The next day, morning came. When I woke up, Shisho was sleeping in a terrible, twisted position right beside me. I felt a slight sense of relief. Afterward, the four of us, along with my uncle and his wife, had breakfast together—a total of six people. Something felt missing.
Right. There was no newspaper.
"Ah, it doesn't arrive until noon."
That's right. Both my PHS and Shisho's cell phone had no signal out here in this information-restricted countryside. After finishing our meal and returning to our room, I decided to ask Shisho about what happened last night.
"We went there, didn't we? To the place where Kyosuke got hurt."
"Yeah," Shisho replied, turning on the electric fan and sitting cross-legged.
"Did something happen?"
"No, nothing happened."
His evasive answer irritated me a little. After everything that went down, there was no way nothing happened.
Then, Shisho narrowed his eyes meaningfully and slowly opened his mouth.
"It was there during the day, but gone at night." He meant it had been dug up.
"It seems they realized we noticed."
A creepy smile played at the corners of his mouth.
"What was buried there?"
Shisho didn't answer right away, instead lying down flat on the tatami mats.
"Do you know what an Inugami is?"
"I've heard of it."
I remembered Kyosuke mentioning it before this trip.
"It's said to originate from the black arts of *Jukondo*—evil sorcery. If a person who commands an Inugami desires something belonging to someone else, the Inugami instantly brings disaster upon that person and won't stop until the object is given to its master. Inugamis are passed down from parent to child, and such families are called *Inugami-suji* or Inugami lineages. These lineages are detested within the community, and most social interactions, especially marriage, are avoided. Because of this, Inugami families repeatedly intermarry within their own clan, making their 'blood' increasingly concentrated."
Shisho held up a finger while lying on his back, acting secretive.
"Contrary to their name, Inugamis are often depicted looking like small rats. Some records even describe them as dogs the size of a single bean. Inugami lineages sic these creatures on their rivals, bringing about sudden physical ailments like stomachaches or high fevers. People possessed by an Inugami have Shugendo monks or priests find the cause, identifying whose specific Inugami is afflicting them. After that, they go to the house of the identified Inugami lineage and…"
"Offer tribute?" I interrupted.
Shisho shook his head at me.
"They go to complain. To tell them, 'Stop acting outside the bounds of human decency.'"
Legend has it that Inugami beliefs survive mostly in rural farming areas. In a tight-knit community where human relationships are deep and intense, when an unreasonable disaster occurs, blaming it on a specific individual is probably just one of the gears in Japan's old social structure.
It's also a factor that creates discriminatory classes. However, Shisho noted that Inugami lineages are slightly different in meaning from the so-called discriminated buraku communities.
"Inugami families are invariably wealthy. Most of them are upstart landowners born around the time when a commodity and monetary economy began permeating rural villages. In a village where owning land and farming fields were everything, some households grew magically wealthy by lending land, lending money, and distributing cash crops. And people who couldn't understand this paradigm shift thought: *'That family got rich because they use an Inugami. They greedily covet our land and wealth, exploiting us using sorcery.'* They say the lack of money, the lack of land, a bad stomach, an injury—it's all the fault of the Inugami lineage. By believing that, they might be trying to maintain some sort of balance as a community."
People in the old days used to say someone losing their mind was possessed by a fox or a dog, right? Shisho continued.
"This isn't limited to Inugamis; fox possession, snake lineages, and monkey lineages are all the same. Pretending to lose your mind is very easy, and furthermore, it makes it easy to express what is possessing you. If it's a fox, you act like a fox; if it's a dog, you act like a dog. By doing that, the existence of a possessed lineage—and the harm they are causing—can be reaffirmed among the exploited people."
To me, it sounded like he was saying it was all an "act."
The Inugami wasn't some terrifying, supernatural entity—or rather, even if it harbored the darkness of human hearts, it was merely one of the systems in rural villages for resolving concrete frustrations. That was how it sounded to me.
Shisho, who had been speaking comfortably, suddenly fell silent. I felt suffocated by the weird silence.
In that silence, the image of Kyosuke collapsing at the four-way intersection the previous day flashed through my mind, along with the chill that had attacked me afterward, and I began to feel increasingly sick.
Once again, Shisho slowly opened his mouth.
"There is a record passed down about how to create an Inugami that goes like this. First, you bury a dog in the ground, leaving only its head exposed, and let it starve. And when starvation reaches its absolute limit, you place food right in front of its nose, and the moment the dog stretches its neck out to snap at it, you chop off its head with a machete. That head, filled with intense 'intent,' is placed in a box, cursed, and made into an Inugami. At that time, the remaining body is left buried in the road, and by having unsuspecting people trample over it every day, the dog's 'intent' is sustained and grows even stronger. It's considered even more ideal if that road is a busy four-way intersection."
"Ugh."
I involuntarily clutched my mouth. I felt like an ominous premonition was crackling inside my head.
It was just past ten in the morning when Yukio arrived, riding a scooter with a loud, tearing roar.
"Oh, Ryu. Rare to see you out greeting people, meow," he said, patting Ryu's head as the dog sat at the edge of the eaves. I had carefully observed Ryu's face when he slowly crawled out of his doghouse to eat in the morning, but the veil of memory was still too thick, and I could only feel to the extent of, "I'm not sure, but it looks like Ryu."
"Well then, let's get going right away."
Yukio led the way on his scooter, and we followed behind him in a car Shisho drove, which he had borrowed from his uncle.
I should add that initially, when Kyosuke tried to get into the driver's seat, Shisho told him something like, "A beginner mark driver should quietly sit in the back," to which Kyosuke retorted, "As if your driving is anything great," almost turning the atmosphere sour.
Yukio's "teacher" apparently really was a school teacher. Yukio said he was taught by him back in elementary school. After retiring and his own children becoming independent, he bought land deep in the mountains, built a house, and had been living quietly there with his wife.
"When you work as a public servant in a countryside like this, you can't escape the duty of protecting 'tradishun,'" Yukio had said before we left, but he didn't seem entirely unhappy about learning the kagura dances himself.
"The teacher is a bit particular, so please don't get upset even if he says weird things."
I recalled the mystical appearance of the white-robed dancer I had seen in my childhood.
After hitting the national highway for a bit, the car ran along the river, turned toward the mountains again, and from there climbed a mountain road endlessly. The road was bad, with fragments of broken rocks scattered all over the asphalt here and there.
"Aren't these falling rocks?" Shisho muttered, carefully dodging the stones nonetheless.
The sunlight was somewhat milder than yesterday, and opening the car window let in a breeze that provided just the right amount of coolness.
Just as I leaned forward, thinking I caught a glimpse of a snake's black body on the mountain slope, koko in the backseat spoke up.
"You shouldn't stay away from the bike."
Until just a moment ago, she had been playfully tickling Kyosuke next to her and making a fuss, but her voice now had a stark, serious tone. I instinctively shifted my gaze forward.
I thought she meant we were about to lose sight of Yukio, but that wasn't it. Just as I was about to turn back toward koko to ask what she meant, a strange thing happened.
Yukio's scooter, without any sign of accelerating, smoothly drifted farther and farther away.
I thought our car had lost speed on the slope, but that wasn't it. The speedometer stayed in the exact same position. Before I could understand what was happening, our car was left behind the scooter, and Yukio's white helmet disappeared deep into the winding mountain road without ever looking back.
"Step on the gas," Kyosuke said sharply, but Shisho only replied, "I am," staring straight ahead with a serious expression.
Neither had we slowed down, nor had the scooter sped up. To my eyes, the road itself seemed to be stretching out. I looked around, but the same mountain scenery just repeated, and I couldn't figure out where on earth it was "warped."
Before I knew it, we had completely lost sight of Yukio's scooter. It was a single, winding road. Until we caught up, we had no choice but to keep going. Shisho dropped a gear, but it just made the engine roar louder without any effect.
"This is bad," he muttered while shifting the gear back.
"Is this some kind of curse?"
To Shisho's light tone, Kyosuke replied flatly, "I don't know."
Unable to believe what was happening, my eyes darted frantically around. It was still early in the morning. Everything felt like a joke.
"Really bad."
Looking ahead, I felt the road was getting narrower and narrower. The curves were also becoming sharper, and the scenery through the windshield was entirely trees, trees, and more trees.
The green color and the black soil of the mountain seemed to press in like walls.
What was barely two lanes was now completely one lane. The guardrail had vanished as well. To the right was a ravine. If we fell off, there would surely be no surviving. Judging by their reactions, there was no doubt the other three were seeing the exact same things I was.
Mass hallucination? That word flashed through my mind. But could even the effect of the car's accelerator be bound by something like that?
"Hey," Shisho called out to koko. "Isn't this a dream?"
koko shook her head. Shisho nodded a little while later. It was a bizarre exchange.
"If something else weird would happen, it'd give us a hint. Like a human being hanging…"
…from a tree branch.
At Shisho's whispered tone, I instinctively shrank back.
I genuinely felt like such an eerie sight might appear deep within the surrounding mountain forests, and the hairs on the back of my neck bristled sharply. The road stretching forward and the road stretching back. An image flashed through my head that both ends were somehow connected somewhere in the winding mountains, and a chill ran through me.
Shisho kept desperately turning the steering wheel through the approaching sharp curves. It was as if he was afraid to stop.
Something abnormal, something abnormal. As those phrases repeated in my mind, I felt a familiar sight briefly flash within my line of sight. I strained my eyes toward the mountain slope, but it rushed past in an instant.
A short while later, the same thing appeared ahead of us once more. The moment I saw it, I shouted.
"A snake!"
With incredible reflexes, Shisho slammed on the brakes. The car stopped just short of scraping against the curving slope.
Kyosuke opened the backseat door and leaped out. Immediately climbing up a tree root, he spotted the black snake lying sprawled across the mountainside. We also got out of the car and approached.
Looking closer, a long nail was driven deep into its black head. Pierced from the top of its head down to its jaw, pinned to the ground, the snake was dead. Its writhing body amidst the short grass looked like pitch-black blood welling up like groundwater. Kyosuke hooked his right-hand fingers around the nail and pulled it out.
At that moment, from high above.
From a place that could only be described as the sky above, a deafening scream echoed out. It was a voice that was neither male nor female, nor entirely human nor beast.
Yet the next moment—though it was an indescribable sensation—I instantly knew it was an auditory hallucination. And I was struck by an eerie premonition that the scene right in front of my eyes was about to flip over like a page. Tree branches rustled uneasily, and my legs froze stiff as pillars.
"Get back in the car," Shisho's voice snapped me out of it, and I jumped into the passenger seat as if fleeing.
Without even time to put on my seatbelt, the car accelerated violently. And the moment we rounded the next curve, Yukio's scooter appeared right in front of us. It was running down the mountain road, looking no different than before when it had been pulling away, its white helmet bobbing up and down.
The road had somehow returned to its original width, and though dented in places, the guardrails were properly on both sides. I was speechless, slowly shaking my head. As if we had been trapped in a green labyrinth, time hadn't passed at all, and everything connected back seamlessly.
I stood dazed by an event that felt like a daydream.
"You really did it now," Shisho exhaled deeply, letting his body sink back into the seat. "To think that was the work of a human…"
His voice sounded as though pale blue flames were flickering at the edges of his words.
When I looked at Kyosuke, he was holding the nail that had been driven into the snake earlier.
"Hold onto it."
The moment Shisho said that, Kyosuke tossed it away out the window.
"Hey," Shisho chided, his tone sounding more like a sigh than actual anger.
Kyosuke looked away, saying, "Unnecessary things invite more unnecessary things."
Shisho stared resentfully into the rearview mirror. Up ahead, Yukio took one hand off the handlebars and pointed toward the mountain side.
We must be getting close to our destination. That seemed to be what it meant. Soon, we arrived at a detached house standing alone deep in the mountains. It was a traditional Japanese house built very similarly to my uncle's. They kept chickens in a large yard.
Yukio took off his helmet and called out toward the house, "Teeach-er!", and I approached from behind, whispering into his ear.
"Didn't you lose sight of our car just now?"
"Huh?" Yukio asked, shaking his head with a puzzled look.
I figured as much. That phenomenon had probably reacted to our spiritual awareness. To Yukio, it must have just been an uneventful mountain road.
However, it was clear we had been targeted. I felt a malice that felt like a "warning." It was of the exact same quality as the one I had felt at that four-way intersection where Kyosuke had injured his foot.
I looked at Shisho's face, but he only shook his head slightly, as if telling us to let things take their course.
"These are the people I called about earlier."
Yukio said, stepping inside the entryway and calling out to the back. Eventually, a reply came, and we were invited into the house. We were led to a tatami-floored guest room, and feeling intimidated by the orderly atmosphere of the interior, we sat formally in seiza and waited. We heard the sound of creaking corridors, and a white-haired man appeared from beyond the sliding paper doors. Since Yukio had said he was his elementary school teacher, I had imagined someone a bit younger, but he looked close to seventy. The teacher stood at the entrance of the guest room, glaring down at the interior, and shouted at Yukio who was sitting cross-legged.
"What kind of freaks have you gone and brought here?!"
"Wha—?" Yukio's eyes bulged in shock. Startled, I looked at the faces of my companions.
With a stern expression on his face, the teacher spun around on his heel and stomped angrily out of the room.
Flustered, Yukio chased after him. Left behind, the rest of us could only sit in stunned silence. But Shisho wore a strangely delighted expression and said:
"That old man said, 'What kind of *mono* have you brought here?' But he didn't use the *mono* for 'person' [者]; he used the *mono* for 'specter' [物]."
Or perhaps the *mono* written as 'demon/ogre' [鬼]… Shisho muttered, writhing his body as if tickled.
Kyosuke watched him with cold eyes. Presently, the sliding doors opened once more, and an old woman, presumably the teacher's wife, quietly lined up cups of tea in front of us.
"Excuse me—"
Just as I started to speak, the teacher reappeared, accompanied by Yukio with a deep frown etched between his brows. As they entered, the old woman slipped away past the sliding doors. Pulling a zabuton cushion closer with a smooth motion, the teacher sat down in front of us. Yukio sat nervously behind him, scratching his head.
"Now then."
The teacher spoke, fixing a piercing glare upon us from deep within his wrinkles.
"I'll say this beforehand: my original duty is to exorcise the likes of you lot."
His eyes were fixed straight on Shisho.
"Now, what is this business you want to ask me about?"
Without a hint of intimidation, Shisho casually opened his mouth.
"I've done a bit of studying on Izanagi-ryu. I got the impression that Esoteric Buddhism, Onmyodo, Shugendo, and Jukondo are all blended together into a single whole. Among them, the influence of Onmyodo seems particularly strong. With the Tensha Shinto Prohibition Act of 1870 and the subsequent suppression, the Tsuchimikado main family as well as all sorts of folk Onmyoji should have had their lives snuffed out—yet how is it that such a practical form of it still survives in this region?"
Without letting his expression crack, the teacher answered simply, "I don't know."
"Well, that's fine. Ignorance of the law, is it? Come to think of it, wasn't the setting of the 'Musasabi-Moma Incident' around these parts as well? …Ah, I digressed. In any case, in this Heian era—ah, Reiwa era—I hear that Izanagi-ryu still earnestly performs karma-subjugation and sick-patient prayers, and sometimes even casts *shiki* rituals."
"You mean the Shikiko? …Throwing around words you barely understand."
"Well, I admit my knowledge is superficial. What I actually want to know about is the Inugami lineage."
"That has nothing to do with us."
The teacher replied flatly.
"Please listen. As you know, Inugami lineages are a folklore widely distributed across Shikoku."
Shisho spoke while remaining in seiza.
He said that because there are places where the techniques to exorcise Inugamis are passed down, there is consequently room for Inugamis to lurk in the depths of society. Especially in a land where such techniques are woven into daily life, Inugamis exist right next to the mundane.
"On our way here, we saw a snake with a long nail driven straight through its head. It was clearly set up as a tool for casting a curse. If someone were to find the secret place where the body of the Inugami being used by a certain someone is buried… what on earth would that person do?"
The moment Shisho stopped talking, all the teacups in front of us simultaneously began to rattle.
Thinking it was an earthquake, I instinctively looked up at the electric light cord. The cord was swaying slightly, and the shoji paper where light streamed in from outside was also faintly vibrating. Kyosuke scooped up a drop of spilled tea with his finger and stared intently at it.
I figured it was probably just a minor earthquake, but an indescribable anxiety stirred in my chest.
After the shaking subsided, the teacher slowly opened his mouth.
"Ine."
Huh? Shisho asked back, and I whispered into his ear, "That's the local dialect for 'Go home.'"
"Does that mean we have no choice but to leave this land?"
Shisho stood up, approached the shoji screen, and put his hand on the wooden frame. With a pleasant, sliding rustle of wood, blinding light poured in. Beyond the veranda, inside a fence built in the yard, chickens were pecking at the ground.
Watching that scene, Shisho muttered:
"They didn't panic at all."
It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the earthquake earlier. Indeed, there had been no sound of chickens making a fuss.
"Can't something be done?"
To Shisho's words, the teacher merely shook his head. Yukio looked flustered.
"It really seems like I'm thoroughly disliked here. Local history researchers and folklore scholars must visit sometimes for fieldwork, right? Do you chase away outsiders like that too?"
"When demons come instead of humans, it's customary to drive them off with a volley of stones."
Demons, huh? Shisho muttered in a voice barely audible, then looked up again.
"Speaking of demons, I hear that in Izanagi-ryu, people make paper cutouts called *hei* to lure invisible demons out for rituals. Are they called the demonic horde? River Misaki, Water Deity Mentatsu…"