Pathway to Japanese Literature

With a clatter... and a bang, Ayako slid open and shut the entranceway's lattice door more roughly than usual. No sooner had she hurriedly kicked off her shoes than she rushed into the tatami room.
Her face was slightly flushed, her eyes wide with surprise.
Observing this scene, her mother Akiko raised her eyes from her needlework and quietly looked on.

"What’s the matter? You’re all worked up."
"...You seem to have been later than usual today."

"Yes, I was on duty today."

She placed the parcel there, sat down without removing her hakama, and began speaking in a low, forceful tone.

“Mother!”

“Huh?”

Resting her work-worn hands on her knees, Akiko leaned forward.

Ayako repeated “Mother!” and took a short breath.
“They say this house is a strange one.”

Akiko remained silent.

“Today Mr. Kuroda said there haven’t been any strange occurrences at your house.”
“I didn’t understand what he meant at first, but when I asked him properly, he told me this house has had a reputation for quite some time.”
“Apparently there’s something suspicious going on.”
“So everyone who moves in leaves soon after—they say it was empty more often than not.”
“When we came and settled here so calmly, people who know about it think it’s strange…… But since Mr. Kuroda kept insisting—‘Is there really nothing at all?’—I told him there aren’t any ghosts! Even if there were some little one, I wouldn’t care! People of the twentieth century don’t believe in ghosts anyway.”
“But…”

"Madam!" came a voice from behind the sliding door, and when the maid Kiyo showed her face, Akiko suddenly revealed a frightened expression.
Ayako, not understanding what was happening, fell silent with a blank look on her face.

Akiko answered Kiyo regarding the inquired matter, then after a moment turned back with a serious expression.

“You mustn’t speak of such things to anyone………And if someone asks whether there have been any strange occurrences, you must say there have been none.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because if some strange rumor starts spreading, just see what happens...”

Unable to clearly explain why that was wrong, she cut off her words midway.

“But if it’s some amusing ghost like the ones in Western fairy tales, I wouldn’t mind it appearing at all.”

Seeing Ayako’s face with pursed lips and rolled eyes, Akiko naturally formed a smile.

But...
If such rumors existed, they couldn't have stayed there even carelessly.

With two rooms upstairs and three downstairs, conveniently arranged with plenty of sunlight, the woodwork rough but new, and the rent surprisingly cheap, they had immediately moved in declaring it quite the recent find.
But the layout—stairs immediately past the entranceway, an eight-tatami reception room to the right, and opposite that, a four-and-a-half-tatami maid’s room on the corridor side leading to the kitchen—somehow felt dim and gloomy.
If that were all, they could have tolerated it as merely being the maid’s quarters, but on the very night they moved in, Kiyo found it unnervingly eerie and couldn’t sleep a wink.

“It’s probably because the air circulation isn’t good.”

Shinsaku said this, but just to be thorough, he examined every corner yet found nothing suspicious anywhere.

Then one evening, as the pale light streaming through the north-facing high window grew faint and blurred, Akiko casually entered that room. When she paused before the closet, a bone-deep chill ran through her and her body trembled uncontrollably.
It was strangely eerie.
However, even when she opened the closet, it only contained Kiyo’s bedding, luggage, and unneeded tools—nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever.
Thinking it was her imagination, she kept silent about it, but that night too Kiyo apparently found it too eerie to sleep.
After that, Kiyo took to sleeping in the three-tatami entranceway.

That circumstance matched exactly with Ayako's story.

“There’s something very wrong with you.”

When alone with her husband, Akiko concluded her account with those words and studied his face.

The receding hairline at both sides of his forehead had deepened considerably, but his mustache remained thick and jet-black. Twisting its ends, Shinsaku answered with a faint smile.

"If a real ghost shows up on top of that, it'd be just the perfect fit."

“Huh?”

She didn’t understand the joke.

“Oh, nothing—if it were a real haunted house, the rent would drop considerably. That’s the idea.”

“What are you talking about? I’m being serious… That room truly is somewhat strange.”

“Then I’ll try spending a night there.”

By his naturally carefree disposition, he didn’t believe in supernatural forces.
While idly brushing off his wife’s concerns, he never once undertook the effort to pass a night in the maid’s room.

However, one day on a gloomy afternoon when a dreary rain had been drizzling persistently, a shrill scream rang out in that maid’s room.
Akiko, who had been in the living room, and Kiyo, who had been in the kitchen, rushed over from both directions simultaneously.
When they looked, there at the base of the window, with his back to them, Shinkichi stood rigid as a stick.
Akiko was the first to rush over.
Shinkichi’s face turned deathly pale, and for a while he couldn’t speak.
Even when he finally managed to speak, all he could say was that something white had flown past outside the window—no further details could be discerned.
He himself was half in a dreamlike state.

“See there—I told you so,” Akiko said triumphantly to her husband, layering her words with a deliberately eerie expression.
“For Shinkichi, who even attends elementary school, to be that startled—this certainly isn’t an ordinary matter.”

Even Shinsaku was somewhat drawn in.
He did not speak of supernatural phenomena, but neither did he deny the sort of coincidental occurrences typical of an optimist—things that, when mixed with a bit of imagination, could readily become spirits or miracles.
So he experimentally entered the maid’s room, walked around here and there, crouched down briefly, crossed his arms, and tilted his head slightly.

The light filtered through both the corridor’s shoji and the room’s shoji was diffused by illumination streaming from the high north-facing window. Beyond the window stretched a zinc fence marking the neighboring boundary, its upper edge framing upward-reaching cherry branch tips. With no direct sunlight reaching it, the room’s air held a bone-deep chill. This much was tolerable—yet from the closet drifted an inexplicably unpleasant sensation. Vague yet compelling, absurd yet undeniable—an indefinable discomfort permeated the space. Upon closer inspection, either the narrow closet’s sliding door or pillar had warped slightly, creating a half-inch gap at their meeting point. He held up his palm but detected no draft seeping through. When opened, the closet revealed Kiyo’s belongings and familiar old tools crammed inside. Testing further, he tapped all surrounding boards with his fingertips—top, bottom, left, right—but found every nail firmly secured. Yet upon withdrawing his outstretched hand and head, he felt it—an unpleasant sensation like some odor grazing his nostrils drifting through him. He snapped the sliding door shut.

He was filled with an indescribably strange feeling.
He hurriedly stepped out into the corridor and looked around the opposite side of the closet.
There stood the kitchen’s sooty wall.
How strange, he thought—but then his unease transformed into curiosity. He lifted two or three of the kitchen’s floorboards and peered into the space beneath the closet.
Beyond scattered bundles of firewood, a tattered old spiderweb hung limp, and the musty earth under the floor lay indistinctly spread out—there was nothing unusual, nor did any unpleasant sensation drift through.

He dazedly returned to the living room.

With a look that asked “How was it?”, Akiko studied his expression.

“It’s nothing,” he answered in a tone as if convincing himself.

But still, it just didn’t sit right with him.
That creepy, bizarre closet!
This feeling had taken root in the depths of his mind.

At that moment, Kiyo brought something bizarre.

One night, the electric light began fading smoothly like a receding tide, and just when it seemed to have gone out with a pop, it suddenly came back on.
The moment they thought "Huh?" it truly went out this time.
Akiko, who was in the living room, located the candles from the Buddhist altar.
From the second floor came Shinsaku, and from the entrance came Kiyo, groping their way.
And with Akiko and Shinkichi joining them, everyone gathered around the dim red candlelight.
No sooner had they gathered than the electricity promptly returned.
They exchanged glances with looks that said "Oh, it was nothing."

It was decided they would have some tea, but unfortunately, the water in the iron kettle was lukewarm.
Kiyo rose to boil it over the gas flame and went to the kitchen.
The clattering of geta on plump, short feet had only echoed two or three steps down the corridor when—*Ah!*—a scream and the clanging sound of an iron kettle being dropped rang out almost simultaneously.
In an instant, Kiyo’s bristling face came flying into the living room.
She said she remembered taking two or three steps down the corridor and glancing sideways to see an inky-black giant shadow figure looming up behind the maid’s room shoji... but beyond that, she knew nothing.

Her demeanor was so earnest that everyone was startled.
However, Shinsaku took the lead with Akiko following behind, and they went to investigate the maid's room.
When they stepped out from the entrance into the corridor, a large pitch-black figure loomed into view on the shoji screen.
But that was merely their own shadows cast by the entranceway's electric light.

When they felt relieved, they found it amusing.

“Hey, everyone—come take a look! There’s a Giant Monk here!”

Encouraged by Shinsaku's lively tone, everyone came out from the living room.
Several large shadows overlapped and were cast upon the shoji before them.

“Whoa, there are so many Giant Monks!” Shinkichi shouted.

“Yours is a Little Monk, isn’t it?”

And everyone—except Kiyo, who still hadn’t recovered from her earlier shock—cast shadows on the shoji screens together. But then it became eerie, and they stood frozen in silence.

Shinsaku slid open the shoji screen.
The high window across the way hovered dimly like a corpse's unseeing eyes.
An icy shiver crept through him.

“Oh my, why isn’t the light in this room working?”

At Akiko’s words, everyone noticed for the first time.
Shinsaku went inside and twisted the light switch.
The room suddenly brightened.
But as if by unspoken agreement, they all returned to the living room without another word.

“What a ridiculous Giant Monk!”

Shinsaku tried to force a laugh.
As that laugh began to stiffen unnaturally, Kiyo started insisting on another matter.

“But at first, the electricity had certainly been on…”

The light in the maid’s room was always left on.
That night too, until just before the power outage, it had certainly been on.

“Look here!”
Though she didn’t voice “How strange!” aloud, Ayako conveyed it with her eyes as she looked around at everyone’s faces.

“Is that also the Giant Monk’s doing?”

“Whoa, there’s a Giant Monk here too!”

Shinkichi stood up and, stretching upward, cast his own shadow onto the opposite wall.

They couldn't decide whether to laugh or feel afraid—it was an odd atmosphere in that moment.

And this persisted afterward.

When night came, Shinkichi began earnestly studying the shadow figures on the wall by adjusting the lamp's position and experimenting with various poses.
When he spread his arms and leaped up, it formed an airplane shape; when he stood on one leg while shaking his head, it became a monster figure.
All manner of other shapes emerged.

“Stop that. If you keep doing that, you’ll get swallowed by the shadows before long,” Ayako said.

The notion of being “swallowed by the shadows” was a phrase she had coined, yet it indeed conveyed an uncanny resonance in everyone’s hearts.

“As if I’d get swallowed! I’ll swallow you up first, Sis!”

And Shinkichi struck a pose imitating a lion dance mask and cast it onto the wall.
Even Kiyo laughed at the sight, but she was trembling fiercely within.
She never once set foot inside the maid’s room after nightfall.

Akiko showed everyone a superficial smile while secretly asserting to her husband.

“You—let’s move somewhere else. I can’t stand another day in this house.”

“Yeah,” Shinsaku gave an evasive reply.

While it could have been dismissed as imagination, even so, the closet in the maid’s room remained undeniably eerie and strange. On top of that, even Shinkichi’s behavior—now fixated on shadow figures—seemed eerie depending on how one looked at it.

"But that can’t be possible." — "Yet something still feels off."

With a heart conflicted over whether to stay or leave during this time, Shinsaku began to consider that moving might be acceptable if a good house could be found.
Even if he thought during the day that there was no point in going out of their way to move from a house they liked, come nightfall, the area around the maid’s room felt oppressively gloomy.
Even after buying a 50-candlepower bulb and secretly installing it, it was still the same.
And somehow, the area around the closet…

“We’ll look for a house starting tomorrow,” he answered Akiko.

However, that tomorrow kept getting postponed day after day.
But on the other hand, Akiko began asking regular merchants to search for vacant houses.

Then one day, a detective suddenly came to Shinsaku’s house.

It was around 1 PM on a Sunday afternoon. When Akiko urged him to go vacant-house hunting, Shinsaku kept giving noncommittal replies and frittered away the entire morning in dawdling. During that time, he once stealthily entered the maid’s room without anyone knowing, yet somehow it still felt unsettlingly strange. After lunch, he sat absentmindedly in the second-floor room, gazing at the cloudless expanse of sky through the glass-papered shoji. As he idly reflected on everything that had happened so far, it all seemed absurd—yet he couldn’t bring himself to laugh even at that absurdity. In a state of confused bewilderment that even he couldn’t parse, he stared blankly through the translucent screen at the endless sky beyond.

At that moment, Kiyo came with the visitor’s calling card.
It read: Detective Nakai Uhei of the XX Police Station.
Shinsaku had no idea whatsoever what business the detective could have with him.
He stared at the front of the business card for a while but, in any case, had the detective shown in.

He was a man in his mid-thirties wearing a kasuri-patterned meisen haori over a kimono paired with serge hakama trousers, his head closely cropped, appearing simple and unassuming.
In Shinsaku’s mind, the man’s appearance and the detective’s official title registered as entirely separate entities.
After finishing the customary greetings, Detective Nakai apologized for his sudden visit in roundabout terms.
There was a strange ambiguity in his tone.
Shinsaku asked what business he had while looking at his face.

“Actually, I’ve come about a rather strange matter………….”

Detective Nakai began speaking in a mix of polite and casual tones—rumors were spreading about strange occurrences at Shinsaku’s house. There had already been odd rumors before they moved in, which was why no one had settled there long-term. But since the Shinsaku family had stayed put for some time now, the neighborhood found it puzzling—and sure enough, new suspicious rumors had started circulating.

“I happened to hear about this,” he continued, “and since such matters often provide leads to old crimes, I came to ask what sort of strange occurrences you’ve experienced.”

“I assure you this won’t cause any trouble—might I ask you to share the details for reference? This is purely a personal inquiry.”

Shinsaku allowed a faint smile to surface.
He then hesitated briefly.

“If there’s any inconvenience, I won’t press the matter,” Detective Nakai Uhei said.

Those words clung strangely to Shinsaku’s heart.
He couldn’t endure being perceived as connected to supernatural phenomena—yet when his own outrage struck him as ridiculous, he felt driven to spill everything out.

“Even if you call it suspicious, there’s nothing concrete… It might just be my imagination, but…”
He detailed only that the closet was eerie.

The detective listened attentively, but after Shinsaku’s words trailed off and a moment passed, he asked if they would allow him to examine the closet.
“It’s for everyone’s sake to clarify the cause,” he said.

When he thought about it, it made perfect sense.
He agreed with a bitter smile but then reconsidered and called Akiko there.

After hearing the explanation, Akiko watched the detective’s face with a puzzled look but soon suddenly furrowed her brow.

“But might the children and Kiyo become even more frightened?”

Her concern was well-founded.

“Well then,” the detective said, “I could come by when everyone is away.”

However, now that it had come to this, Shinsaku found himself growing eager instead—he wanted to have it examined as soon as possible.

He consulted with Akiko and decided to send everyone out.
They had the two children go to the zoo accompanied by Kiyo.
Ayako made a bored face, but Shinkichi and Kiyo were overjoyed.
And the three of them went out.

Shinsaku and Akiko guided Detective Nakai to the maid’s room.
Yet strangely, they felt nothing particularly eerie at that moment.
As they took out tools from the closet, they even grew embarrassed at their own foolishness.
Shinsaku kept making excuses-like remarks about it being just their imagination.

However, the detective’s eyes suddenly began to shine.
He thrust out his forehead as if concentrating and wiggled his nose like a dog.
He first inspected the inside of the closet, then scrutinized the maid’s room’s interior and exterior, wedged half his body through the kitchen’s raised floorboard area, and poked around the ground beneath the closet with the tip of a stick fragment.
Finally, he returned to the front of the closet and sank into thought, tilting his head slightly.

At those silent actions, Shinsaku and Akiko—who had been silently following along—found themselves disappointed, their initial sense of anticlimax compounded by growing disillusionment that betrayed the faint hopes they’d harbored.
They hardly noticed when the detective suddenly began staring intently at one corner of the closet.
And as instructed, they fetched a nail puller and hammer and handed them over.

The detective clung with his entire body to a single wallboard in the closet corner. With hammer and nail puller, he pried it loose. Finding a scrap piece of board, he deftly plugged the gap. Finally rising, he stepped into the hallway, brushed dust from his kimono, and stared intently at the removed board. Viewed edge-on, it bore faint scorch marks and numerous small whitish spots like mold spores. But that was all.

“I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said.
“I’ll take custody of this board.”

“Is that everything?” Shinsaku asked.

“Yes, nothing appears particularly unusual.”

“Will that board lead to anything?”

“Well…” The detective sounded half-convinced.

Nevertheless, after sipping his tea, he hastily departed, carefully cradling the newspaper-wrapped board.

“If you find out anything, could you please at least give us a brief notice?” Shinsaku asked.

“Having clarity will help settle our minds.”

“I suppose so.”
And the detective paused for a moment, then answered in a cheerful voice.
“Yes, I will let you know in due course.”

The closet in the maid’s room seemed to have lost its mysterious allure ever since undergoing Detective Nakai’s inspection. The room’s gloom remained utterly unchanged from before, but when they considered how one board in the closet had been replaced with a scrap piece by the detective’s hand, the indescribable eeriness that had lingered until now turned as pallid as morning light and vanished into thin air.

“It really was nothing after all, wasn’t it?”
“Perhaps it was just our imagination after all.”
Shinsaku and Akiko stood before the closet and exchanged these words.

But... from beneath that, new concerns began to well up.

"I wonder what the detective made of that board?"

After the suspicious illusions vanished, an unshakable reality-based illusion—fabricated through science and police—rose up with a terrifying visage.

But that isn't any of our business.

Repeating this to himself, Shinsaku forced himself to feign composure. And sitting down in the maid's room, he called the children and Kiyo.

“It was nothing after all.”
“A board in the closet had broken, and wind from under the floor was blowing in—that’s why it felt unnaturally creepy.”
“It’s been fixed up properly—you don’t have to worry anymore.”

And he moved aside some of the closet’s luggage and pointed out the board Detective Nakai had nailed in place.
Yet Kiyo looked unconvinced, Ayako frowned suspiciously, Shinkichi snorted dismissively, and Akiko forced a bitter smile—so it—though they couldn’t tell exactly what—still felt off.
They couldn’t settle in that room.

When going to the bathroom late at night, there were moments when they would suddenly shudder at the sense that something’s gaze seemed to peer out from the hushed darkness.
This was no longer the sort of absurd supernatural phenomenon they had imagined, but rather a kind of fateful deception—as if some karmic bond with that closet…—that haunted them.

Given that it was a new house, this was all the more perplexing.

“They say this house wasn’t built too long ago, you know.”

“Yes, they say it hasn’t quite been three years yet, you know.”

Akiko answered while searching her husband's expression for something that could give her strength.
And when she couldn't find it, she ultimately started insisting they move.

“But there’s also that promise with the detective, you know…”

However, there had been no word from Detective Nakai since then.
They couldn’t very well go to inquire about it themselves.

Bewildered, the two of them sat blankly before the long brazier while Shinkichi immersed himself in shadow puppetry with Ayako and Kiyo in the three-mat entranceway. Rabbits and foxes had long become trite, and even airplanes and monsters had lost their novelty. He was now earnestly wrestling with creating new figures.

“Look! I made a toad!”

When Shinsaku quietly peered in, he found Shinkichi down on all fours, locked in a staring contest with the wall. The posture looked utterly bizarre.

Shinsaku suddenly struck his knee.

“Hey, I’ll make something interesting for you, so stay still.”

He stepped closer and abruptly thrust out both hands with his sleeves rolled up and overlapped. However, the form of the serpent attempting to swallow Shinkichi’s toad did not manifest on the wall as intended.

“You’re no good, Dad!” Shinkichi shouted.
“If it’s making monster puppets, I’m better at it!”

Shinkichi used both hands to make various shapes, demonstrating all sorts of ghostly puppets.

“I don’t like this, Young Master.”
“If you persist in such behavior, the real one will emerge before long.”

But it wasn’t just Kiyo who was frightened.

One night, Shinsaku, Akiko, and even Ayako were awakened by a sudden, sharp scream.
When they looked, Shinkichi stood there rigidly.
With an expressionless face, he had turned as rigid as stone.
They finally managed to get him back to sleep, but he lay there with eyes wide open like one possessed—he’d dreamed his shadow disappeared.
His shadow had vanished and wouldn’t appear no matter where he cast it. As he desperately searched for it, he suddenly became unbearably frightened—or so he said.

“Not only your shadow—soon even you yourself will be swallowed up, Shin-chan!”

Ayako trembled as she uttered these words.

It was an eerie, bone-chilling silence.
While he lay awake, the pillar clock struck four.
Then the sound of the clock’s pendulum lodged itself in his ears, and Shinsaku lay awake until morning.

“Something’s off with me too.”

When he realized this, Shinkichi’s dream began to weigh strangely on his mind.
The thought even occurred to him that perhaps leaving the bright electric light on in the maid’s room all the time might be to blame—such an absurd notion.
Yet even with the bright electric light left on, when night fell, Kiyo remained too frightened to enter that room.
Even Akiko had grown strangely restless.

They couldn't go on like this any longer.
"I have to do something…"

He was at a loss.

At that very moment, unexpectedly—though in truth he had been eagerly awaiting it—Detective Nakai arrived.

Shinsaku, who had been spending that Sunday morning in a daze, leapt up in sheer delight and personally went to greet him at the entranceway.

The detective’s face shone no less than his.
Holding a soft cap lightly in his left hand and standing with feet slightly braced, beneath the taut skin of his sun-tanned face overflowed a bright smile.

The two men exchanged friendly greetings.

However, once they were shown to the second-floor parlor, the detective abruptly adopted a solemn demeanor.
He quietly inserted his half-smoked Asahi cigarette into the brazier’s ashes and assumed an expression that seemed to contemplate everything at once.

“To be frank, I was considerably conflicted about whether I ought to inform you. However, given how you’ve remained unperturbed by suspicious rumors until now, I judged that informing you wouldn’t cause any particular fuss. Moreover, considering your previous request and my assumption that you must have been awaiting news, I concluded it appropriate to visit—given all that.”
“However, I must ask you to keep this matter strictly confidential.”
“I believe a time will come when disclosure becomes permissible.”
“As the case remains under preliminary investigation.”

Shinsaku, struck by an unexpected feeling, straightened his posture and swore not to speak of it to others.

And what the detective had to say was even more surprising—the burn marks and whitish stains on that board had aroused suspicion.
When the police conducted a preliminary investigation, suspicious points came to light.
Therefore, they further commissioned Dr. Takayama of forensic medicine to conduct an analysis.
Through Dr. Takayama’s examination, they discovered that the whitish stains were traces of mosquito droppings, and furthermore, that these droppings contained numerous human white blood cells while human fat had soaked into the board itself.
Then, upon investigating the board’s origin, they found it had come from the site of a fire. When Shinsaku’s house was newly built three years prior, the carpenter had used it as is for some reason.
What was even more curious was that the board appeared to have been used as closet paneling even in the burned-down house.
Upon further investigation, it was found that the owner of the burned house was currently in a detention center for a serious crime.
However, when the house burned down, an old man had perished in the fire, and the master received a life insurance payout of 10,000 yen.
Thus, two doubts arose in the eyes of the police.
How had the closet board remained unburned during the fire?
Why were mosquito droppings containing human white blood cells and human fat so abundantly attached to the closet board?
From these questions, with the 10,000 yen insurance money serving as the key, the scene of a certain criminal act emerged.

Three years ago, on a certain early summer night—

In the center of the room lay a sixty-year-old man sleeping alone.
The surroundings were utterly still.
Thereupon, an adjacent sliding door soundlessly opened, revealing a wide-eyed middle-aged man crawling forward on his stomach to peer inside.
After a moment, he stood upright and approached with heavy yet tiptoed steps.
Having rolled up the mosquito net and entered its enclosure, he withdrew a black merino heko obi from his sleeve.
The old man lay sideways with his mouth gaping open, exhaling alcohol-laden breath in labored gasps while deep in slumber.
The man crept behind him and began threading one end of the sash beneath his neck.
The old man stirred faintly.
In that instant, having fully threaded the sash around his neck, the man began strangling him while simultaneously pressing down on his back with a knee.
Drawing his neck inward and hunching his shoulders high, he summoned all his strength and crouched motionless.
The old man abruptly kicked away half his bedding before collapsing soundlessly.
His limbs began quivering.
The tremors ceased abruptly.
Then they resumed shaking.
The convulsions gradually weakened into spasms with lengthening intervals between them until one final violent shudder left him still.
Three minutes... five minutes... Then the man rose.
The old man’s head slumped limply.
His eyes stared wide while his jaw hung slack.
The man glimpsed this sight before turning away.

The man soon composed himself.
He wiped the greasy sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
He then stepped out from the mosquito net and quietly opened the closet’s sliding door.
Inside, there was an empty space of about four feet.
The man reached out from outside the mosquito net, grabbed the old man’s feet, and dragged him out.
He lifted him lightly with both hands and laid him in the empty space of the closet.
He then closed the closet door, straightened the disheveled futon inside the mosquito net, wrapped the heko obi around himself, cast a terrifying glance around the room, and hurried out.

Everything was carried out swiftly and soundlessly with precise steps, as if premeditated from the start.
Only the closet's sliding door had been left slightly open by two or three inches.

The area fell completely silent.
In that utter silence, only occasional low sounds leaked through from the room beyond.
And within the closet lay the old man’s strangled corpse—eyes wide open, mouth agape, an unknown liquid trickling from his nose—its chest exposed beneath nightclothes, limbs stiffly stretched out, growing rigid and cold.
And mosquitoes swarmed over it.

Shortly after the pillar clock struck three a.m., the man from earlier came clomping in.
He held matches and an alcohol bottle in his hands.
He approached the closet but froze in shock upon seeing the sliding door left slightly open by two or three inches.
Then, with a start, he shrugged his shoulders, opened the closet’s sliding door, and confirmed the old man’s corpse.
And then he suddenly splashed alcohol onto the sliding doors and paper screens, and set them ablaze.
Having confirmed that the blue flames were spreading wildly, he slipped away into the darkness.

Within less than thirty minutes, flames engulfed the entire room.
And then they engulfed the house.
By the time the house’s ridge burned down, the old man’s corpse lay quietly atop a single scorched board from the closet—like a small boat adrift in a sea of flames and ash—slowly and relentlessly consumed by the fire.
However, before being completely burned away, it was excavated by firefighters.

Contrary to Detective Nakai’s expectations, this phantom proved even more terrifying and eerie to Shinsaku and Akiko than any supernatural creature.

They immediately moved out the next day to the first vacant house they could find, accepting it as a temporary hardship.
When they thought of their previous house, a chill ran through them as if doused with icy water.
And then, settling down with relief amidst the scattered belongings in the dirty house they had moved into, they exchanged looks with indescribable expressions while distant visions still floated in their minds.
Ayako, Shinkichi, and Kiyo gazed at the pair’s expressions from three sides, comparing them with puzzled looks.

But at least this house was safe.