During the summer vacation of my second year in university, I tagged along with an acquaintance to the countryside. He had insisted, "You definitely have to come with me," so I agreed, but I was thoroughly annoyed by how it took eight grueling hours of switching between trains and buses to get there. The acquaintance was an occult-loving senior I’d met at university. I looked up to him as my "Master" while simultaneously making fun of him behind his back. When a guy like that grins and tells you to come along, you really have no choice. In the end, I just wanted to see something terrifying.
It was a small village nestled in the mountains right on a prefectural border. It sat at a high altitude, and despite it being the dead of summer, I felt an actual chill in the air. When we arrived at a single-story house surrounded by a hedge, an aunt came out to greet us, and I was introduced as a "relative." The Master was all smiles, but I felt an odd stiffness and awkwardness coming from the family that made me deeply uncomfortable. After we dropped our bags in the room assigned to us, I casually asked the Master about the situation. At first, he mumbled something vague like, "Well, they're distant relatives..." but when I pressed him further, he finally confessed.
The trip really had been far—far enough to make my backside go numb. Normally, if even a distant relative's young child were to visit during summer vacation, rural folks would be delighted. Except that this "child" was already a university student. For an adult relative with whom they'd had almost no contact to show up with a friend and ask to stay the night must have felt pretty creepy to the hosts on the other end. Of course, that distant blood relation was just an excuse to get us a place to stay. Ultimately, we were just here because we wanted to see something scary.
Living in that house was an exercise in feeling acutely unwelcome. Since there was nothing to do at the house, I mostly killed time by heading down to a nearby stream or wandering along mountain paths. As for the Master, I’d catch him wrestling with a university notebook from his luggage, only to suddenly wander off and randomly visit neighborhood homes, getting deep into conversation with the elderly residents. Knowing how the Master operated, I didn't say a word and just waited.
It was the sixth night. I was thinking with a bitter self-deprecation that I hadn't exchanged a single word with the family's two children yet, when the Master finally opened his mouth. "Fine, fine. You're so annoying, I'll tell you," he whispered, sitting cross-legged on the bedding with the sliding doors of the six-mat room firmly shut. "Do you know about the Graveyard and Burial Act?" he asked. "Basically, it's the law the government used to shift away from indigenous funeral customs like earth burial, sky burial, and exposure, and into state-managed cremation." "They stripped human death away from local folk customs," the Master said. "Did you notice, while wandering the mountains these past few days, that the graves are all relatively new?" I hadn't noticed. I had certainly looked at the graveyards, but... "It seems the hamlets around here used to practice a rather unusual form of funeral rite." Of course he had known about this before coming. He was here to verify something. My heart hammered in my chest. I felt like once I heard it, there would be no turning back.
The house was completely asleep. In the faint glow of a small nightlight, the Master spoke. "When someone died, they were apparently cremated, and the ashes were scattered in the fields. It was an old bit of wisdom to neutralize acidic soil. "However, the weird part isn't the cremation itself. "Up until the middle of the Edo period, the custom of burying the dead wasn't even common. Corpses were just things to be 'thrown away'." The chill in the air seemed to worsen. Even though it was summer. "There's an even bigger reason why they could turn corpses into ash and scatter them so casually on the fields here. "They didn't recognize the corpse as the person's true essence—the seat of their soul. The true essence was properly mourned and laid to rest. Extracted right out of the corpse."
For a second, I didn't understand the meaning of the word "extracted." "In this hamlet, there was no such thing as a traditional funeral association. "Handling funeral rites was the job of a hereditary line of sorcerers, a shaman family. They apparently used to be called *Ki*. "When someone died, the sorcerers took custody of the corpse. Eventually, a corpse with its 'essence' removed would be returned to the family, who would burn it and scatter it over their own fields. "The extracted 'essence' was placed in a wooden box and buried together under a stone managed by the *Ki*. "In a sense, this was their gravestone. Prayers to ancestral spirits and the cleansing of ritual impurities were directed at this stone, not a grave. "It seems they called this 'essence' *Onmi*. "The old folks really didn't want to say that word out loud, so it was a huge pain getting them to talk about it." I finally understood why the Master had come to such a mountain backwater. He wanted to see what was inside those wooden boxes. He was *that* kind of guy.
"This custom didn't exist in the neighboring hamlet just down the mountain. That's because there was a Jodo sect temple nearby, and the villagers were its parishioners. "Before the temple was built? Who knows. But it seems this custom survived in total isolation, kept alive by this single hamlet alone. "Even that custom came to an end in the Meiji era, ahead of the Graveyard and Burial Act. "That's why all the graves in this hamlet are from the Meiji period onward, and most of them probably date back to the Taisho and Showa eras." I went straight to sleep after that. That night, I had a dream that I was placed inside a wooden coffin while still alive.
The next morning. As I was eating breakfast with the family, they dropped heavy hints about whether we wouldn't be heading home soon. *We aren't going home until I see what's inside that box,* I thought to myself as I shoveled down tasteless rice. For some reason, the day felt deeply unsettling, so I didn't go into the mountains. I spent the entire day sitting by the nearby river, completely spaced out.
*I don't care what's inside that wooden box,* I thought. *What I really want to know is what the people of this hamlet in the past considered the human essence to actually be.* I didn't want to know. But I could imagine. The only difference was which organ it was. Pressing a hand against my stomach, I sat on a rock by the riverbank and flicked water drops away. From far off, the village children watched the foreign intruders. Those kids probably didn't even know such customs had ever existed.
That night. In the dead of night, during the hour of the ox, the Master lowered his voice and said, "Let's go."
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