people who created problems just so they could solve them, but Wataru cut me off.

“I know what it means. What are you trying to say…?”

“Try not to get mad at what I’m about to say. I’m just telling you what the most logical explanation seems to be. Lady Osara is a local tutelary god, on the verge of being forgotten. She needs a constant flow of prayers and faith in order to survive. Hardly anyone prays to her in this day and age, so she doesn’t have the power to help people anymore. But if she inserted those ‘dead cat things’ into the children and made it seem like their diseases had been miraculously cured—”

That was as far as I got before something small and hard hit me in the lower lip. It was a small plate—it fell to the ground and shattered. Wataru had clearly thrown it, intending to hit me. The object hadn’t drawn blood, but it did leave my lip throbbing in pain.

“Go away.”

His polite, measured way of speaking had vanished. His face had stiffened, and his voice was cold as ice.

“How am I not supposed to get mad at that? You don’t know anything about her!”

“I’m not trying to deny what you’ve experienced. I’m just looking at it logically—”

“Who cares about logic?! She’s doing everything she can for me. If you try to use that against her, then…!”

The boy got to his feet, presumably to lash out and start hitting me, but he lost his footing somewhere along the way and fell. I heard him sobbing as he tried to get back up. His face was full of tears, and his nose was running.

“I hate this body.”

He slammed the ground with his fist several times.

“I hate it. I can’t do anything. I can’t even hit some idiot who says mean things about that nice girl.”

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to say something comforting, but then the door opened. Miharu came running up to her son.

“What’s the matter? Did she push you?”

She glared at me.

“No!” Wataru yelled back. “I just tripped. I ran, and I tripped. I can still do that much on my own.”

He once more curled up on the floor and continued crying. Before Miharu could say anything, we heard another voice.

“Excuse me…”

In the shadows of the door stood a woman I took to be Wataru’s grandmother, beckoning me over.

“I assume you’ll be leaving now, Miss Sasaki. Allow me to see you out.”

She tugged on my sleeve. I offered a perfunctory good-bye and stepped out with the older lady, doing my best not to look at Wataru. His grandmother led me out of the Moritake house, and we walked together for a while. I simply followed in the direction she led me, not really feeling it necessary to ask where we were going. All I knew was that we were walking in the opposite direction from the nearest train station.

“Miss Sasaki, have you deduced where it is I’m taking you?” the woman asked after about five minutes.

“Well, uh, ma’am…”

“Call me Sakiko.”

“Thank you. I assume you’re taking me to Osara-Kannon, Sakiko.”

“That’s right.”

About halfway through a largely deserted residential area, she came to a stop.

“Here we are.”

It really was a tiny shrine. Had she not pointed it out, I probably would have never noticed it. The icon sitting inside was nothing like the Kannon statues you saw at Buddhist temples, either. It was more like…

“It looks like a little child, doesn’t it?” Sakiko said, as if she’d read my mind.

“In the old days, when my grandmother was still a young girl, there was a temple here. But it burned down during the war.”

She beckoned me closer to the shrine and crouched in front of it.

“She said they used to have people throw unglazed plates and make a wish.”

“And that’s why the shrine is called Osara-Kannon? Osara meaning ‘plate’ in this case? You said the temple was burned down, but didn’t that actually happen to Gatsugo-ji?”

“No, not at all. That place is a small temple but a proper one all the same. Do you know anything about its history?”

“I heard the story about the ascetic Saemon and those other stories…,” I said.

“You should understand, then. It may not look like much today, but Kannon is said to have visited the place in days gone by. It became so important that pilgrims came to it from far and wide; even people of high social rank went to pray there. This little shrine was never like that. It’s probably something the townsfolk put together. I imagine they named it after the Kannon at the other temple and added the Osara part because of the plate connection.

“I said there was a temple here before, but even that wasn’t the kind where monks lived. It was more of an imitation temple, really. An imitation temple with an imitation Kannon.”

“That’s an interesting way of describing it, considering Wataru really experienced some kind of divine intervention.”

“True enough. Wataru, my father, and many others have been saved by this imitation deity. You don’t need to be the real thing to do good, do you?”

I had no real answer to Sakiko’s question. She was quite right.

“I don’t know how long it’s been here, but it’s this small, warm presence. It’s always watching over us. And for reasons I don’t fully understand, it does amazing things once every few decades.”

“What kind of things?”

“There are some local historians who could probably show you records or give you more details. I just know of two incidents myself. One was during the Edo period. There was an embankment around here at that time, where the people used to come to watch the sunrise or hold moon viewing parties.

“One night, the moon appeared particularly large in the sky, and a great crowd of people gathered on the embankment to gaze at it. They all jostled one another for a better view, becoming more desperate and violent. Soon it was like an image of hell, everyone trampling over each other. People might easily have died in the chaos, but they all chanted hymns praising Kannon, and no one was harmed.

“The other incident occurred during the war. Once again, a great moon appeared in the sky, so bright that it lit up the night. But its pale luminescence was soon dyed red by incendiary bombs. An air raid hit, and everyone rushed into a large air-raid shelter that had been dug nearby.

“Though the shelter was large, it wasn’t big enough for everyone to fit inside. That was when the old temple burned down, with the flames even reaching as far as the shelter. But it’s said that once again, everyone joined hands and began singing Kannon’s praises, and nobody was killed.

“Tell me, what do you think of these two tales?” Sakiko asked.

I thought for a moment before answering.

“A god answering prayers and saving the mortals who believe in them is a pretty commonplace story.”

“That’s right. Completely ordinary miracles. Personally, though, I don’t think this is a god.”

“Why’s that?”

“Lady Osara’s miracles only come on nights with a big full moon. And she only saves those who sing praises in her name. I don’t think that’s what a real god would do. A god simply watches over us. Their powers are rarely employed in ways that work out so conveniently for us humans.”

“I think that might be a matter of personal opinion,” I said.

Sakiko ignored my comment and continued.

“She also only seems to appear when a large number of people are in danger. I find that quality…frightening. It’s unnatural. It seems like it could easily be abused. That’s an odd way of putting it, isn’t it? Maybe I should say ‘utilized,’ out of good intentions?

“For example, if you gathered together a lot of sick children who were going to die, what would happen then? It’s likely that a miracle would occur, and Lady Osara’s fame would spread. That’s what I find so scary. That’s probably what happened at this counseling session Wataru went to. I don’t think whoever is responsible for it thought things through. They probably think that so long as the children get well again, nothing else matters. But, really…”

Sakiko’s words caught in her throat. After pausing for a moment to take some deep breaths, she carried on.

“My father, you see, he was a barber. But he came home from the war with most of the fingers on his left hand blown off. Losing those digits wasn’t the reason he couldn’t do his job anymore, though. It was more of a psychological problem.

“A friend of his had sheltered him from an explosion, and my father watched this friend get his head blown off right in front of him. I was born late into the war and was still very young at the time. I couldn’t fully understand what my father was going through, but I could see that he was suffering. He always had such a dark look on his face. But after he prayed to Lady Osara, he became a totally different person.”

“A different person?”

That made me think of the children. The ones who had miraculously recovered but began acting strange afterward.

“In my father’s case, it was probably for the best. His work picked up again, and we lived a comfortable life. That may have just been because he adopted a more positive attitude. But for these children, like Wataru, to suddenly be cured of what were supposed to be lifelong conditions… As I said, it’s unnatural. It’s too far removed from the way the world normally works.”

“What is it you’re trying to tell me?” I asked.

“I’m not trying to tell you anything. I just want whoever is trying to make Lady Osara more powerful to stop. They need to realize how terrifying a thing they’re dealing with.”

Sakiko seemed like the type to focus on the bigger picture. I wasn’t sure whether I could sympathize with her or not. When it came down to it, this story of hers was all told through the lens of her religious views. For someone like me, who wasn’t religious, it was difficult to accept at face value. The one thing that was clear was that Sakiko didn’t agree with the way Lady Osara’s power was being used. On that point, at least, I agreed with her.

“In other words, you want me to stop them. Unfortunately, I have no idea how I’m supposed to do that.”

The old lady wasn’t listening to me. She kept talking, a somewhat dazed look in her eyes.

“It’s the sun that has the power to oppose the moon. Science says the moon only shines because it reflects the light of the sun, but I don’t think that’s right. The shining moon and the wandering sun are naturally opposed.”

“Ah yes, they’re described like that in the Manyoshu somewhere, aren’t they? Originally, the moon was thought of as something that shined down on the earth from above, while the sun was something that traveled from east to west, lighting the skies as it went. In Shinto, the greatest of the gods is the sun goddess Amaterasu, but originally—”

“That’s enough of that, thank you,” Sakiko said.

I closed my mouth a little sheepishly. I was always like this. If Aoyama wasn’t there to stop me, I’d ramble on and on about whatever came into my mind.

“The sun may be the only thing that can truly restrain the moon’s influence. Look at this.”

She passed me an old notebook. Something was written on the front, but the handwriting was so elaborate that I couldn’t read it. It must have been written a generation or two ago.

Sakiko told me to turn to a certain page, which I did. Once again, the writing was a little too fancy for me to make out. After I looked at it for a while, though, it started to become clearer. It was the lyrics to a song. The same song about Lady Osara that the children had started singing. It was all written in hiragana, but it was obviously also the same Ninth Day Memorial song the monk at Gatsugo-ji had shown me.

“It’s a song of praise.”

“So it seems. But this part…”

A section of the page on the left was missing. The cuts were straight and clean, suggesting it had intentionally been removed with scissors.

“I found this shortly after my grandmother passed away. I don’t know how long it had been used before that. But my grandmother told me all about it. When you ask Lady Osara for something, you must sing the top part of this song. If you sing the bottom part, the effects will disappear… By the time this came to me, someone had already removed the words you aren’t supposed to say.

“It was probably my grandmother who cut them out. She’d worried about my father so much—more than my mother, even. I remember it clearly to this day. Every night when the moon came out, she would stand here and sing loudly. The moment Wataru started talking about Lady Osara, I knew it had to be the same deity from the same shrine. He doesn’t seem to have noticed himself, but he sings this song in his sleep. That was why I suggested he come here to ask Lady Osara for help.”

“You knew it was the thing that was causing your grandson pain, and you went out of your way to bring him closer to it?”

“But it worked out for the best in the end. I think I made the right choice. I’ve been praying with all my heart this whole time. ‘Please, stop making Wataru suffer’—I pray for that every day. ‘I’ll gladly give you my life, just leave him alone,’ I say. It seems my prayer was finally granted.”

“In other words, she really…”

“Yes, she really removed her influence from him. But then Wataru started throwing plates, like people around here did in the past. I felt a shiver go down my spine. He said he was doing it to gather the power of prayers. Lady Osara seems to have something of a hero complex, just as you suggested.

“Her power appears to grow as the moon waxes, so I tried to shield Wataru from it. You can never really hide from the moon’s light though, and my daughter didn’t believe me when I told her we shouldn’t let him out on moonlit nights. She went to see you, a paranormal investigator of all things, but she still doesn’t believe anything she can’t see with her own eyes.”

“I can’t say I blame her. I live with this kind of phenomena every day, but even I don’t understand the mechanics of how what happens, happens. And if, say, I see someone who’s possessed by an evil spirit, I can exorcise that spirit, but because the victim could never see it to begin with, they’ll just assume it was some minor problem that went away on its own. When you can’t offer evidence, it’s all too easy for people to assume you’re trying to scam them,” I said.

“This is no scam, I’m sure of that much. I saw Lady Osara myself once, when I was a girl,” Sakiko insisted.

“You did?” I asked, waiting for her to continue.

“It’s just as Wataru told you. She appeared as a young, pretty girl. It was daytime when I saw her. I had gotten into an argument with my parents and ran out here to cry, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and saw a beautiful flower blooming in front of me. Then a girl said, ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ and disappeared. Somehow, I knew she must have been a god.”

“I see…”

Did Sakiko consider that a happy memory? She was smiling as she recounted it, but the smile soon disappeared, and her dazed expression reasserted itself.

“Lady Osara isn’t bad in and of herself. But she has become bad. I think that was the only way for her to stop herself from disappearing. Even I’d forgotten about her until all this happened. Rather shallow of me, isn’t it? A fine way to show gratitude after she saved my family.

“That’s why, I think… If you can, I’d like you to do something about it. I only faintly recall the wandering sun song from the part of the page that was cut out, but I remember enough to sing it for you. Please, won’t you use it to restore Lady Osara to her old self? She was such a sweet girl, the type to just stand and admire flowers… And now I can’t do anything for her. I’ve been coming here every single day, but I haven’t been able to change anything. I may actually have made it worse by giving her more power with my prayers. I don’t want to believe it, but both Wataru and I pray to her now, so her influence is spreading. And it’s not just us. According to your story the ill children have been singing her song, too.

“I don’t think even Lady Osara realizes what she’s doing anymore. It doesn’t really matter that she’s only an imitation. But somebody has to stop her, and I don’t have the power to do it myself.”

Sakiko took out a thick envelope from the bottom of her bag and pressed it into my hands.

“I can’t accept this. I haven’t even done anything yet,” I said.

“Consider it a request from me. One I’m willing to pay for—a consulting fee, if you will.”

I pulled my hands away, and the envelope fell to the ground. The old lady picked it up and heaved a sigh.

“Please. If there’s even the slightest possibility… This is for Wataru’s sake, of course, but it’s for hers as well.”

She looked directly into my eyes, and once again held out the envelope to me.

“Ah!”

I let out an involuntary cry. Something had been written on the white envelope in pencil: THE WANDERING SUN’S PURE LIGHT RESIDES EVEN IN THE DEPTHS OF MY MURKY HEART. When I looked up again, Sakiko’s eyes were so bleary that it looked as if she might start shedding tears at any moment.

“Please, save her. I know you won’t dismiss what Wataru and I have experienced as just some nonsense or delusions. I don’t think you’ll accept it all and tell us what we want to hear for the money, either. I get the feeling that I can really trust you. This entity, whatever she is, saved my family before. Please restore her back to her natural state.”

I took the envelope. Still looking like she was moments away from tears, Sakiko thanked me over and over again.

1

The light of the moon. I’d never thought of that before. I’d thought people under Lady Osara’s influence were simply developing affection toward the moon and praying to it. The word lunatic refers to a crazy person, but it’s derived from the Western belief that the moon can drive people to madness. Even in Japan, people with particularly spiritual outlooks have attributed certain mental and emotional damage to the moon.

Somewhere along the line, I must have intentionally detached myself from this line of thinking. It was too outdated, too dubious to be worth considering. That was rich coming from me, someone whose whole profession came across like some kind of scam.

The specialist who’d “treated” Reon Masuda had actually been onto the right approach. I couldn’t say that sealing the things into the boy’s body had been the right thing to do, but covering them up had been a solid idea.

For now, I was going to focus on helping Yuika and Lady Osara herself. I wasn’t doing this out of the goodness of my heart. It was only natural I would prioritize my own acquaintances and people who had paid me. The other children would have to wait until later. It was already starting to get dark.

“Mr. Izumi.”

“What is it?”

He’d answered the phone after a single ring, but I could tell from his voice just how deeply tired he was. He needed to hear this as soon as possible, though. Before I could start speaking, he got in ahead of me.

“Oh, right. I forgot to mention this, but there’s something I need to tell you, Rumi.”

“Me first. This is urgent. Unfortunately, as of now, I’ve still been unable to nail down the root cause of Yuika’s problem. But I do know how I need to proceed from here. I’m sorry to spring this on you when you’re so busy, but I’d like to proceed to the next stage right away.”

I sent him the design for a goumafuda talisman on my phone.

“I need you to keep Yuika in her room and paste some of these outside it. It may seem a little inhumane, but you’ll also have to wrap her up in something. Make sure it covers her head, too. You can’t let her be exposed to the light of the moon.”

“…For now, I won’t ask any questions. I’ll get right on it.”

“I’m on my way over to you now. Can we meet at your office?”

“I’m at Entremet Setagaya. Yuika’s with me. They’re about to close up for the day but I’m sure I can stall them. I’ll wait here until you arrive.”

I thanked him and hung up. Things should be all right for now. But the Moon Festival was only three days away. Though the sun hadn’t completely set yet, the moon was already visible, hanging large in the sky. Thankfully, it was cloudy enough to give me some additional cover.

It wasn’t as if I was fighting the moon itself. However, as I looked over my shoulder at it, I got the feeling that I was setting myself up against something just as large and formidable. I wasn’t too confident about my chances. I’d already failed to defeat this opponent once before. I’d definitely opened the door to my closet. But I’d passed out before I could put the thing inside.

The one thing that was different now was that I had a better idea of what Lady Osara was. I wasn’t certain yet, but I knew more than I did back then. I’d also learned that there was more to the hymn. A lot of what Sakiko had told me was mere speculation. But I needed to believe that I could do this. Faith was like a placebo effect—I’d be doomed to failure if I lost confidence before I even started.

I didn’t believe in any God or gods, but I still hurried along the street with something like a prayer in my heart. Soon enough, the familiar red sign came into view, and Izumi came running out to meet me.

“Mr. Izumi.”

“R-R-Rumi…!” he yelled. “Yuika’s been kidnapped!”

Momoko appeared from behind him. All the color had drained from her face, and her lip was trembling.

“Wh-what are we going to do? It’s all my fault…”

“No, no, Momoko, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just—”

“Enough,” I cut in, a little louder than I’d intended. “If you’ve got time to go back and forth like that, use it to tell me what happened instead.”

Izumi took a glance at Momoko before deciding to take the lead.

“It…it all happened in an instant. The cakes were sold out, and customers were starting to leave, when Yuika suddenly stood up. She’d been sitting there good as gold all day, but when she saw Momoko come out from behind the counter, she went toddling over to her.

“It was weird, though… I’d done like you said and wrapped her up in a big blanket so only her legs were sticking out. She even had one of those talismans on her head, and I’d put my jacket on top of her so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea. But despite all that, she could still see okay, or maybe she just instinctively knew how to get to her mother. At any rate, she went running over, and then the back door opened.”

At this point Momoko let out a groan.

“A young woman with a fierce look in her eyes came in. In an instant, she grabbed Yuika and fled. I tried to stop her, but I tripped, and…”

“It was Yuumama!” Momoko wailed. “Yuumama took her!”

After that, words seemed to fail her, and she babbled incoherently, tears streaming down her face. Izumi did his best to comfort her. I ignored the two of them and broke into a run.

“Hey, where are you going?!”

“I need to catch a bus. To Ms. Shiozawa’s home, of course.”

When she heard that, Momoko started running as well.

“I’ll go, too.”

Her makeup was smeared with tears and snot, and she looked haggard, but she was still beautiful. Having her with me would probably only sour Rikako’s mood further, but I didn’t have it in me to tell her to stay behind. I said nothing, just nodded.

“I’ll catch up with you later!” Izumi shouted from behind us.

We had barely boarded the bus that would take us to Rikako’s house when Momoko suddenly let out a cry and pressed the stop button.

“What are you doing? We’re not there yet…”

“I saw Yuumama!”

The street was so sparsely lit that I couldn’t see anything. When the bus stopped, Momoko barreled out of the door at full speed. Still at a loss, I hurried to catch up with her.

“Yuumama!” Momoko’s high, clear voice echoed through the dark street. A shadowy figure swayed and emerged from the blackness.

“Hey, I thought I told you not to call me that.”

It was Rikako, responding in a voice devoid of emotion. She was dragging along what looked like some sort of sack. Doubtless, Yuika was inside.

“You really piss me off, you know that? Am I just an accessory to Yuu? I told you that before, and you even said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s a little strange, isn’t it?’ But you really didn’t get it, did you? You’re so hopeless.”

“Never mind about that!” Momoko shrieked.

She dashed up to the young woman’s side and tried to yank her hand away from the sack. Rikako struggled, unwilling to release the sack, and she waved her arm around. Momoko was shoved back and lost her balance, falling onto the sidewalk. As if smelling blood, Rikako began kicking the woman while she was down. Momoko let out several choked shrieks. I rushed toward the both of them, but Rikako had already noticed me.

“Don’t come any closer.”

She brandished something shiny and held it to the sack. It was a fruit knife.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“I heard what you’re doing. He told me all about it. You’re trying to make Yuu and all the other kids go back to the way they were. Why are you being so selfish? I’m fine with things the way they are. Yuu can walk and talk like normal; he’s doing great.”

“He” told her? Did she mean the man in black, with the blonde hair and the nice face? It had to be him. But how? Why? My thoughts whirled around in a flurry of confusion, until another cry from Momoko scattered them to the wind.

“That’s not enough!” she shrieked, a frenzied look in her eyes. “That…that’s not at all enough. Walking, talking—there’s so much more to Yuu than that!”

“‘Not enough…?’ Ah-ha-ha-ha!”

Rikako opened her mouth wide as she started to leave. She still kept a tight grip on the knife, not presenting any openings I could use to disarm her.

“Guess that all seems pretty trivial to you, doesn’t it? Well, I’m different.”

Rikako got to her feet and, with the knife still biting into the sack, pushed past me. She advanced on Momoko like a beast bearing down on its prey.

“Yuu couldn’t do anything before he got better. He couldn’t move around, or talk, or sing. He couldn’t even eat on his own. You ought to know that yourself. Remember how he used to hold his crayons when he and Yuika were drawing together? Honestly, every time you or your daughter said he was good at drawing, it made me so mad. I wanted you both to drop dead!

“So, Yuika has a weak heart. So what? She still looks totally normal. She’s cute, just like you. She’ll be able to live a perfectly normal life. My boy was going to be like that forever. Stuck in a wheelchair, not being able to move his hands properly, always someone nearby to help him eat.

“I told you before, didn’t I? He got this condition while I was still pregnant, and my scumbag of an ex told me it was my fault and cut me off. He paid me alimony at first, but then he came to my place demanding I give it back. You wouldn’t believe it, would you? I was so scared, day after day; I borrowed money from my parents, my brothers, even from you. Do you even know how many times I wished I was dead?”

“I… I’m sorry…”

“Oh, don’t apologize.” Rikako glared at Momoko with bloodshot eyes and snickered. “After all, that’s just how it is. You haven’t done anything wrong. I know that. But your whole existence hurts me. I wish you and your daughter would just disappear.”

The clouds briefly parted, and our surroundings brightened. The moon. The moon hung large in the sky, shining its light down over the whole town. Rikako yanked open the sack she’d been dragging along. Yuika came spilling out, her body still covered with paper talismans. Rikako proceeded to peel them off one by one.

“Stop it!”

Momoko tried to grab at her, but the other woman kicked her in the stomach and sent her reeling.

“Urgh, so annoying! You piss me off so much! That voice of yours sounds so weak—it’s like a victim’s. Is that how you lure men in? No…not just men—it’s everyone. They all pay attention to you. No one ever spares a glance for me…”

“Personally, I think you’re much more charming.”

It was a low, pleasant voice. The kind of voice you’d never get bored of listening to. It was beautiful enough to take one’s breath away. Even at a time like this, the moon shining in the sky couldn’t hold a candle to him.

“Hey, why don’t you let her go?”

Rikako’s arm fell limp at her side, the knife clattering to the ground. At the same time, she shoved Yuika away from her. Momoko came running over and clung to her child, wrapping her arms around her so tightly, it was like she would never let go again. Rikako opened and closed her mouth before finally managing to choke out some words.

“That’s not…”

“Oh, it’s true, all right,” Toshihiko replied with a smile.

It was the kind of dangerous grin only someone whose beauty surpassed that of normal humans could pull off.

“Suffering is food for the soul. Life is so much more interesting when you explore the twisted side of it and experience the kind of pain other people don’t understand.”

Those beautiful lips of his might as well have been made to tempt unwary sinners.

“That other lady is certainly beautiful. She’s the type people can love easily. But that’s all there is to her, if you ask me. Her face isn’t much prettier than anyone else’s, not by my standards, anyway. She’s got no sense of…tension about her, shall we say? I’m much more interested in what a person’s like on the inside. You can find kind, earnest souls anywhere. I prefer people who are a little bit messed up.”

Rikako’s eyes glistened, the passion in them plain to see. Just then, I heard the sound of heavy footsteps and labored breathing. It was Izumi. Still panting, he rushed past me and went to put his arm around Momoko. Rikako’s gaze briefly shifted toward Momoko, but Toshihiko put his hands on her face and made her look at him.

“Are you listening to me?”

“I—I, well, this is so sudden…,” Rikako stammered.

“Try to listen, won’t you?”

I could see now why Lady Osara had tried to eliminate Toshihiko first. People were naturally drawn toward the beautiful. That was part of the reason why Rikako had been so jealous of Momoko. But in Toshihiko’s case, he inspired affection, maybe even faith, in anyone he chose to interact with.

There was nothing special or high-minded in the things Toshihiko said. But when he spoke to someone, his words would take on a new significance. They seemed wonderful and profound and correct. People would believe in them—believe in him. You take without giving anything in return. I wasn’t sure if I’d call that a fair description. But Lady Osara would doubtless consider Toshihiko a threat—someone who could snatch her followers from her.

“Hey, Rumi.” Izumi tapped me on the shoulder. “This is no time for you to be staring at that pretty face of his, right? This is what I wanted to tell you about before. Toshihiko met up with me after he got out of the hospital. But never mind that. Shouldn’t we do something while he’s distracting her?”

I nodded. Behind me, I could still hear Toshihiko’s lovely voice droning on like something out of a dream. He’d shown up at the right time and done what he did best. Now I had to do the same. And the thing I did best was locking harmful presences in my closet. I was confident I’d be able to do it now.

I wasn’t dealing with something all-powerful. She’d only been able to interfere with this world by drawing power from Aoyama and the children. She’d tried to take Toshihiko out of the picture, but he’d recovered and left the hospital before too much time had passed. Perhaps the faith Lady Osara had gathered had run dry, or she’d been too weak to handle keeping him sick indefinitely. She was likely almost at capacity just from controlling the children.

I dashed up the stairs to the third floor and threw open the door to the apartment. It wasn’t locked. The moment I stepped inside, my nostrils were assailed by an aldehyde-like odor so strong that it made me gag. My eyes were watering, too, but I would have to power through.

“Lady Osara…”

I called to her, but she didn’t appear. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something squirming around. It wasn’t Lady Osara—it was Yuu. He was being manipulated like a puppet. But I could feel her presence nearby.

“Lady Osara!”

Her presence was getting more and more pronounced. My whole body was tingling. That tiny thing in the tiny shrine was resisting me. My heart ached, because something so compassionate, something that had watched over humanity since ancient times, had now been twisted into something terrible. And it was humanity…it was Aoyama who’d been responsible for that.

She appeared in the form of a small child. A light shone from within her, weak and faint like the flame of a flickering candle. I had to end this, for her sake. She never needed to produce miracles. She just had to watch over us; that would have been enough.

“The wandering sun’s pure light resides even in the depths of my murky heart.”

There was a sound like a thick log being split in half, and then it was over. I opened the door to my closet and shut her inside. My cheeks were drenched with tears. I shouldn’t have had to do this. But it was the only way I had of stopping her.

I wiped my nose on my sleeve and pulled away the black blanket on the floor. Now that this stage of the case was over, I had to get Yuu to the hospital. Even if he could never be the way he was before, I was sure he and his mother would be able to move on with their lives. I wanted to believe in them.

“Thank you for that.”

It was a soft, gentle voice. And yet, for some reason, it was so unnerving that it made every hair on my body stand on end. I’d expected to find Yuu under the blanket—a weakened, paralyzed boy.

“It was so stubborn… That probably sounds rude of me, doesn’t it? But that thing really wouldn’t let up on me. I don’t know what I would have done if you weren’t here to help. Thank you for getting rid of it.”

The man sat up. My eyes met his. In that moment, I froze up.

“I didn’t actually see it. I couldn’t see what happened just now. I don’t have any kind of special abilities like you do. But I still knew. Somewhere at the very back of my mind, I can tell that thing has gone away. You made it go away. I don’t bear you any ill will. If anything, I’m grateful to you. But you’re determined to get in my way as well, aren’t you?”

Now I was sweating from every pore. I held my right hand in my left and my left in my right to keep them still. If I hadn’t done that, I’d have tried to gouge out my own eyes. It was all I could do to keep that crazed impulse in check.

“If you promise not to interfere again, I can show you paradise. It would be the best choice for you to make here. That thing wanted the same—for the children to be saved and the people to be shown paradise.”

The man raised his hand high. My muddled senses managed to discern a large hole. He had a hole in the palm of his hand.

“Your objectives and mine align, don’t you think? Yours, mine, and that thing’s, too. Please say you won’t interfere anymore. Come here—”

“Rumi!”

The door was thrown open with a clatter, and the lights flicked on. Izumi came lumbering in, and a low wail escaped from the back of his throat. “Yuu, what happened to you?” “We need to call an ambulance,” “Thank goodness he’s still alive.” I heard his words indistinctly, like they were coming from a different world.

“Sasaki!”

A beautiful voice assaulted my eardrums, calling my name. “Sasaki, get a hold of yourself.” The most beautiful busybody in all the world. “Mr. Izumi, tell them we have a woman with serious injuries. Quick!” My head felt like it was going to split open. They’d gotten inside. I shook my head. I shook it hard, but the brown things didn’t budge. “Sasaki? She’s not responding. What do I do?!”

The man from before wasn’t there now. Of course he wasn’t. His business here was done. “Sasaki!” Ho-ho-ho. “Rumi!” Ho-ho-ho. Hoooh, hoooh… Ho-ho-ho. Hoooh, hoooh… Ho-ho-ho. Ho-ho-ho. Hoooh, hoooh… Hoooh, hoooh… Ho-ho-ho. Ho-ho-ho. Hoooh, hoooh… Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho. Hoooh, hoooh, hoooh…

2

“Mononobe.”

“You caught me off guard, comin’ out here so sudden.”

“Don’t have to pretend you didn’t know.”

“What’re you so mad about?”

“I’m not. But I just know you’ve been watching me. And, well…”

“‘I’ve been watching you too,’ is that what you’re tryin’ to say?”

“…”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make fun of you or nothin’. And you’re right, I did see it comin’. Just works out that way sometimes. We understand each other pretty well, way I see it.”

“Then you also know why I’m here today?”

“Reckon it’s because—”

“No, let me say this. Even if you know already, I want you to hear it from me.”

“That so? Go right ahead, then.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong, Mononobe. But the difference between my senses and yours is just too great.”

“Oho?”

“I came here today to speak to you about God.”

“You and me believe in different gods though, right?”

“That’s true. The thing I want to talk about is closer to mine… Although it’s different from God the Father in its own way.”

“Huh… Well, go right ahead. Say what you gotta say.”

“Mononobe, have you ever heard of Osara-Kannon, or Lady Osara? It doesn’t matter if it’s not a god. Have you heard that name anywhere before? Have you exorcised anything by that name in the past?”

“Can’t say I have. I ain’t one for folklore or mythology, and it’s not like I remember every little beastie I’ve ever gotten rid of.”

“I understand. Well then, what kind of entity do you think a god is?”

“It all right if I answer in terms of my god?”

“Of course.”

“It’s like a parent.”

“…”

“You said you needed to say this yourself, but me, I’m not such a great talker. It’s easier if I show you. Might even give you the answer you’re looking for.”

“I’m sorry, it was selfish of me to want to do all the talking. I’m only here because I looked into your head without asking. I thought you’d understand.”

“Aw, it’s fine. Don’t sweat it.”

“I saw someone calling on Osara-Kannon, on Lady Osara. He was a man who… Well, he was a lot like me. He’d been hurt badly and was being consumed by his pain. He called this thing Kannon, but really it was nothing of the sort. It had big eyes. Looking at it… Or rather, being looked at by it would cause bad things to happen. It was simply borrowing that name from another god. The man didn’t seem to realize the truth, and he started to use its power…”

“Yeah, I saw all that, too. I know what you’re getting at. But what’s so bad about it, really? I looked into this myself, and it seemed like it cured a bunch of sick kids. Ain’t it a good thing if they’re all happy now?”

“Personally, I don’t think that’s what a god should be. But what you’re saying is true. That man definitely thought the same thing and kept using that thing’s power. I wouldn’t mind how the kids were cured so long as they were all right. But I don’t think what Lady Osara is doing is really making them happy.”

“Whatcha trying to say?”

“I know that this will sound disrespectful. They’re doing so much to help people, showing so much consideration, and I don’t mean to be ungrateful. I actually appreciate what they’ve done…”

“Knock it off. A real man shouldn’t be such a suck-up.”

“Just tell me what I should do. I know that this is deeply disrespectful. But is Lady Osara…?”

“Yeah, she’s right here. It’s part of my estate now, but not so long ago, just about anyone could use it. She’ll grant any wish you care to make. You wanna lose weight? Split up with your husband? Get more work? She can do all that, but it comes at a price.

“Say you make a wish to lose weight—you might catch some disease that stops you eatin’ so much. Wish to split up with your husband, and you die. You want more responsibilities at work, everyone else quits, and you gotta do everything yourself. That was how it went here for a while.

“Somewhere along the way, people figured out that if you want a wish granted right, you gotta offer something of equal value in return. We soon figured out how dangerous that could be, and we restricted access so only I could use it. Normally, it’s hidden from outsiders. Only the chronically curious would come out to the middle of nowhere lookin’ for something like this, anyway… Hey, Aoyama.”

“What is it?”

“I know what you’re tryin’ to say. You came here to ask me how to deal with somethin’ like this. How to beat somethin’ akin to a god that actually answers prayers.”

“That’s right.”

“Seein’ is believin’, as they say. Why don’t you give it a try?”

“Uh, well, I…”

“Don’t sweat it, she won’t take anythin’ from you.”

“But…”

“You’re a good person. I’m the one sayin’ it, so you know it must be true. And what I think, the gods think so, too. This god, y’see, she only takes things that folks lack. And there ain’t nothin’ you don’t have enough of. Go ahead, ask for anything. Money, women…even a person’s life.”

“…”

“Seriously, anything goes. Wish for that girlie to come back to life, and she’ll be back with us just like that.”

“Please don’t make light of me, Mononobe.”

“Just my li’l joke.”

“There are limits to what you should make jokes about.”

“You might not think it, but I feel some sense of responsibility for that. It’s weird, isn’t it? Why couldn’t any of us do anything?”

“Mononobe.”

“What’s up?”

“I don’t intend on wishing for anything.”

“For real? Even though you can get it for free?”

“Even then, I’d prefer not to.”

“There a reason for that?”

“Being granted a wish and not giving up anything in return feels wrong.”

“I guess from your God’s point of view, it’d be the devi—”

“That’s not for me to say. I know I’m repeating myself, but I know this sounds disrespectful and ungrateful. I really am sorry. There’s one other thing I need to apologize for.”

“There’s more?”

“I lied to you. I didn’t actually come here for information.”

“…That’s how it is, huh?”

“I’ll find a way to do something about Lady Osara myself. I’m sure it’ll work out.”

“So what did ya come all the way out to the sticks for?”

“To return something. I don’t need your protection anymore. I’ll be all right now, even without you watching over me.”

“Was it that much of a bother to you?”

“Of course not. You saw everything, so you should know. If anything, it saved me.”

“Then why don’cha need it anymore?”

“I don’t want to turn you into someone who only ever watches from afar.”

“I don’t get you.”

“I’m sure you understand. You’re the type to do anything and everything for the people you help. The mental connection between you and me is a sign of that. But even you can’t do everything. You’ve had defeats and failures. It’s only natural. But it always hurts you when you do fail. You find yourself wondering why you couldn’t have done more.”

“Knock it off, man. Seems like you got it wrong. I don’t—”

“You’re right, I’ve probably misunderstood. All the same, I wouldn’t want to do that to you.”

“Just go on home already.”

“Thank you for your time, Mononobe.”

“No more talk. Go on, get. I’m done with ya.”

“All right, good-bye. Take it easy, okay?”

3

I knew there was nothing left but to wait for death.

I was so happy. Aoyama and I were living together.

I messed it all up.

Aoyama comes to wake me up in the morning.

I destroyed that darling little Kannon.

“Good morning. What would you like for breakfast?”

Lady Osara, who’d watched over and protected the children since olden times…

“Today I’m in the mood for salmon, fried eggs, natto, and a great big bowl of rice! With nori on top. Oh, and French toast with lots of jam. No boiled eggs, though.”

Once something is broken, it can never go back to the way it was.

“Are you sure you can eat all that?”

Lady Osara was always there for the weak, for the sorrowful.

“It’s fine. The more I eat now, the more I can move around later.”

The tiny people with their wood-like skin sing loudly.

“Whatever you say,” Aoyama says, smiling indulgently.

I can’t hear.

I’m thin. I’m cute. Aoyama and I are a perfect match. We look natural standing side by side.

I can’t move a single muscle.

We’ll be fine living together. Everything will be fine, so long as we’re together.

I wish a doctor or nurse would get here.

“You really oughta knock that off, Rumi. Guess there’s no point in tellin’ ya, though.”

I finally realize that it’s all completely meaningless.

Mononobe is my best friend. He lives in the neighborhood and is always dropping by to see me and Aoyama.

The doctors and nurses can’t do anything.

“Mononobe, don’t be rude.”

I’m surrounded by the things.

Mononobe’s occasional bluntness is Aoyama’s only worry.

They scrunch up their mouths and laugh. Ho-ho-ho.

“Aoyama, you shouldn’t be mean to Narikiyo, either.”

No, not laughing. It’s just a feral animal cry.

“Aw, don’t sweat it,” Mononobe booms, laughing and walking across the room to his chair.

No thoughts, no will.

He crosses his legs. I catch a glimpse of thick hair when the leg of his pants hitches up.

They’re crawling inside.

“C’mon, it’s unhygienic.”

They’ve taken over my right side.

Aoyama glares at Mononobe. I wish the two of them could just get along.

The left side, too—everything except my eye.

“You could at least shave your legs before you come to call on a lady.”

Now my left eye is being taken. Hoooh, hooh… Ho-ho-ho. They peck away at me, still making those eerie noises.

Aoyama gazes tenderly at my face.

It’s all getting swallowed up. The creatures’ eyes move.

“Do you really hate unclean things that much, Rumi?”

My worries, my suffering, they’ll take them all away.

“Yeah, I haaate dirty stuff.”

They rush in, filling the empty spaces.

Aoyama smiles. I do, too.

I’m happy.

Mononobe sighs.

So very, very happy.

“You two are real close, huh?”

Happy. Together forever.

“What would you expect? I’m always by Rumi’s side.”

Love. Happy.

Aoyama answers proudly.

Happy. My life. No more problems.

“So hurry up and get rid of that unclean thing.”

So happy it feels like I’m going crazy.

“Aw, come on. Why I do gotta do whatever you say?”

Save me. Happy.

“You really do hate unclean things, huh?”

Mononobe gets up and starts tearing off his clothes. A shock runs through my body. For just one moment, he looks at me. “Wake up,” he says, short and to the point. There’s a disgusting sound, like the last squirt coming out of a mayonnaise bottle. Suddenly, I’m awake.

I tried to sort out my thoughts, but my head still hurt. It was October 8, a few minutes past ten thirty PM. My arm was held firmly in place, an IV stuck into it. The lights were off, but the room felt so bright that it hurt my eyes. Outside the window, the moon was large in the sky, almost a perfect circle. Its light clearly illuminated my surroundings. Aoyama was sitting on the corner of the bed. Visiting hours should have finished a long time ago, shouldn’t they?

“Aoyama…”

He smiled and nodded. The right half of his face was lit by the moonlight, making his eyes look white and hollow.

“Why… Just now, Mononobe was…”

“Mononobe? Oh right, he pitched in. I couldn’t do this all by myself.”

Aoyama didn’t look at me when he spoke. His usual mild smile had disappeared. I wasn’t even in his field of view anymore.

“What does this thing look like to you?” Aoyama asked, holding out something that looked like a small, mangled animal in his hand.

“I…I don’t know…”

He threw the thing to the floor, and it made a squelching sound. I became aware of an unpleasant odor. It wasn’t from the crushed whatever-it-was—this smell was coming from Aoyama.

“I’m covered in urine right now. I don’t want you to see me like this, so please keep your eyes on the ceiling, okay?”

“Why did you do that?”

“It was the only way.”

Aoyama’s voice was gentle. It was calm and didn’t betray the slightest tremor. It was the same voice he usually used when he asked me if I would like any tea.

“You’ve probably figured it out already, but it was to protect me from their gaze. Long ago in Europe, protective charms modeled on human phalli were popular for a while. They protected people from the gaze of those creatures. The things abhor the unclean, sexual organs included.”

Mononobe had taken his clothes off on purpose. He’d mentioned disliking unclean things, too. Was that a dream or reality or something in between? I didn’t know. I still couldn’t think straight. There was another squelching sound, like something being crushed or forced out of something. The unclean sounds continued to pollute the air.

“I asked you a question. Do these things look like gods to you?”

There was a loud crash as a stainless steel trashcan toppled over. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Aoyama had kicked it. I was scared. I wasn’t used to seeing him angry. He usually avoided violence as much as he could, and here he was kicking things around.

Of course he’s angry at me. I doubted him.

“I’m sorry.”

Words of meaningless apology spilled from my lips over and over and again. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—

“Of course they’re gods,” a man’s voice said, low and calm. “What is it, after all, that people consider gods? Things that surpass their understanding. Objects of awe.”

There came the steady tapping of leather shoes. The sound felt familiar. It was the same one Aoyama made when he walked along. This man looked a lot like him. His physique, the sound of his footsteps, his scent, his kindly-looking facial features. The one thing that was different was his eyes. His were green, and his pupils seemed to be dilating. His features had a Western look to them. His hair color could easily have been mistaken for Aoyama’s in the dark.

It was never Aoyama. It had been this man all along. He was the one who had done that to the children.

“Rumi, don’t look at him. You should be fine so long as you don’t meet his gaze, but just in case.”

I took Aoyama’s advice and averted my eyes.

“Did God the Father answer your prayers? Did he save anyone? I think not. He doesn’t save anyone; he only watches. But these things can and do save people and grant their fondest desires. All they want is to show us paradise. They are something truly worthy of being called a god.”

“Serina Takahashi’s mother killed herself,” Aoyama said in a quiet voice. “Serina wouldn’t stop singing hymns to Lady Osara, and it took a toll on her mother’s mental health. She used to love to hear her daughter singing. Serina’s being taken care of by her father’s side of the family now, but her father still blames her.

“Katsuya Nagatsuka’s home is covered with talismans and other fortune-telling goods. His grandmother took Lady Osara’s influence as some kind of sign from above. At her urging, his parents left the house. The only ones there now are an old lady who babbles about unseen gods and a child who continues to sing.

“Midori Tsujihara’s sister gave up on marrying the man she’d been going out with for many years. His mother said that they couldn’t cope with her little sister, the way she was. Her sister didn’t blame Midori, but she cried for days all the same.

“There’s plenty of other cases. Hikaru Kitazawa, Marin Matsumoto, Rukia Oshige, Takahiko Kashiwa, Shuichi Miwa, Sumire Koito, Marika Kiyota…”

“What’s your point?”

“I’m not done yet. I can give you details for every single case if you want. I remember them all—the names of each and every child who Lady Osara has made miserable.”

Aoyama stared fixedly at the other man.

“Knowing all that, can you still call this thing a god, Cris Sawano?”

The man called Sawano froze in place. His lip quivered, but even when he tried to speak, the words wouldn’t come to him.

“Nothing to say? In that case, let me give you a warning. You should cut all ties… Actually, that might be a little hard at this point. But you shouldn’t pray to this thing any more than—”

“Shut up!” Sawano punched the wall. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! What would you know?”

His green eyes blazed with fury. As the two men spoke, more of the things wriggled into the room; they were everywhere. Sawano reached down and picked up one of them.

“Are you such a zealot you can’t stand hearing them referred to as gods? I know about you, too, you know. I have a good idea of who you are, Kouki Aoyama. The only places in Japan that perform those ridiculous exorcisms anymore are your family’s church and a few other religious cults. Yours must be a cult, too, I suppose.”

“Say whatever you like.”

Aoyama continued to stare unblinkingly at Sawano. The room echoed with eerie laughter, Ho-ho-ho, hoooh, hoooh… For some reason, the things stayed away from Aoyama, as if he had a barrier around him.

“If a zealot like you can’t accept them as gods, then maybe I should equate them with something else. To tell you the truth, I don’t actually consider them gods, either. I don’t believe in any deities anymore. These things are…medicine. An elixir that cures any ailment. Put them in your body, and no matter who you are, you will be blessed. You will behold paradise in all its glory.”

Sawano stroked the thing tenderly. Aoyama just sighed.

“There’s no way you’ve really stopped believing in God.”

He picked up another of the things and threw it against the floor. It splattered into a liquid, which joined up again with the other things.

“It’s not like you’ve chosen to follow a different god, either. God the Father still resides in the very depths of your being, just like he does for me.”

Aoyama took another step toward Sawano, then another, slowly, steadily.

“Because your prayers weren’t answered, because you felt betrayed, you started to hate God. That’s all.”

“What kind of god won’t save the people who pray to him?”

“God the Father doesn’t exist to help people when they’re in trouble.”

I remembered what Sakiko had said. Gods’ powers were rarely employed in a way that worked out so conveniently for humans. Maybe she was right. But then, why did people pray to them? An unreligious person like me probably wouldn’t understand. But the words seemed to resonate with Sawano. His face was twisted with powerful emotion as he bit into his lip.

Aoyama continued to walk closer, the sea of brown creatures parting around him, still chittering their peculiar cries. Finally, when he was only a few inches away, he reached out and took Sawano’s hand.

“Just stop this. I don’t have any kind of power, either. But even I can see these things now. At this rate…”

“You don’t understand anything!”

Sawano spoke with a voice that seemed to rumble from underground. Aoyama took a deep breath. He cast a quick glance at me before focusing back on Sawano.

“Yurina Kikuchi.”

There was a dull sound like two bones crunching against each other, and then Aoyama was on the floor. Sawano proceeded to kick him, still waving his fist around wildly. I wanted to tell him to relent, but my body wouldn’t move; I didn’t have the power to stop him now. My insides were filled with those creatures, writhing around painfully.

“Don’t you dare say that girl’s name!” Sawano yelled.

“Yurina Kikuchi, she—”

“I said shut up!”

He was crying now. Giving himself over to his emotions, he continued to swing his limbs around, laying into Aoyama again and again.

“You don’t understand! You couldn’t understand!”

“I understand.”

Aoyama’s voice was frighteningly quiet. Even while weathering the assault of punches and kicks, he still managed to choke out the words.

“I…understand…”

1

Masaru Cristóvão Sawano was born to a prosperous family. His father was a doctor, and his mother worked for an interior design firm. His mother, an American, first visited Japan on a sightseeing tour of Shimane prefecture. Apparently, she came down with a sudden fit of nausea, and a man who happened to be passing by treated her; the two of them fell in love.

His parents both led busy lives, but his paternal grandparents often spent time with him, so he was never lonely. His grandparents on his mother’s side would also come to Japan for work, just like his mother had, so the young Sawano had a total of four grandparents to dote on him.

Both sides of the family got along. That may have been because they were all Christians. Members of the same religion don’t always see eye to eye, but Sawano’s grandparents all seemed to have similar values and managed to maintain harmony within the family.

Both sets of grandparents were regular churchgoers. From his paternal grandfather, he received a red rosary from the Vatican and a beautifully bound bible. Sawano read the Bible very often, and God and Jesus were always by his side throughout his life.

He was not only blessed by his grandparents but surrounded by other good people. Friends, lovers, they were all so nice that he believed there were very few truly bad people in the world. Even people who seemed bad at first could surely be understood if one sat down and talked to them. He truly believed this. The way he’d lived his life had taught him that was how the world worked.

After graduating from college, Sawano trained to become a psychologist and found employment as a therapist. He worked at the pediatrics department of the hospital where his grandfather was general director. Here, too, his Christian ethics led him to try and guide people whose hearts were worn down with suffering in a better direction. So far as he was concerned, children were angels.

At the hospital, he encountered evil for the first time. He had always known it existed, but he’d pretended not to see it. Bad people do bad things. That was a gross oversimplification. He could see that now that he’d spoken to children who’d been on the receiving end of such “bad things.” Evil existed in the hearts of all humans—the only real difference was how freely it could reign in each. His early beliefs—that only bad people did bad things, and that there were very few bad people in the world—had just been a way of averting his eyes from the truth. He could see that now.

He’d been wrong about the children, too. They weren’t angels. They were simply small humans. A point so obvious it was barely worth stating. At the hospital, he saw normal people suffering, being broken. This was also only natural. Not long after he started working there, he fell into a deep depression.

Abuse. Bullying. Disease. Poverty. These things had never affected Sawano prior to his employment at the hospital. Agonizingly, this made him unable to empathize with the children. How could someone who had lived such a charmed life be able to understand what they were going through? These children had been hurt and broken, and they even lashed out and hurt others themselves. Yet despite going through all that, they still possessed an inner light.

Even if he couldn’t fully understand them, perhaps he could make a change just by being there for them. He could take the warmth his family had lavished on him since the moment of his birth and the all-enveloping love of God and pass on just a little of it to the children. He stuck by them like glue.

His kindness did comfort some of the children. For instance, there was a girl who’d almost killed herself due to neglect and hadn’t spoken a word since that failed attempt; she broke her silence to tell him, “Thank you.” Sawano was grateful to God. He lived every day feeling he was both saving and being saved by the children. He finally understood what the Bible meant when it said that God resided within everyone.

He should have known that what he saw on the surface was only a fraction of what composed a person’s life, and that they might be hiding hidden depths. But he couldn’t help drifting back into his old way of thinking. Everyone could be saved, given enough time. Shortly after he started getting used to his job, he met a girl by the name of Yurina Kikuchi.

“Call me Kiku,” she’d said with a dark look in her eyes. “Don’t call me by my first name. It reminds me of bad stuff.”

Kiku was in her last year of junior high. She’d been the victim of terrible bullying that had driven her to attempt suicide. She’d jumped from the seventh floor of the apartment where she lived but had been saved by a safety net. She’d survived, albeit with severe injuries. After her physical wounds had healed, she’d been referred to the children’s psychology department. She took one look at Sawano and began to vent.

“People just let you do whatever you want, huh? I can tell. I’m so jealous, I could cry.”

He didn’t deny it. He wouldn’t allow himself to lie just to make her like him more. It was true; he’d never once been denied or ignored by anyone in his whole life.

“It’s okay, that’s just who you are. Most people are like that; the world would be a weird place otherwise.”

Kiku was an intelligent girl, for better or worse. She remembered every detail of the abuse she’d suffered and related it all to Sawano. The inciting incident had been a truly small matter. Kiku had failed to notice a popular girl waving at her, that was all. Her feathers ruffled, that girl and her followers had started ignoring Kiku. Again, a fairly small matter, at first.

“Once they decided to do that, there was no going back. Whatever I did, they ignored me. They didn’t consider me the same kind of human as them anymore.”

Kiku recounted the events with a thin smile.

“Try searching for my name.”

She told him to take out his phone and access a certain adult site. He did as she said and was horrified at what he saw.

“This is…”

“Yeah, that’s how it is.”

She was perfectly calm. It was the kind of calm that only someone who had given up on everything could muster.

“Before you ask, I sent a request to the site to delete it. I tried everything I could think of. I quit school, changed my address, and I’m even planning to change my name. What do you think? What’s the good of a life like—”

“I want you to live,” Sawano interrupted.

“Must be nice to be able to say stuff like that,” she replied, her smile still looking like it had been pasted on. “I wish I could be like that.”

He had no idea what he could do to help this girl or how to heal her heart. All the children he’d dealt with so far had at least had hope. Hope that they would recover from their illnesses, that their parents would stop beating them, that something would provide an opportunity for them to change.

Kiku had no such hope. From the moment she’d jumped, and even in the days leading up to that, she’d been ready to end her life. No number of outside factors would change the fact that it was now continuing against her wishes. Living didn’t represent hope for her anymore, just a continuation of her despair. Sawano couldn’t help her. Not because she wouldn’t listen to what he had to say, but because words wouldn’t change that she’d already come to the end of her journey.

She showed no signs of the violent tendencies abused children sometimes manifested. He wished he could dispel even a millionth of the trauma she’d suffered, but she just spent her days in a kind of listless silence.

There were two saving graces to the situation. One was that Kiku still had contact with other children. The pediatrics department primarily dealt with patients under fifteen, so Kiku was the oldest one there. Children were peculiar in that they tended to gravitate toward people older than them. Even if she didn’t do anything specific, the younger kids would naturally flock to her. And judging by the way she looked at them, she seemed to feel some affection for them, too. That was the only time when a genuine childlike gleam came to her eyes.

“I wish I could give my arms and legs and eyes and heart and organs to these kids,” she said to Sawano once.

“It’s still your body. It’s a gift from God. You should try to take care of it and use it yourself.”

“I guess it wouldn’t do any good though,” she went on, ignoring him. “My eyes aren’t great, and my body’s weak, so I doubt they would want them.”

Her words had a negative, offhand quality to them. But she clearly still cared about these sick kids. People who were truly worn down and exhausted found it hard to spare much thought for anyone else, young and old alike. The fact that Kiku retained some measure of human kindness gave him hope.

The other saving grace was her apparent interest in Sawano himself.

“You know, I really like your face,” she told him on one occasion, staring right at him. “Is it weird for a kid to like you? Do you think I’m being disrespectful or getting ahead of myself? I don’t mean this as an excuse, but when I say I like your face, I’m not really talking about your appearance. It’s more that sort of vacant expression that I like. It’s like there’s no doubt in your mind.”

“Sounds more like you’re saying I don’t have a thought in my head. That stings a little.”

“Come on, we both know you’re thinking about stuff all the time. You’re way smarter than me. But I like that dopey look all the same. I like it when you look like that.”

She laughed a hollow laugh, ho-ho-ho. The smile didn’t reach her eyes—they were empty and lifeless as gaping holes. But she was willing to talk to him more. She didn’t have any particular interest in the Bible or his personal history, she just enjoyed hearing him talk.

After several months, Kiku started going to the events Sawano held for the children. They would practice English by singing songs, learn about the Bible, or just walk around outside. Then one day, she said something that made him sit up and take notice.

“There’s that thing called manna in the Bible, right? It’s like some kind of food given to the people by God. Sort of a sweet powder? Hearing about it made me want to eat kinako mochi.”

With a great effort, he managed to hide his delight and maintain a straight face. He gave an offhand remark about liking kinako treats, too, but on the inside, he was jumping for joy. Kiku had something she wanted to do—there was hope!

When she’d first started her counseling, he asked her to write five things under the categories Things I Like, Things I Don’t Like, Things I Want to Do and Things I Don’t Want to Do. The first time, she hadn’t written anything at all. “It’s all the same to me,” she’d said. The next time he asked her to do this exercise, under Things I Don’t Want to Do, she simply wrote this.

In a lot of ways, this wasn’t a drastic change. Her dreams for the future were still minor things, like wanting to eat a certain food. But nonetheless, she now had something she wanted. Sawano immediately went to the nearest convenience store. They didn’t have any actual kinako mochi, but they had kinako mochi-flavored chocolate. He told her to keep it a secret, which had made her smile.

“So this is what it’s like to get special treatment.”

He continued to give her little presents like that, in secret. He had often been reminded that there was more than one patient at the hospital, and he knew all too well that he couldn’t be the same steadfast supporter to all of them. But that was all the more reason he wanted to do something for this girl, at the very least. He wanted her to know that this didn’t have to be the end for her. That her life could, and would, carry on.

Thanks to the attention Sawano showed her, Kiku was able to smile again. Starting with just food she liked, she gradually started to talk about novels, manga, and movies. Since there weren’t many kids her own age around, it was mostly Sawano whom she engaged in these conversations.

Kiku’s mother, a single mom often busy with work, thanked him with tears in her eyes. It seemed both she and Kiku had been convinced there was nothing left for her but death.

“I can’t talk to Mom about this stuff,” Kiku had said. “She doesn’t know anything. She just thinks it’s the regular kind of bullying anyone might go through.”

Putting her own suffering to one side so she wouldn’t bother her mother with it was just the selfless kind of thing she would do. Even so, Sawano urged Kiku to tell her mother everything. If they could talk the whole thing over, things might change.

That summer, Kiku received a clean bill of health; she was now eating three square meals a day and showing no signs of self-destructive behavior. She was like a whole new person. The light of life once more shone in her eyes, and she understood that there was more for her out there. You could see it in her face.

“Congratulations on getting discharged,” Sawano had said. Kiku smiled bashfully.

“I don’t know if I should be happy. I’d rather—on second thought, I can’t watch that My Hero Academia movie if I stay here. I guess I am happy to be leaving after all.”

Apparently, she was going to see an anime movie with her mother later to celebrate. That made her seem like any other middle school girl.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t really listen to a lot of the stuff you tried to tell me. I just liked you and liked hearing you talk. But you know what? Talking to you and the other kids here… I started to feel like there might be a God after all.”

Sawano wasn’t sure how to reply, so he stayed quiet. He hadn’t wanted to say anything that might derail this new positive attitude of hers.

“Mr. Sawano, I know I’m just a kid, and not all that cute, but… Maybe, after I turn twenty, I can come see you again? And I know it’s not very likely, but if you don’t have a girlfriend or a wife or anything by then, and I tell you I like you, will you actually take me seriously?”

Kiku looked down, her face bright red, trembling all over. He’d never seen her wear that particular expression before. He’d been seeing someone at the time, and like Kiku said, she was still just a child in his eyes. But there was no need to tell her that, especially when she’d plucked up her courage to tell him how she felt. Instead of a verbal reply, he took his red rosary out of his pocket and pressed it into Kiku’s hands.

“I will always be watching over you. I’ll always be by your side.”

“I…I can’t accept something like this. It’s too special; your grandpa gave it to you…”

“It’s fine. I’d rather it belong to someone who really needs it.”

It was such a shortsighted way of thinking. But it gave him some small sense of satisfaction in the moment. He was so foolish. He shouldn’t have given something like that away so freely. He’d thought it wouldn’t do any harm, but he was wrong. He’d gotten full of himself just because he’d been able to save one person. He’d been arrogant. He was filled with ridiculous faith and gratitude to God. But he hadn’t saved Kiku—he’d killed her. She was never coming back.

She’d died with his rosary around her neck. She hooked it around a doorknob and used it to strangle herself.

2

Sawano had been in bed with his girlfriend when Kiku died. When he saw her name on the news, he’d slammed his head into the floor, hard. He was hoping it was all just a bad dream. But the blood running down his forehead, and his lover’s tear-stained face, told him this was cold, hard reality.

He’d gone to work in a complete daze the next day to find Kiku’s mother waiting for him. She hit him. A security team soon arrived to restrain her, but even as they dragged her away, she continued to hurl abuse at him.

“This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t given her that thing!”

She was right. Kiku had even mentioned him in her suicide note.

“You used Yurina just to stroke your own ego. You’re the worst! You’re inhuman! Drop dead!”

It was all true. He might not have done it consciously, but he’d certainly exploited the girl’s feelings for him. He’d felt good, thinking she saw him as a nice guy worthy of being her first love. It was like a form of emotional masturbation. Especially considering never had any intention of returning those feelings.

Now, he’d been exposed for the shallow, immature, and hopeless individual who he really was. He wished someone would kill him. But life is rarely so simple. Just wishing for death didn’t mean someone would appear and take his life right away. And Kiku’s mother was currently suffering a pain far worse than death.

Kiku would have been better off if she’d never left the hospital. A lot of people thought that. Reports to that effect reached Sawano day after day. Why did nobody save her? What had gone wrong? Many seemed to focus on her small frame. He didn’t remember the details of what was said, nor would there be any real point in doing so. The one thing everyone seemed to agree on was that the girl had chosen death.

“I cannot forgive this.” Kiku’s mother also appeared on television several times, yelling in the street. She had a small frame similar to her daughter’s, and public opinion was, for the most part, on her side.

There were some dissenting voices, though they were in the minority. They said that Kiku had been lonely because her mother was involved in night work and that this was just the consequence of that loneliness finally catching up with her. Kiku had never spoken to her mother about her feelings because she couldn’t trust her. That was the general drift of their arguments. There wasn’t a lot of variation in what they said, but it was delivered with a surprising amount of vitriol.

At first, this formless ill will seemed like severe hatred. But it cooled off almost as quickly as it had flared up. Would it have been any better if there were no such negative comments and everyone was purely sympathetic? Kiku was already dead. Whatever people thought about the circumstances of her passing, it wasn’t going to bring her back.

Sawano quit his job at the hospital. He didn’t resign to save face; he just stopped going. He didn’t want to be there anymore. He decided to track down the horrible children who had tormented Kiku. Anything he could do to them would be trivial compared to the pain they’d inflicted on Kiku. But all the same, he wanted to do something to make them regret their actions.

Some terrible individual had already leaked the children’s names and addresses, so it wasn’t difficult for Sawano to track them down. He wasn’t a violent person by nature, but he felt like he could do anything if he gave himself over to the hatred welling up inside him. While he was devising a plan to eliminate them all one by one, he noticed something—they weren’t the guilty parties here.

There was no denying these kids were the ones who had made Kiku’s world a living hell. But they were also victims of the awful adults in their lives. Each and every one of them, without exception, came from terrible home environments. Being forced to lie about their age by their parents so they could work shady night jobs—this was the kind of thing that was totally beyond his own experience.

He’d encountered his fair share of traumatized children at the hospital, but that wasn’t what shocked him. He’d convinced himself that the kids who’d killed Kiku had been actual devils; beings who did evil because they were inherently evil. But the real world wasn’t like that. Actions had causes and effects. These kids had simply been replicating the only behavior they knew.

The only difference between the bullies and the children at the hospital was whether they turned their destructive impulses outward or inward. Their terrible home lives had denied them the nurturing kindness that would have allowed them to live pure, uncomplicated lives. That was what really made him mad. Once he realized that, he knew he would never be able to kill them.

He wandered aimlessly for days on end. He took to riding the Yamanote line. He could sit on the train all day as it went around and around in a never-ending cycle. It was always crowded and noisy, too, so he didn’t have to worry about falling asleep. He couldn’t sleep at home, either. If he slept, Kiku would appear in his dreams.

“Why didn’t you save me?”

Kiku would ask him that every time. He never answered. He wouldn’t even allow himself to tell her how much he’d wanted to save her. He knew it was just an illusion constructed by his own mind. A naive fantasy, borne of the idea that if Kiku appeared from beyond the grave and rebuked him, it might ease his guilt a little.

Those dreams were when he was the most painfully aware of his own weakness. He tried to sleep as little as possible. Things continued going like that, day after day, until his heart finally broke. He wanted to die. If he died, then he would be released from everything. Or even if he wasn’t, it would be better than living like this. He had to die. Die. Die. Die. Die…

On a night with a beautiful moon, Sawano climbed to the top of a construction site he’d spotted during the day. He was grateful now that he’d been born with a strong physical constitution. He walked easily along the unsteady metal footholds. He could fall from here and it would all be over. But that wasn’t what happened.

Upon reaching the top, he once more looked up at the sky. The moon seemed so close now. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit… He made the sign of the cross, and his legs seemed to buckle out from under him. In that moment, he felt someone grasp his shoulder strongly from behind. It was a man—a security guard.

“It’ll mean trouble for me if I let you die here,” he’d said offhandedly. His attitude was cold. He didn’t report Sawano to the police. Apparently, that would have been too much trouble, too.

He didn’t regret that he’d chosen death. What he regretted was his own shallowness—the fact he’d gazed up at the moon as if he were putting on a show for the world at large. He didn’t like the idea of dying the same way Kiku did, but it looked like if he was going to leave this world, he would have to do it in the comfort of his own home. He bought some sturdy packing string from a convenience store to help with the deed.

Once he got home, he felt like he should write some kind of note. One last message to the lover who had sent him so many messages of encouragement during this hard time, and to his beloved parents and grandparents.

The note didn’t contain any words of gratitude to them or an apology for the lack of piety he showed by doing this. He just specified how he wanted his estate to be divided up, along with requesting that his organs—if any were usable—should be donated for transplants. Above all, he stressed that this act of running from the world was his own choice, and there was nothing any of them could have done about it.

He’d heard that hanging tended to cause the victim to urinate and defecate. It might have been a meaningless gesture, but he wanted to make this as easy on the person who found him as possible. He went to the bathroom, washed himself, and changed into his newest set of clothes.

Sawano wrapped the packing string around the doorknob. After one last deep breath, he put the other end around his neck. Kiku didn’t appear this time. He no longer felt any fear. An unclean noise gurgled up from his throat, and his mouth gasped for air in vain. His vision started to get hazy…

“Your sins will be forgiven.”

Where had that voice come from? Another hallucination, offering him salvation right when he needed it? Just how naive was his subconscious? All the more reason to cut off the oxygen to his brain as soon as possible.

“You will be forgiven.”

His body seemed to float into the air…

The next thing he knew, he was on the floor. He got up and looked around. He was in his room. One end of the string was still wrapped around the doorknob, but it had snapped in the middle.

He was alive. His heart was beating. His body was warm. He had a stinging pain all around his neck. If he felt pain, he must still be alive. He’d failed to die in the same manner as Kiku. Getting to his feet, he felt a wave of nausea wash over him. He grabbed a pair of scissors from the top of his desk and shuddered.

He could see a person. There was someone standing there, in the middle of the room.

You will be forgiven.

There was that voice again.

“Go away.”

He slammed his head against the desk with all his might. It was just another hallucination conjured up by his oxygen-starved brain.

“Go away, go away, go away!”

Again and again, his head came down hard on the desk. His forehead split open, and blood began flying everywhere.

You will be forgiven.

His body felt light again. The human-like thing didn’t move. Whatever was going on here wasn’t right.

Kami. God. Theos. Adonai. Demiurge. This entity had been called many things by many people, and now it was standing right here in front of him. That was the only explanation.

Your sins will be forgiven.

“Are you God?” he asked. His voice was hoarse and dry.

Whatever it was, it didn’t answer. Sawano raised his hand to his forehead to make the sign of the cross, but his arm was yanked up by some unknown force partway through.

Pray.

The figure was looming over him, gazing at him with eyes that looked far too big.

Pray, and you will be forgiven.

“Our Father, who art in heaven…”

His mouth stiffened up, refusing to form the rest of the prayer. This presence had done nothing so far but stand there, observing him. Yet somehow, deep down in his soul, he could tell that this was not God the Father. Crossing himself or saying the Lord’s Prayer wouldn’t do him any good here. When he’d asked the thing if it was God, its eyes had moved.

I won’t just watch.

The moment it said that, memories started to surge into Sawano’s head.

Haru was just five years old. He had leukemia. All his hair fell out. He was always smiling. He died clutching his mother’s hair.

Yuu was in elementary school. She had bad kidneys, and her face always looked swollen. She hated eating flavorless udon noodles all alone. One day, she suddenly went blind. She died of pneumonia complications.

Ririka was born with a large scar on her face. She was bullied and stopped going to school. When even laser treatment failed to remove her scar, she took her own life.

Kaoru. Yuuri. Nagi. Rento. And on, and on, and on… He saw so many children die pitiful deaths, unable to offer any resistance as their lives were swept away.

I won’t just watch.

The thing’s large eyes opened.

“I’m sorry.”

Pure, honest words forced their way out of his mouth. It all made sense. God the Father never did anything but watch. Sawano wasn’t sure what the thing standing in front of him was, but it had saved his life. That wasn’t something God had ever done. He knelt down and gazed up at the being. The suicide note had disappeared from the top of his desk.

He heard a voice, a kind of ho-ho-ho noise. It looked like the thing was laughing. All of a sudden, the room was filled with that noise, and intense pain shot through him.

Understand. Take action. You, too, will see.

Still groaning with pain, he tried to pinpoint where it was coming from. It was his left hand—it had a hole in it.

You will see.

Sawano held his hand up in front of him. He could see through the hole to the other side.

“That must be…paradise,” he mumbled, and promptly passed out.

When he woke up the next morning, the first thing he noticed was the terrible smell. He felt damp and clammy below the waist. It was the smell of urine and feces. Next, he felt a pain not unlike a muscle cramp. It was coming from his neck. Crawling to the mirror to examine his reflection, he saw a violent red mark around his neck, with pieces of packing string still sticking to it.

Was it all an illusion? he wondered. Perhaps the string had simply failed to hold during his suicide attempt, and the rest was just a hallucination created by his dying brain. He’d imagined that an overwhelmingly compassionate deity had been willing to forgive him for his sins. The same went for that vision of paradise—a place where no sadness or misfortune could enter, where children smiled surrounded by gold and silver flower petals. Such a place couldn’t really exist, could it?

Sawano got to his feet, his whole body trembling. The suicide note was on his desk, right where he’d left it. He laughed derisively. Here he thought he’d abandoned God, that he didn’t believe in him anymore. Truthfully, he’d always had his doubts. He just hadn’t been able to see them for what they were back when he was happy. Now, though, he would no longer be deceived by honeyed words. There was no God. Prayer didn’t accomplish anything.

He reached for the scissors, just like he had during the hallucination…

“Ah!”

There was a large hole in his left hand. There was no blood. It didn’t hurt.

“It…wasn’t a dream?”

Nobody answered him. He just repeated his question to himself. After a while, still trembling, he hesitantly held his hand up in front of his face.

He could see them. They were there, in his room. Squirming, crowding around.

I will bring you happiness.

Sawano nodded. He knew now what he had to do. He cleaned himself up and put on some fresh clothes. He even washed the hole in his hand, just in case. He felt different, renewed, like his body had become part of something greater.

Even after everything he’d witnessed, he wasn’t ready to believe in this thing without question. There was still the possibility he’d gone crazy and was continuing to experience hallucinations. He put on a pair of gloves to hide the hole in his hand.

When he staggered back to his family home on unsteady feet, Sawano’s parents greeted him with tears in their eyes. They’d been so worried about him, they said, it was like he’d been consumed with guilt ever since Kiku’s death. It sounded like they knew he’d been planning to take his own life, too.

“It wasn’t your fault, Cris. You have to stop blaming yourself.”

They really were such good people. If he’d been like them and had encountered someone in the same position, he probably would have comforted them the same way. But he couldn’t live like that anymore.

He smiled, thanked them, and ate the bare minimum of food needed to fuel his body. He went to his old workplace and apologized for leaving without warning. He was willing to face whatever punishment they considered appropriate, including dismissal. But the director also started crying and welcomed him back with open arms. He was such a good person.

If the thing that had appeared before him really was what it claimed to be, something was bound to happen soon. Now that Sawano was back at the hospital, it was the perfect time to test its powers. The first miracle occurred even before he formally returned to work.

After apologizing to the director that first day, he spotted some elementary school kids on their way home. A rather small girl was walking along awkwardly, like her leg wasn’t quite aligned right. The other children trailed behind her, calling out hurtful remarks. This hardly seemed like innocent fun. He stepped in and told them to knock it off. The kids scattered and ran, still wearing mean-spirited smiles.

He asked the girl if she was all right, although she obviously wasn’t. Her tearstained face was contorted with fear. Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t a girl at all, but a boy. Too frightened to answer Sawano’s question or properly thank him, he simply bowed his head and hurried away. Sawano didn’t try to stop him. He just laughed.

“Ho-ho-ho.”

The very next day, the boy was walking straight as an arrow, and the bullies trailing in his wake now treated him with respect and admiration.

“Are you a god?”

He never received any kind of answer. Frankly, he didn’t need one. The thing’s actions spoke far more eloquently than words ever could. It wasn’t anything like the God that Sawano had spent his childhood believing in. This was something that would actually get involved and save children who were suffering—a true deity with powers that transcended human understanding.

After he was reinstated at the hospital, he spoke to each of the young patients one at a time. He asked about the sorrows that made their lives so hard to bear. The noble souls all denied they had any such troubles. This claim always provoked a ho-ho-ho noise. The things seemed to be reacting to the children’s suffering.

Not just one thing now, but many. They were small, with smooth, brown skin. Their eyes were so big that it was always obvious what they were looking at. They slinked up to the pitiable children and crawled into their eyes. The children who were “treated” in this way instantly became healthy again. They recovered from their maladies and began to sing—a song praising the Great Ones and the power that controlled them.

Lady Osara, where will you shine your light tonight?

He didn’t really understand what all this meant. He just watched. The things that came through the hole in his hand only entered the children, never him. He was so happy. Children who couldn’t even walk before were now able to live normal lives.

“Are you hiding something from me?”

The hospital director confronted him just a few days later. The old man’s expression was totally different from the friendly one he’d worn when welcoming him back. Naturally, Sawano acted like he had no idea what he was talking about. The director answered coldly, warning him not to get up to “any shady stuff” at the hospital. There had been complaints that the children he’d spoken to had started acting strange. Sawano wasn’t worried—there was no proof that he was responsible, was there?

“According to young Moritake, this all started after you gathered the children in a room together.”

Moritake was partially sighted—almost blind, really. The things worked their miracles by entering through the eyes, so apparently, they hadn’t affected him. How sad that he was going to be denied the opportunity to see paradise. Everyone had a right to be happy.

He paid no attention to the director’s warning. In the end, Sawano left the hospital without formally resigning. He’d already made most of the children who went there happy, after all. Back at his apartment, he removed his gloves.

“Can’t we do anything for children who can’t see?” he asked the hole in his hand. The answer he got was the same as always.

The answer was the same as always.

If everyone prays, they will be saved.

It spoke to him in his dreams. If lots of people prayed to the moon, they would all be able to see paradise. That probably meant he hadn’t done enough yet. His god needed more faith.

Christianity was known as one of the world’s three major religions. It had no shortage of believers. Having been raised in that kind of environment, Sawano had never thought about how different things were for religions with fewer adherents. But he was starting to. From a deity’s point of view, having fewer followers probably meant less power. That was why he needed this Ninth Day Memorial or Moon Festival or whatever. That was what would allow even the blind to see paradise. Everyone would be happy. The children would no longer have to suffer cruel fates.

After some more research, he discovered the Moon Festival was a fairly insignificant affair. It was only held at a small temple called Gatsugo-ji and was akin to regular moon-viewing events. It wouldn’t draw nearly enough of a crowd for what he needed to do. Where did that leave him?

Once someone had those things inside them, they would be happy and enthusiastic about helping him. But they weren’t able to enter just anyone. The creatures had failed to convert the boy with the poor eyesight, and they hadn’t done anything to the director, despite him having perfect vision. Sawano tested the things out on several people before he started to understand how the process worked.

The person’s state of mind seemed to be the key. The things could only enter the unstable, the weak. It made perfect sense once you thought about it. They’d been drawn toward sick children before, so they could help them. It was only natural they wouldn’t have the same compatibility with strong, emotionally resilient people. The monk at Gatsugo-ji Temple hadn’t been all that old, but he had a lean figure that exuded an air of fragility. They couldn’t take complete control of him, but they got in all the same.

Naturally, the reason Sawano had chosen Gatsugo-ji was because of the words that had flowed into his mind. It was actually quite convenient there was already a moon-based festival here. That made it all the easier for him to co-opt it for his own purposes.

He was starting to understand what was going on now. He wasn’t dealing with the Osara-Kannon spoken of in Gatsugo-ji’s history. Its appearance was different from what was described there, and it lacked any kind of aura of divinity. The way it moved suggested it was more animal than god. Its repeated assurances about being forgiven sounded like it was just parroting back words it had heard somewhere else.

The small brown things were like machines. They served one function and nothing else—healing the children. But really, that worked out better for him. He wasn’t interested in unpredictable miracles or a promise of paradise after death. It was results that mattered to him. Namely, making the children happy.

There was nothing to feel guilty about. He was simply adapting a preexisting local deity to spread his own faith. Many other religions had done the same throughout history, Christianity included. Even here in Japan, earlier systems of faith had been adapted into what was now Shinto. There was a danger of absorbing the deity’s power and allowing it to turn him into something else. He wouldn’t go that far. He’d just be borrowing the power. Whether this thing was really a god or not, the incredible power that faith endowed it with was the real deal.

For now, he just had to gather as many people as possible on the day of the Ninth Day Memorial. Using the resident monk and some young so-called influencers, word spread at a frightening rate. During that time, Sawano also visited different places around the city, cementing the things’ influence. For the most part, he concentrated on children.

3

He first became aware that someone was watching him during a visit to Moriya Children’s Hospital. Was being watched a bad thing? He couldn’t say for certain. But he had to be aware that whoever it was might try to interfere with his plan at some point.

The parents of one of the children he’d healed had probably hired this person, this presence. Once modern medicine failed, hoping for a supernatural solution was the next best thing. He understood where they were coming from; he’d gone through a similar emotional process himself.

But Sawano was confident. It was too late now. Even if someone noticed something unnatural about his actions, or tried to get in his way, or even killed him, this could no longer be stopped. The Ninth Day Memorial would be held, Lady Osara would appear, and the people would see paradise. All that was left was to wait for it to happen.

Once the things were removed from the monk at Gatsugo-ji, he couldn’t just sit by quietly anymore. Out of the plump, androgynous woman and the chillingly beautiful man, he opted to eliminate the man first. The things had judged that he was the more dangerous of the two. Evil things always adopted a beautiful form, after all.

Even after that, the woman kept investigating. Sawano kept an eye on her, but there was nothing to worry about—she was on the totally wrong track. There was no indication that she was aware of him, either. But he still couldn’t shake off that unpleasant sensation that someone’s eyes were on him.

All he’d been able to ascertain for sure was that the woman possessed some kind of special power. During his surveillance of her, he finally realized the identity of the gaze that was on him. It was a man, a minister. Sawano had seen an interview with him in a medical magazine that had happened to be left out at the hospital.

Kouki Aoyama. His great-grandfather was an Irish missionary who had come to Japan and built a church in Chūō City. This Aoyama must be the fourth generation in that line. One of his church’s main claims to fame was that it was a Protestant church that performed exorcisms, which were usually the province of Catholicism. That should have been considered an act of blasphemy, but for some reason the church had integrated itself into the local community. Even other churches seemed to accept that it had its own way of doing things.

There’s one passage in the Bible that has stuck with me more than any other. It’s from Matthew 25:40. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” These days, medical science has taken the lead when it comes to caring for the sick. But I think this is a good reminder that religion still has a part to play. We shouldn’t view patients as poor, unfortunate souls to be pitied. We have to showthem the same respect and dignity as we would to God Himself. I think of that approach as a kind of God-given mission.

At the head of the article was a photo of Aoyama, smiling in a way that proclaimed him to be a good person. He was a lot like Sawano. Not in ideology, of course, more their personal backgrounds. Aoyama was also a born-and-raised Christian who stood out in Japanese society because of his Caucasian heritage. Of course, he’d taken it one step further, actually working as a minister and helping run a church that did exorcisms—a rarity anywhere in the world, not just in Japan.

Whenever he saw that peculiar woman, Aoyama was by her side. Around the same time Sawano noticed him, he seemed to notice Sawano, too. Maddeningly, though, Aoyama never did anything about it. Perhaps he was just waiting to see what Sawano would do next. He did nothing but watch. It was infuriating.

The other man’s attitude must be rooted in the Christian—or rather, Protestant—values he’d grown up with. A famous Protestant text said “A Christian is lord of all, completely free of everything. A Christian is a servant, completely attentive to the needs of all.” It was largely taken to mean that while Christians all share the same purpose under God, each individual also maintains a sense of independence and free will. It didn’t explicitly forbid going against God’s will. That was what all Christians thought on the inside, though. They thought they were always in the right. Damned hypocrites.

Sawano’s anger burned ever brighter. He threw himself into getting everything ready for the Ninth Day Memorial ceremony. He served a different god now. The anger he felt wasn’t because Aoyama was a follower of the old god that he’d discarded. It was directed at the man himself. He couldn’t abide the way the other man seemed to be watching over him, respecting his viewpoint, all the while believing that it was he, Aoyama, who was in the right. Just how far was he going to carry this “good person” act?

He was going to make that woman disappear. If he did that, if Aoyama lost something precious to him, he’d start to understand Sawano’s anger toward the world. And the woman just so happened to collapse around the same time he arrived at this decision. More accurately, she foolishly erased the real actual deity that had been protecting the town. That had allowed one of the things to get inside her.

Even then, her companion had not intervened. He was surely watching, though. If you want to see it that badly, I’ll show you, Sawano had thought. I’ll show you what it’s like to stand by, powerless, as someone important to you slips away.

It was easy enough to get into the hospital. Most of the people there had been converted into his followers, after all. Sawano had long since lost sight of his true objective. Perhaps he never really knew what it was to begin with. His thoughts were so muddled it felt like his mind might break at any moment. But even in the midst of that mental turmoil, one coherent thought remained. He wished that he could see that girl again.

4

Sawano brought his fist down hard. Aoyama took the blow. His eyes were swollen, blood trickling from his mouth.

“Yurina Kikuchi died. She hanged herself, and she died. Her death was the result of all the troubles and sorrows in her life becoming too much to bear.”

Aoyama stumbled to his knees and wrapped his arms around Sawano’s legs.

“That includes you. Her feelings for you were one of the sorrows that crushed her.”

Sawano snarled and roared like a wild beast. For once, I could understand how he felt. That had been a terrible thing to say. Aoyama didn’t back down, maintaining steady eye contact even as the other man continued to beat him mercilessly.

I recognized the name Yurina Kikuchi. She was a girl who’d killed herself about a year ago. It was only after her death that the truth of the horrible bullying she’d endured was brought to light.

I knew what it was like to be bullied—I’d experienced more than my fair share of it when I was young. I was ugly, I lived in an orphanage, I was gloomy and didn’t fit in with the crowd. Little things like that made me a target. I was subjected to both physical and mental abuse on a daily basis.

Then one day, the ringleader—a girl from my class named Kanae Hashiguchi—killed one of the school rabbits and forced bits of the body into my mouth. I wished that Hashiguchi would die, and shortly afterwards she was impaled by a sign that seemed to have come flying out of nowhere. That was when I realized the truth about my powers.

Yurina Kikuchi’s case had been reported on the news several days running. That had made the memories of the despair and humiliation I’d suffered become fresh in my mind again. Although, the pain this girl had suffered was likely several times worse than mine. It was no wonder she’d chosen to die rather than live like that. I might have gone that route myself if I hadn’t killed Hashiguchi first.

Further details about what she’d been through were shared on online forums and social media. This went much farther than anything that appeared on the news, describing a variety of incidents in grisly detail. It was hard to believe anyone could be capable of such things, let alone children. But pictures and videos shared by the perpetrators—things that called to mind my own hellish childhood—made the reality of it painfully clear.

Sawano had clearly been very close with Kikuchi. You just had to look at him to know. Here was a man who had lost someone dear to him, powerless to save her. That remark must really have stung. He didn’t need Aoyama to tell him he was responsible for the girl’s death. Sawano doubtless knew that better than anyone.

He’d probably run countless simulations in his head, thinking about what he could have done differently, before the truth finally dawned on him. Once a person is dead, no amount of “what ifs” could bring them back. Kikuchi was gone forever, and he was one of the factors that had caused that.

“God wouldn’t save her!” he screamed. “Not when she was suffering in silence, not afterwards. He did nothing for her!”

Sawano struggled to get free, still raving, spittle flying everywhere.

“God did nothing! No matter how we suffer, all he does is watch. That’s why I turned to these things instead! These are what will show us para—”

“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,” Aoyama answered in a quiet voice, grabbing the man’s wrist and bringing it down level with his own chest. “Please, remember. God is always watching over you.”

“You’re quoting the Bible at me now? What’s the good of that? The Bible’s words never made anyone happy. The same goes for God. He doesn’t help, he doesn’t answer prayers, he doesn’t serve any useful purpose!”

“God is there when his people are suffering.”

“Was he with that girl, too? Then why did she die?”

“Evil is drawn to people who are suffering.”

Aoyama continued to cling to Sawano, entreating him.

“Please, just listen to me. Try to really think about what it means for those things to show you paradise. You’re still capable of rational thought, aren’t you?”

“This is where my thoughts have led me.”

Sawano stopped squirming and moved his arm toward Aoyama’s face, preparing to show him his hand.

“Why don’t you listen to me instead? Look. Look at what’s on the other side. On that side, these things will be able to bring us happiness.”

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you get what ‘seeing paradise’ really means?”

“Oh, I know,” Sawano answered in a singsong voice. “I think that… Well, not that it matters. The children will be happy; that’s the important thing. That’s good enough for me.”

I couldn’t make out all of what he said, but when Aoyama heard his reply, he took his hands off Sawano and stood up. Then he slowly turned around to face me. He really did look awful. His face was cut and swollen in several places. Even in the dim light I could clearly make out how much he was bleeding. His jaw was clenched, and he was crying. His eyes stayed open, but big, heavy tears fell from them.

“Rumi.” He called out to me, his voice hoarse and erratic. I trembled all over and heard a handful of wordless groans escape from my throat.

“It’s a pity, isn’t it? Sometimes, it’s just not possible for everyone to understand each other and get along peacefully.”

“I let you down. I didn’t trust you… I’m sorry.”

Hearing him choke out his words so pitifully, the only thing I could think to do was apologize.

“Why do you look so sad…?” The light of the moon glinted in the tears forming in his gray eyes. “Is it because you understand how he feels? The truth is, I—”

“Stand aside.”

Suddenly, Sawano was standing behind Aoyama. He was brandishing his hand at us—the hand with the hole.

“Are you going to try to kill us now?” Aoyama sobbed.

“No. No, I won’t kill you. But I might turn into something else, and that might result in your deaths. But this is how it must be. Just as you said, you and I will never see eye to eye.”

Aoyama spun around and tackled Sawano. He might have had more strength left in him than either of us thought, or maybe he’d just taken the other man by surprise. He knocked Sawano off balance and slammed him into the wall. He once again turned to face me.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I’m prepared to do what I have to.”

He held out his hand to me.

“Rumi, are you ready to do this?”

“I…don’t know…”

Hearing my timid reply, his eyes started to well up again, and a single tear slid down his cheek.

“…But I want to do everything I possibly can, for you.”

Those were my pure, unfiltered feelings. I realized I really had started thinking of Aoyama as a mother, or something like one. I wanted to feel that he cared for me, too, but it didn’t really matter in what way. In that moment, all I wanted was to do whatever I could for him. I might never have realized all this if I hadn’t been pushed to my limit like I was then. His eyes lit up.

My nostrils were assaulted by a terrible odor as he sat down next to me.

“I can’t do anything. Not in the same way you or Mononobe can.”

His face, so smeared with blood and tears, was inches away from mine. It was a grisly sight, but I didn’t feel even a hint of revulsion.

“I was able to find out that thing’s name, though. I really didn’t want to do this, but it looks like he’s not going to back down, so…”

Sawano staggered up from the wall and back onto his feet, raising his hand and looking in our direction. I heard the ho-ho-ho voice, and all at once the entire wall was covered with the creepy brown things.

“Tell me,” I said. Even at a time like this, he was still being his same old kind self. But he’d said he was prepared to do this.

Aoyama must have noticed how it worked. I’d never talked about my past with him. He didn’t know about my closet. But he must have picked up on how knowing a thing’s name allowed me to grasp its true nature and seal it away. His lips brushed my ear ever so slightly. He spoke the thing’s name, quietly so only I could hear it. I repeated it out loud. Sawano screamed at me to stop, but it was too late.

“Come on in.”

I opened my closet.

In a single moment, it was all over.

That’s the only way I have to describe it. The very second I spoke the thing’s name and opened the door, all of them were instantly sucked inside. Once I closed the door again, there was nothing left in that room with us. I no longer felt that unpleasant buildup of pressure in my head, either. I had the sudden urge to say something. It felt like my mouth would still move properly if I tried. I turned to Aoyama, when…

“Are you satisfied now?”

It wasn’t a loud voice, but it carried in the newfound quiet of that room. Sawano was on his knees. His left hand still had a hole in it, but the only thing any of us could see through it was the floor on the other side.

“Are you proud of yourself?”

The ends of his fingers had gone red. He was pressing them into the floor so hard it looked like the ground was biting into him.

“Tomorrow, those children will have to go back to their miserable lives. They’ll spend their days stumbling toward some vague endpoint that may not even exist, inevitably stumbling and dying before achieving anything. Is this what you wanted? Was this God’s will?”

“I told you before, I know how you feel. You and I are a lot alike. I even know what you’re thinking right now. You’re desperately trying to make us feel guilty. You’re trying to make us believe that we were in the wrong. That if we hadn’t gotten rid of those things, everyone would have been happy.”

“It’s the truth! You’re all a bunch of egotists. Just because something isn’t a god, you label it as evil and destroy it. Was it so unnatural for those children to recover from their illnesses? Was it such a bad thing to defy logic, to go against God’s will? Was that enough of a reason to abandon those poor children to die?”

“We’re not abandoning them.” Aoyama spoke while looking steadily into Sawano’s eyes.

The two of them really were alike. Large, round, light-colored eyes. High nose. Partial Caucasian heritage, obvious at first glance. And you could see in their faces that they had both been deeply hurt in the past.

“This kind of thing will keep happening. It will happen again, and again, and again. People will be hurt, and suffer, and die. You can’t save them all.”

Sawano slapped Aoyama in the face. What with the hole in his palm, the noise it made didn’t quite sound right.

“How admirable that you can say all that with a straight face. What a very devout believer you are!”

“You need to strengthen your resolve,” Aoyama replied, a stream of blood dribbling out of his mouth. “Resolve to accept what happens and not avert your eyes from the truth. Treasure the things and people you hold dear. That’s something that even powerless humans like us can do.”

Sawano glared at him for a while, then looked away in a hopeless, resigned fashion.

“Speaking to a walking platitude like you won’t get me anywhere. It’s just a waste of my time.”

“Wait.”

Aoyama grasped Sawano’s shoulder. The other man batted it away. Undeterred, Aoyama once more extended a hand toward him.

“You can’t try to do something like this again. You can’t take back your wish. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you from here, but…I really am worried about you. I’m serious. Please, don’t even try it.”

“Of course I’m going to do it again.”

Sawano wouldn’t look at us, but his voice was steady, no trace of hesitation.

“I still have my hand. I don’t know how all this works, but that woman only erased part of the thing just now. There’s plenty left where that came from.”

I’d had a suspicion that might be the case. I’d definitely removed all of those repulsive things that were in this room with us. But it felt like the source they all stemmed from still remained. When I caught sight of the moon outside the window, a sense of anxiety I couldn’t explain welled up in me. This wasn’t over yet.

“But you’ll die!”

Sawano ignored Aoyama, walking away without another word. The moment he was out of sight, all the tension drained out of me. I blacked out completely, as if my soul had been sucked out. I was aware of Aoyama calling my name, but I couldn’t reply. My mouth wouldn’t work anymore. And then everything went white…

5

The moon is still out. I should have killed them when I had the chance. Yes, I should have killed them.

Killing is wrong. I know that. But they got in my way. Now the children I could have made happy will go back to living lives full of pain and sorrow. I should have eliminated anyone who tried to get in the way of that.

Aoyama was right on one point. That thing is not a god as we understand it. It’s something that gives in return for a price. To make the children happy, it needs something of equal value. In this case, that means the lives of the adults. They’ve already lived long enough. They’ve experienced more happiness and contentment than those children.

Dying painlessly by those things’ hands and going to paradise wouldn’t be such a bad thing for them, would it? I said I was going to show them paradise, and I meant it. It was just a matter of redistributing the world’s happiness more equally.

My arm hurts from the impact earlier. So do my legs and my hip. I’d never gotten that violent with another person before, but I couldn’t hold myself back. Kiku… He dared to bring up Kiku like he knew what he was talking about.

He’s probably experienced the death of one of his flock before. He knows what it’s like to have a young girl die. But he basically told me to just “get used to it.” The same thing will happen again and there’s nothing I can do about it, so I should give up and focus on the things I can change.

It was ridiculous. It was insulting. That he could say such heartless things only showed that he didn’t know Kiku like I did, he hadn’t shared the affection for her I felt. Or maybe he said that because he’s a good person, a virtuous Christian like my parents and grandparents. He even had the gall to claim he was worried about me. He probably thought that we could understand each other’s sadness and grow to overcome it together.

He didn’t understand at all. It’s not sorrow I feel. It’s anger. As for resolve, it’s plenty strong already. I’ve resolved to make it so I can do something about all this. If anyone here lacks resolve and is running from a situation he can’t change, it’s him.

I can’t stand how alike he and I were. Our facial features, our statures, our professions, our religions. It was disgusting, like I was being rebuked by a mirror image of myself. My head was filled with so much fear and anger that I barely knew what I was doing.

I’m not the one in the wrong here. I did the right thing. I was right. I was right. I did the right thing. I did nothing wrong.

The moon is still out. It looks so big up there in the sky.

I run along the nighttime streets toward the place where I first met my collaborator. I come to a deserted three-way intersection. A tiny shrine sits practically hidden by a utility pole. I see the tiny Kannon statue who has borne witness to so many prayers throughout the years, throughout the centuries. I still have this. I just have to borrow its power and make it grow like I did before.

This time, I’ll make sure no one gets in the way… Resolve. Yes, I’ll resolve myself to do what I have to. I’ll kill those two. I’ll do the same to anyone who tries to interfere. I’ll do whatever it takes.

Kiku. The people who hounded you and pushed you toward death are evil. Their lives are of little importance compared to yours. I’ll kill them.

I wanted her to be happy. I wanted to see her grow up, to meet up with her and talk about old times. To chat or read or just spend time together. I even watched My Hero Academia in preparation for the next time we met. It was a hopeful story about a powerless boy named Deku who worked hard to get stronger. Seeing him do his best is really inspiring, isn’t it? I could have said something like that to her. I wanted to see her smile.

But in the end, she didn’t become strong. She wasn’t even allowed to try. I should never have given her my red rosary. I might as well have marked her for death. It was nothing but the noose that wrapped around her neck and took her life away. A reminder of how alone she was. I will always be watching over you, my ass. I didn’t watch over her at all. When she needed me most, I was in bed with a woman.

The thing that bit into her neck in her final moments was a rosary from the Vatican. All the prayers and piousness in the world didn’t do her any good. Kiku… Why did such a dependable girl have to die? She plucked up the courage to tell me she liked me, her whole body trembling, and I made light of the whole thing. How could I say something so condescending to such a dear, bright young girl?

I wish I could apologize to you, Kiku. I wish I could apologize on behalf of this world, the world that killed you.

The moon is so pretty. There was an author once who translated “I love you” as “the moon is pretty.”

Kiku, did you ever read the tale of Princess Kaguya? It describes the moon as another world. A world of beauty with no fighting and no death.

There’s death here in this world, but it comes for everyone. It treats us all equally. By the same token, shouldn’t everyone have the same rights to happiness? Why was that girl denied it? No matter how much time passes, nothing will ever change. She’s never coming back.

The last time I saw her alive, she was smiling, but in my dreams, she leers at me, her face and body rotting. I can’t be allowed to die. Dying wouldn’t fix anything. It won’t bring her back. I just wanted to make her happy. I wanted her to be happy. Even if my childish vision of paradise as a place full of flowers and smiles was rather unsophisticated, I wanted her to be somewhere like that. I wish this world hadn’t crushed her. I wanted to see her smile.

Ho-ho-ho.

I hear the sound clearly. I knew there were more of them out there. I look through the hole in my hand. I can see the moon. What beautiful light. It’s gold and blue and white all at once. With it shining on me, it feels like my body is not my own anymore. It’s as bright as day now… No, it lacks the vitality of the sun. There’s nobody here. Even if there were, it wouldn’t matter.

The moon may really be a different world. I feel that now, not as if it’s another world I’m cut off from, but one that’s watching me. It’s so beautiful. This majestic light that shines down so forcefully surely can’t come from this world. I wonder…is she over there, too?

“I offer my body…,” I pray. I wish for Kiku to be able smile again.

There’s a squelching sound like flesh being crushed. It’s coming from my hand. The things are swarming out of it, wrenching my pointer and middle fingers in opposite directions until they come right off. Starting with my hands, they move on to the rest of my body and eventually arrive at my brain.

“Will I be forgiven?”

My pointless question is swallowed up in the divine stream of light. Whether I’m forgiven or not, it seems my body is going to become part of the other side. I can’t remember Kiku’s face anymore. What did her eyes look like? What about her nose, her mouth, her hair? Her smile had a lonely edge to it. I wanted this girl with the dark look in her eyes to be happy. I prayed. Nothing happened. The price… Flowers bloom all over the surface of the moon.

“Kiku, I hope…”

I don’t really think we’ll ever meet again. This is just a hollow facsimile of paradise. Kiku is in a much better place.

At a time like this, what I need more than anything…is hope.