It was the early autumn of my second year in university. On the way back from buying groceries at a convenience store with an upperclassman from my club, as we approached a narrow side street branching off from the main residential road, I was struck by a mild ringing in my ears. Right after that, I felt like I could see a vague shadow on the road ahead. I stopped and wiped my glasses, but sure enough, a shadow about the size of a human was swaying unsteadily. It somehow lacked a sense of reality. Four or five shadows were swaying as they turned down the narrow street. Beyond it spread the ordinary scenery of a daytime residential neighborhood. My upperclassman turned toward that intersection and looked down the path the shadows had turned into. "Is that it?" I imitated him, stopping to peer down the road. Past the rows of houses, I could see the black-and-white striped mourning curtains. And multiple shadows were making their way along, with an unstable, shifting fragility. It felt somehow sickening. Like seeing the flattened corpse of a cat on the road. "Come to think of it, there's a crematorium around here, isn't there?" "Yeah..." He gave me a half-hearted reply. To someone who looked at things not of this world on a daily basis, perhaps this sight wasn't all that interesting. "So you're able to see them now. You couldn't tell around this time last year, though..." From that slight tone of disdain, I understood he was talking about me.
The man I half-feared and half-mockingly called "Master" had a stance of deliberately refusing to teach me things I couldn't see. What a nasty personality. "What are those?" "Well, they're a kind of ghost, I suppose. Though it might be more fitting to call them bugs swarming to a light." Calling them bugs was going too far. The moment I thought that, one of the distant shadows seemed to turn toward me, lacking any distinction between front and back. "As long as the image of funerals being closely tied to death exists in the mentality of the Japanese, it must be a specially intriguing place for the dead who are produced year after year. Still, they're just bugs, though." Master started walking toward where the mourning curtains were visible. I followed him and entered the narrow path. It felt a little difficult to walk. As if the places where the faint shadows had stepped were sticky. We reached a building where many people dressed in mourning clothes were going in and out. I stopped at a distance. Was a funeral about to begin? Urged on by someone beckoning at the entrance, a few middle-aged women hurried past us. Mingling with the people in black, shadows with undefined outlines were also entering the funeral hall. Foreign objects. That word came to mind, and I felt violently ill. Master was watching the scene with a bored expression.
Suddenly, I remembered a mysterious experience from my childhood. I remembered being led by my mother to a crowded place, told, "We're going to a funeral." We seemed to have arrived quite early, and in a gravel-covered courtyard, I followed my mother around as she exchanged greetings with uncles and aunts I was seeing for the first time. Finding that increasingly boring, I said "I need to pee" and slipped away. As I walked alone, a little girl was beckoning to me from behind a row of large flowers. "Let's play," she said. And the two of us ran around exploring various places, searching for fun spots the adults wouldn't notice. Eventually, my mother found me and dragged me back, saying, "You have to offer incense." I looked back to see where that girl had gone, but there was no sign of her. Dropping wood-chip-like things into the flickering ashes and looking up, the girl I had been playing with just moments before was inside a photo frame surrounded by strong-smelling flowers. Back then, I didn't really understand what it meant to die. Even so, without fully understanding, for some reason, I felt a little sad.
As I was immersed in such memories, a buzz arose around the crematorium. It seemed the memorial service had ended. Less than an hour had passed yet. I only had the impression that in the old days, the monk's chanting went on endlessly and took forever. Was this also a sign of the times? Right before my eyes and Master's, the hearse for the departure of the coffin was brought around. No matter how many times I saw it, it was a shape that could only be mistaken for a joke. Soon, in front of the many people seeing them off, the plain wood coffin was loaded into the vehicle. Amidst them, I caught sight of a middle-aged woman wiping away tears with a handkerchief, but as I stared at her profile, I could tell it was an act. I was about to let out a sigh, but at that moment, I saw a faint, unoutlined shadow clinging to the hand holding the handkerchief. Looking closely, many shadows were clinging around the hands of the people in mourning.
I felt nauseous and pressed a hand over my mouth. The shadows moved sluggishly, fondling, gripping, and pinching the fingers—specifically the thumbs—of those hands. The people being touched didn't notice. They were simply watching over the hearse about to depart, each with their own way of feeling sadness. When I looked at Master's face, he just said, "Absurd," and shrugged his shoulders. *Hide your thumb when you see a hearse.* There certainly is a superstition like that. It had somehow been ingrained in me since I was little. I had thought it was nothing more than a superstition. My legs, rooted to the spot by the sight before me, trembled. Master looked at me and said, "Superstition or not." "Things that have become common sense for the Japanese are the same for the dead." Shadows barely mimicking human shapes were writhing on the road in broad daylight. And they were earnestly toying with the thumbs of the lined-up people, as if they didn't know what else to do. It made me feel deeply sad. "An Edo-period essayist named Oyamada Kiyoshi wrote something like this in his *Matsuya Nikki*: 'Because the soul enters and exits from between the thumbnail, we grip and hide it in times of awe.' Even though it's an ancient superstition, the part about *why* we hide it has been forgotten. If you were to teach them, they'd surely be delighted. They'd be delighted and try to slip in through between your thumbnails." It was sickening. Writhing shadows. The high-pitched sound of a car horn. Insincere tears. Black and white curtains. I continued to fight an unbearable nausea.
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