He stared at the morning mist wavering above the asphalt.
The silent, chilled highway drew in from the west, with a wide winding turn towards the village entrance. The path out of the village crossed the bridge that saddled the mountain stream and headed south, beneath the expressway's overpass.
In the night a sudden unease took him. Feeling rushed by something in the night, unable to sleep, he listened to the radio, only for it to make him feel all the more like he was being cornered by those radio waves. Rolling about in his bed, unable to bear it, as soon as dawn broke he left the house. Unable to seize the mood of a casual stroll, his pace broke into a run, towards the national highway as if being pulled along by it.
A baseless irritation, impatience for something he himself couldn't name. The highway stretched out, chilled, wordlessly running southerly. He pondered its end. The road ran towards the city, piercing fields and hills, leaving the neighborhoods of the village behind. Even with the knowledge that the asphalt beneath his very feet connected this small mountain village to a bustling town, the adults about him spoke of it as his "future," so terribly detached from any present sense of reality.
Passing through one more today, tomorrows were piled up thick. He suspected the pile of tomorrows had approximately no relation to the "future" the adults spoke of, thinking that this road breathed into the reaches of eternity. Would this road really lead to the city if he walked along it? Even if he tried to imagine it, all he could see was his own figure being swallowed up in the morning mist.
Sometimes a truck would rush through shaking the silent stillness, passing him by and driving south as he saw it off, with some strange sense of restraint. It was a runaway's morning. Pressed by the feeling of having no place to have himself, but all the same having a hard time extracting himself from where he was, he idly waited for the sun to rise from the eastern mountain ridge. Soon enough with nothing else to do, with the languid voices of the cicadas as his impetus, just like always, with painful reluctance as if the hairs on his back were being pulled in protest, he turned back, the morning sun throwing vivid shadows over the western mountains behind him.
Casting his eyes down from the brilliant rays, he returned towards his house. He'd felt just a little like he'd be beaten down and at the same time relieved, a mystery to himself as much as anyone.
This morning once again he returned through the country paddy fields while gazing where his heart longed for. In the short time he had been at the highway, the village awoke. Even on a Sunday the village's early rising didn't change. The houses along the narrow pathway opened their windows, signs and presences of people about. The morning fog dispersed, the eastern mountain's shadow whittled away, and the sun shone strongly into his face as he walked north. ---Today'd be hot again.
As his eyes narrowed against the light, his hand shading over his eyes, a brown furball came flying beneath his feet. At the same time came a crisp voice.
"Taro!"
Turning to look back over his shoulder towards the voice, there she came rushing, holding onto a leash. The Shiba Inu frolicking at his feet had no collar. That would, then, be the ring that was dangling from the end of the leash she held.
"I am so sorry. ---Taro, come here."
Ritsuko was in a flustered hurry, seizing the dog whose tail wagged as if it would fall off. The Shiba, now too big to be called a puppy, was either over-excited or excessively healthy, refusing to stay in place in her arms even once caught. With the help of the one the dog had eagerly tripped up, at last the collar was able to be fastened.
"I just changed his collar thinking it was too big but I wonder if it's still too loose? It came right off. Sorry, and thanks. ---Natsuno-kun, wasn't it?"
When Ritsuko spoke, he scowled. He suddenly turned away, silent, without any hint of small talk returned greetings, most unpleasant. Ritsuko thought that he must not have remembered her. They'd met at the hospital countless times. Even so, to him she was nothing more than one of the nurses, and perhaps he couldn't differentiate between each of them.
"Out jogging? Your leg's all better now?"
The question came as much because he was in a T-shirt and jersey as because it would end on a bad note to separate with greetings going the way they had.
She was certain that he was a patient who had come in quite some time ago with a knot on his shin. It was a common ailment of growing boys. It would usually take care of itself during the growth period and in his case he'd come in for prescriptions of pain killers but not since then, so the pain must have stopped, too.
"...... My leg is better. There was some weird bump under my knee, though."
"The cartridge hardened. Then, it must have stopped hurting," Ritsuko said, Natsuno giving a sour nod. Thinking she wasn't making any ground, she was just about to say her goodbyes when Natsuno himself spoke up.
"Uhm, Nurse?"
"Mm?"
"Once you get that kind of lump in your bone, you're finished growing I heard but is that true?"
There was something charming about how seriously he asked. In a hurry to move onward, Taro pulled her two, three steps forward, Natsuno following awaiting his answer.
"They do say that.... but there's nothing set in stone about it." Being pulled into a walk by the dog Taro, she went with no destination, Natsuno at her side. "It is true. When the cartridge ossifies, that is the sign that it's finished growing, yes. But, just because you're past the phase of growing as quickly as you did in middle school, it doesn't mean that your growth has come to a complete stop, so...."
"I see..." It was funny, how complicated his thoughts sounded as he spoke. At the same time he sounded relieved.
They had met at the hospital two or three times but beyond that Ritsuko had caught sight of him who knew how many times during an early morning walk. Natsuno was looking at the national highway. The sight of the boy standing and longing, as if yearning for the south, made it seem as if any minute he'd start off on foot out of the village. She had the urge to call out to him, as if she had to stop him but, at the same time if she called out to him, it seemed like that would be what drove his back forward towards the south, and so she couldn't. ---That image was so powerful that the fact that he was quite worried about whether he'd grow any more or not like a normal young man, knowing such a trivial thing could be on his mind, was somehow a relief.
"Natsuno-kun is entering high school this year, was it?"
"Yes ma'am. ... Could you please stop that." The young boy's voice was blunt, his displeasure naked.
"Mm?"
"Calling me by my first name."
Ah, Ritsuko nodded. Should she call him by his last name Yuuki or his last name Koide? His father's last name was Yuuki and his mother's last name was Koide. The couple weren't together in the family register, and he was under his mother's name. So she thought it had been Koide on his insurance card. Around the hospital he was known by his first name, Natsuno. What to call somebody with two last names was a conundrum for anybody; it may have been the office's Mutou, who was friends with his father Yuuki, who had called him that.
"You hate it? Your name."
Natsuno nodded with a sour face.
"I think it's a good name, though. It's fresh. Your mother gave it to you, right?"
"My old man. I guess it's some noble's name."
"I see. Your father, he's a Romanticist."
Natsuno grimaced. "If he wasn't he we wouldn't have moved, not to a place like this."
"It is a simple, empty country village, after all," Ritsuko said with a smile, making Natsuno bow his head in sudden shame.
"I didn't... really mean it like that."
"Even if you did mean it like that, isn't it fine? It's the truth after all."
---It's like the stock model of the sticks, out here.
Yes, it's been called that. That's just what it is.
---In the last few years of its life, it feels like. It isn't any place for the young.
(That it is not.)
Ritsuko looked out over the village. The V shape carved into the mountain ridges could be seen as open scissor blades. Like it would someday suddenly snap shut, squashing out the village and its people.
"That's right.... It really is a simple country town. To those like your father, who always lived in the city, it might be thought of as curious, in a good way, but..."
"There's a shortage of nurses isn't there, right now?"
"Hm? Well, maybe."
"Then, I do not think you would have trouble finding work no matter where you went. Don't you think of leaving here and going to the city or something?"
"That's true...."
The early rising elderly recognized Ritsuko and called out to her. There were those watering their gardens, those cleaning the street, and children passing by calling out to her in bright voices as they hurried down the road. On Sunday there were no radio exercises, so they must have been going off to play.
"I guess it's because I was born here."
'Morning!' called out a voice from behind before passing by on her bicycle; it was Hirosawa Mayumi. She waved her hand at the both of them and continued off in the same direction as the children, to the north. She was going to work, no doubt.
Hirosawa Mayumi was from the Shimo-Sotoba's Ohkawa household who married into the Hirosawa household---the one called Kohiro or Small Hiro. She used to work at the Mizobe credit union but since marrying, she worked at the register at the super market, Tamo, at the top of the shopping district. She was the third generation, with no kids yet herself. ---Ritsuko was like that, well informed about the various tidbits of the village.
What functions and events were for which seasons, who did what during them, who was from what family and how they were related by marriage. Even while she wasn't especially interested in it, she would naturally hear it, and without trying to remember it, she remembered. Lately her job only spurred that on. Working as a nurse in the village's only hospital, she ended up knowing things down to the finest detail, becoming more and more at ease and familiar. Whenever she walked down the street, there would always be an incessant stream of voices calling out to her.
"With acquaintances and the like and friends and the like, and all those different relationships in place, I guess I just can't get in the mindset to decide where else to live."
"Or where to have a boyfriend?"
At Natsuno's playful question, she gave a light glower. "That isn't a part of it."
"Even though it's really inconvenient...."
"I don't know of any place more convenient, so I don't think of it as inconvenient."
She laughed, but Ritsuko supposed that he could want out of the village. Natsuno moved to Sotoba during middle school, so being raised in the city, wanting to return to the place he was used to living was perhaps if anything only natural.
"I don't get it. Is it that 'wherever you live's the center of everything' thing? If we're talking about merits, there isn't anything to brag about either. The firs or the sotoba...."
That's right, Ritsuko nodded.
---It's like some kind of bad omen, huh? It's eerie.
If you were speaking of Sotoba the village out loud it was going to be heard as an ill-omened word. Everyone here had been teased about it at least once by the kids in school from other towns. But, that woodworking had become less prominent. At one time Sotoba may have stood as a base for building coffins and the like but nowadays the elderly's only manual labor was crafting sotoba. Even the number who did that was decreasing. As woodworking declined, what rose were agriculture and forestry, and most of the households with a family monopolized trade were in decline, to the point where most households had secondary jobs.
Ritsuko's household was one of those stock Sotoba families, her widowed mother tilling their narrow field, with Ritsuko and her little sister working to supplement the family budget. ---No, if you were being precise, now it was Ritsuko who supported the household economy. Her mother's harvests were only enough for one household, and what they came up short on her little sister's income supplemented.
Ritsuko let out a sigh for no particular reason, turning her eyes towards the western mountain. The slope was covered in firs, at the foot a small opening of fields. Amidst the forest of firs catching the light was a rain gutter or something similar on the Kanemasa mansion.
"...That house, they never did move into it, did they."
Ritsuko murmured, Natsuno turning to look at it dubiously.
"That house?" He parroted Ritsuko's line of sight, letting out an 'ah.' "---The Kanemasa house."
That building must have inspired her in some way; there was recently talk about wanting to rebuild the house a lot. Ritsuko's family was an old farming family. There were an excess of rooms and the aging fixtures were undeniably inconvenient. Reconstruction would be a welcome change but if it came to doing actual refurbishing, that task would fall on Ritsuko.
(Even though she should know better.)
Her father died early, and her mother left the forests untended, unable to even cultivate the field that wasn't that broad in the first place. Their savings, if there were enough to call savings, weren't enough for a family. Her mother should not have been unaware of that. ---Her mother demanded a family of Ritsuko.
---If you got out of this old tedious village, you'd feel better.
So get married, she was told. She didn't hate the idea of marrying her partner, and of course it wasn't that she didn't want to be married. She herself knew that if she let this chance get away from her, she wouldn't ever be able to wed.
(But...)
Then why couldn't she work up the determination to do it? Ritsuko's mother wanted her to leave the village behind, restart the family elsewhere and look after her for the foreseeable future. She herself may have even wished to do that. But, her mother's clear expectations were a weight on her chest. Thinking about that made her want to flee but, if she ran away then next her sister would be bound to the role. Thinking of that wrought the same weight in her chest. If she were to run away with a partner who said 'that village' with such scorn, all the more so.
"Now that you mention it, my old man was saying he'd seen a moving truck. On the day of the mushiokuri."
"That's right, Natsuno-kun's father performed as a yuge-shuu, didn't he?"
Mm, Natsuno nodded. "On the night of the mushiokuri as they were burning the Betto, he was saying they saw a moving truck. But, it turned back. They must've taken the wrong road."
Mm, Ritsuko nodded. Being pulled along by Taro as she was, she found herself at the riverbed road that lead to the highway. She thought that maybe Natsuno was coming back from this highway himself but, having a feeling she shouldn't touch that topic, she didn't dare to ask. The highway stretched in from the west here to where it intersected with the riverbed road, drawing out into a large curve that went south. This was the southern boundary of the village.
"Natsuno-kun, thirsty?"
"I didn't bring my wallet."
"It's my treat. When I come with my little sister, I always end up treating her."
Ritsuko laughed, stepping up to the vending machine in the Chigusa parking lot which was just around the corner. Chigusa was the commonly known name of the drive-in, ran by Yano Kanami with one other working girl. How old Kanami was, what kind of person---Ritsuko knew all of that about her. It didn't matter that she had a ten year age difference from Kanami, and that Kanami was rarely ever a patient at the hospital.
After putting the coins into the coin slot of the vending machine in the drive-in parking lot that faced the road, Ritsuko took out the cold can. Putting in the coins for Natsuno, she opened her can looking out over the road that swept by the village. On the other side of the highway, not far off she could see the bus stop. The empty but stop looked to be deserted.
Progression and decay---change did continue in the village without end. Only, the village was left behind from the outside world, the distance from the world beyond growing. That's how Ritsuko thought of it. A far off world, a deserted village. This village, too, would not necessarily always remain. The young left. The old died. Little by little becoming a smaller, more forlorn existence, all while being left behind alone.
"The Murasako's Obaa-chan... passed away, didn't she?"
"Murasako--in Yamairi? Yesterday, three corpses were found in Yamairi I heard, but." Natsuno asked, pulling the pull-ring of the can.
"Yup. But, just the other day, she was at the hospital. She came to pick up the Ohkawa's Ojii-chan's medicine for him. She seemed very healthy, and yet now, with everyone gone, it's strange."
Long ago--when the village was formed and still crafting sotoba, the villagers did their logging from Yamairi, bringing the trees down to the riverbed road by horse to Monzen. In Monzen, the firs were cut into lumber, then further cut down into sotoba. When Ritsuko was a child, there were lumber saw mills and carpentry shops here and there in the village. Those carpentry shops faded one by one, and entry to Yamairi also became less common. With the mere three elderly inhabitants left dead, the neighborhood Yamairi was extinguished. Was that how Sotoba too would at last disappear? She wondered. There would be fewer people, they'd take out the bus stop, only a few people would still make their homes there and, one fateful day, someone would try to pay a visit and they would all be dead. ---Sotoba's end. Was that day coming?
"Nurse," Natsuno spoke up. "Is it true that the three in Yamairi were murdered?"
Ritsuko blinked awake from her reverie. "Oh no. It's turned into a murder story?"
"That's just what I heard."
"The doctor said they died a natural death. They did an autopsy didn't they? He stood in for the autopsy. It was some kind of sickness, he said there wasn't any particular crime."
"What?" Natsuno smiled cynically. "I thought as much."
"Thought as much?"
Natsuno shrugged his shoulders. "Some freak went in, it sounds like some people are saying. But, I didn't think that could happen. I mean, you wouldn't normally think people were living that far back in this backwoods place, not normally."
Ritsuko blinked. "That may be right."
"When I heard there's a place at the end of the forest road where there're still people living, I thought it was a lie. I couldn't believe it. I thought it was one thing to be living out here where there's not even a train and all but the buses don't even run to Yamairi!"
"Is that right... that is right. We know about Yamairi but people from outside might think like that."
"People who don't have anything to do with the village coming in here worked up would be weird in itself. If they did come into the village all the way to the top, they'd think the road ends there, wouldn't they? They wouldn't think there were houses beyond that where people lived and all."
"That... may be true."
"So then, there's no choice but to think the culprit is a villager, is there? But, if there was someone as dangerous as that, everyone'd know. It's that kind of place."
"That's true."
"Everyone keeps watch on each other, collecting every last detail around here."
At Natsuno's voice which seemed to be muttering to himself, Ritsuko's gaze fell with a forced smile.
Right---it might look that way. To someone from the outside.
(This old tedious village)
If you got out, you'd feel better.
(......Even so.)
The people she knew well, the village that had become so familiar with her and she with it. Leaving that village, to a town where she knew no one. Relying on a person who could not grasp how she missed it. ----To Ritsuko, it didn't even seem possible.
When she raised her gaze, Natsuno gripped his can, looking south. It was possible that Ritsuko would become like that too. Standing at the highway at the break of dawn longing for Sotoba; it wasn't a life she wanted.
"Lately there aren't many families that make sotoba anymore are there? ...... Even though I love that smell."
Natsuno turned and blinked. "The smell? The firs?"
Ritsuko nodded.
"I love that smell of the firs. Don't you think it has a certain austerity to it?"
"Isn't that just because you know it's the smell of making sotoba?"
"Probably. ... Yes, it's the smell of nostalgia, remembering the dead." Ritsuko said, something cheerful in her mood as she looked up to the sky. "---All right, we'll use firs to build the new house!"
"New house?" Natsuno looked up at Ritsuko in bewilderment, Taro too looking up blankly.
"Yup! We're rebuilding. Our current house, it's pretty old now."
Ritsuko smiled and looked down at Taro.
"Taro, we're going back. ---Do you want a new dog house, too?"
"Whoa."
As her son's voice rose up in the living room, Tanaka Sachiko turned from the kitchen to look at him.
The kitchen was one step down from the four and a half tatami mat living room. The floor was technically covered in boarding planks but it was still ultimately called a dirt floor. The hard packed clay floor around the kitchen door spread wide, and there was a washing machine in the corner. Previously there was the furnace opening for the bath in that space. Next to the washing machine could be seen the door to the bathroom, all remnants of an old fashioned house fixture. Sachiko's house was built by an old farming family and left that way. She'd thought many times about how she'd like to rebuild it but her husband's parents suffered a long illness and thanks to that they didn't have that much of a savings surplus to afford it.
Sachiko's eyes passed over the small---to the point where it was just page filler--article to know the cause of the prior day's uproar. It seemed like some people had died in Yamairi, or so she had heard rumors of yesterday at least but of course she didn't know any particulars.
"Oh but, they're saying it wasn't like it was a crime or anything, aren't they?"
"We don't know that." Her son Akira said with a somehow expectant tone. When she agreed, her tone was colored with the same tone.
"What's wrong?"
The girl who appeared in the living room tilted her head. Akira happily pointed to the newspaper
"Kaori, Yamairi got a mention!"
"Don't you mean Onee-chan?" Sachiko said, folding the paper. "Kaori, are you going out?"
"Yup. I thought I'd take Love along swimming."
"Instead of that, let's hit Yamairi!" Akira stood up. "Sure has been a while since I've been to the mountains."
"Now stop that." Sachiko glared at her son. Akira had just entered middle school and still showed no signs of calming down. He was always saying childish things. "Three people just died, it's a bad omen. You'll be taken up by an Oni."
"That's retarded. ---Hey, Kaori, let's go."
Sachiko gave Akira a light, small poke. "If you have that much free time, then do your homework. You still have some to finish yet, don't you? --Kaori, watch your step. The water level's low, so the riverbed is slippery."
"Kay."
"It's fine to take the dog to play in the water but don't let him roll around there. If he bathes in that water, he'll come back dirtier than he left."
Seishin took in the sun's scorching rays as he headed towards the neighborhood of Kami-Sotoba. Gotouda Shuuji's funeral went as planned. The chief mourner, Fuki, was the sister of the deceased Murasako Hidemasa but she married out of the Murasako household. The ill fates of the Murasakos were ultimately the burdens of the Murasako family, the Gotouda family being a separate entity, and more than anything it was summer so Shuuji's burial needed to be hurried. The Murasako couple's corpses were taken away for an autopsy, when they would return unknown. Thus for the time being the burial went as planned, though the mourners' interest was not on Shuuji but in the community of Yamairi.
"No matter how old they were, three people, all at once is, well..."
"Didn't some lunatic kid come in from Mizobe or something? It's become such a dangerous world."
"You said it. I mean, I myself have never locked my doors since the day I was born. I wonder if this isn't a sign of the end of that era?"
"I mean just a little while ago wasn't there talk of that outsider who ran over a child?"
Seishin was in a separate room but due to it being summer time the sliding screens and shouji were pulled back. All of the mass' conversations leaked through.
In any case, circumstances being what they were, speculations were flying. It seemed the villagers were largely thinking of it as a crime. A thief or possibly a madman was the culprit. If so then the perpetrator was not a villager but without a doubt someone from outside. ---That was the village's "common sense" at work.
'Weren't they attacked by some mountain dogs?' came the slightly more peaceable explanation, popularly given amongst a few of the elderly who even now entered the mountains for forestry.
"They're really multiplying up there you know. Another housing district was built near Mizobe. Those fellas abandon their dogs in the mountains."
"To make sure they don't come home, they drive them all the way out here to abandon them. And not puppies or old dogs either. The point is they got tired of taking care of it or something, they're unmanageable, so they bring them out here."
"The Inoda's Motosaburou-san, wasn't it? The guy that horrible mess happened to in early spring. In Yamairi."
"Right, right. That guy's mountain was to the east of Yamairi and all. That's where he was attacked by a mountain dog, a hell of a scene. The dog that attacked him, too, they were saying it was one of those what're they called, a big western breed dog. One of those long haired ones you see in pet shops. Dogs go in and out of fashion like anything else, those bunch from the city throw them out once they're not fashionable anymore."
Seishin inclined his ears towards the voices he could hear amongst the clamor. While saying it was mountain dogs, the cause of those mountain dogs was ultimately not the village itself but the outside. Middle-aged women gossiped about whether it wasn't a double suicide. They lived alone in the mountains as they were, with no relatives to rely on. They were left in the middle of the mountains to be ruined by illness or age, and unable to suffer that they committed suicide, or perhaps Murasako Mieko was at her wits end and a forced double suicide took place; there were such explanations of that as well. And this was caused by government administrative deficiency, of a social welfare deficiency, or the children who had treated them cruelly and left the village, of course it was not caused by anything within the village.
The village was isolated from the outside world. The village rejected the outside world, you could even say. Like this they discussed from various angles the idea of "death intruding from the outside world" and yet, oddly enough, regardless of the explanations offered by Seishin and Toshio, that it was neither an incident nor an accident, the opinion that it was a natural death, was, as if the possibility never existed, not given so much as a breath.
Yes---"that" always came from outside of the village. What really came was not something that came from the town of Mizobe, nor from any of the neighboring communities, it came from much further---no, not from the city beyond the bypass, either. It came from what was not a part of the village, from the firs that surrounded the village within them. The forest of firs were not a part of the village, they were outside of it. "That" was within the firs, coming into the village from outside to seize the villagers. It took the villagers to the boundary line outside the village, towards the border between life and death.
(.....Shiki.)
Ohkawa Tomio expressed his outrage to the drinkers at the corner counter of the liquor shop.
"Suddenly, there's a phone call saying that my uncle's dead. When I hurry on up there in a rush, it's not a sight a man should see. Sure enough I was told that it was my uncle but, even if you tell me that there's no way I could know. The man was rotted on top of being in pieces!"
The old men at the counter's faces, red with inebriation, all scowled at once.
"He wasn't just rotted from heat. Maggots were crowded in there, I take a look at the old man's face and I thought I was looking at bone it was so white. Just when I'm thinking that it's moving, I realize it's the maggots gathered in his face." He continued on with grand exaggerations, planting the seeds of nightmares in all those around. "On top of that, in the empty houses all over and from my uncle's house, seems there were torn up bits of rabbits or dogs found scattered around. Spots of blood were all here and there to. They had to have gotten mixed up with some punk from somewhere who was off in the head. Not a doubt he killed old man Gigorou and the Murasako couple then flew the coup. The cops are all saying shit about it being wild dogs, but I say like hell!"
As Ohkawa Atsushi heard his father's coarse voice rise up the stairs, he nursed a complex feeling. Throwing himself down on the bed atop the tatami mats, he scowled at the ceiling.
(Someone went to Yamairi...) Dead bodies and torn apart animals, a blood stained house. (...hunting.)
Atsushi tried to draw such a mental image looking at the ceiling above. Blood, entrails, corpses. The sinews of muscles frayed, somehow made his blood boil. Murderer, weapon, mayhem. Corpses and blood. Something pooled in the pit of his stomach, an itchy impatience making him feel as if he were wavering. Somehow, he felt like he could neither stay there nor stand to go.
"Damn... there's no way to blow off some steam..."
If he went to the recently emptied Yamairi and recklessly crashed the whole joint, maybe this inexplicable feeling would blow away with that steam. But, thought Atsushi. When he snuck into Kanemasa to do the same thing, when the time came, Atsushi was seized with fear and ran away. Remembering that, something bitter from the depth of his stomach rose. What if he ended up stuck in the role of the schmuck doing something like that again?
There was a pause in his father's gruff voices, and when it continued it shouted up to the second floor.
"Hey, Atsushi, a delivery!"
People passed through to get to the village. People filled their ears up with information and came jogging back as if to return before it leaked out, bursting from their mouths from the intense internal pressure. Yet regardless, when the local Takami stopped by to pay a visit, they kept their mouths tightly shut. The only one to proactively open his mouth was Katou Kyousuke.
"A lot of people died in Yamairi, right? I know who did it."
At the sound of the child's voice, Takami turned his body as Kyousuke distinctly pointed towards the western mountain.
"It's that house. That place is full of demons, they did it."
His grandmother Yukie quickly covered his mouth.
"Don't say things like that. ---I'm sorry for him. That curious house was built and he's just completely convinced it's a haunted house."
"It's true..." Kyousuke added with a whisper, but it seemed the adults weren't listening. True, Kyousuke once again quietly repeated before he closed his mouth.