"Well, I'll be going then. But Kana, please. Keep it moderate." The head priest slid the *fusuma* door open and began to step out. His greasy, bald head caught the glow of the electric bulb, reflecting the light strangely. Kurotani Shogetsu, the father of Natsuo and Aki, was, as his name suggested, a man born on New Year's Day—a naturally auspicious beginning. Though he had inherited the temple from his parents, he had a commercial streak for shady practices like exorcisms and ritual burnings, and the local parishioners were reportedly exasperated by him. Worse still, he was deeply addicted to gambling—mahjong, pachinko, bicycle racing, and boat races. There was even a well-known anecdote about him secretly pawning a generations-old Buddha statue. On top of that, he drank heavily and loved chasing women, making him the very embodiment of a corrupt, worldly monk. His wife had long since given up on him; they weren't legally divorced, but they were living apart. Director Ogawa was his wife's younger brother, which made Natsuo the director's nephew. "Just go already," Natsuo dismissed him coldly. Looking thoroughly dejected, Shogetsu shuffled out. As he did, the hem of his vestment got caught in the sliding door. "Huh?" he muttered from the other side, and right as he spoke, the edge of the robe was yanked firmly through the crack and disappeared. Aki let out a small, giggling laugh at the comical movement. We weren't in the main hall; we were in the residential quarters of the Kurotani home. It was a spacious, tatami-matted room facing a garden. In the center stood a low table, the kind you find in hot spring inns, and we were sitting around it on floor cushions. Aki, who apparently had a frail constitution, had been spotted by Shogetsu just moments earlier and forced to take her post-lunch medicine, leaving her with a scrunched-up face, though her mood seemed to have recovered. "You shouldn't say that," Aki said softly with a small laugh after the priest's footsteps faded away. I fell back into that strange sensation again. Earlier, under the cypress tree, she had muttered, "They're back," and nodded repeatedly at empty space. It was the exact same thing. Noticing my bewildered expression, the Master asked me, "Do you know how many people are in this room right now?" Hearing this, I instinctively looked around the faces seated at the table in turn. The Master. Natsuo. Aki. And myself. "There are four of us." After I gave my answer, the Master asked Natsuo the exact same question. Natsuo wore a disinterested look, but muttered flatly, "Seven."
Huh? How did he figure that? I looked around the room once more, but aside from the people sitting around the table, there was no one else there. "Close, but not quite. There are eight." The Master grinned, then looked at me meaningfully. Did he mean ghosts? He was including the number of invisible presences. If that was the case, even I... Instead of my eyes, I expanded a different sense and concentrated my awareness. I cast the roots of that perception throughout the room, searching for a place where the presence of something non-human lingered stagnantly. Near the ceiling. Something was there. Something wandering. That was all I could find, though. Five in total, including us. Yet Natsuo said seven, and the Master said eight. What did this mean? The Master continued. "Or so I'd like to say. But my answer isn't necessarily correct. Now then, let's ask Her Ladyship." With exaggerated politeness, the Master turned toward Aki. "Now, how many people are in this room right now?" he asked. Aki blinked her eyes and began to count, pointing her finger starting with Natsuo sitting beside her. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten..." Her fingertip moved past the table, drifted toward the empty wall, and then changed angle slightly as it swept back. "...twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four..." At twenty-seven, she pointed right at me, and her small finger continued moving toward empty space. "Ah, alright, that's enough. That's enough." The Master stopped her. Eh? What is this? A creeping unease settled deep in my stomach, making me fidgety. What was she counting? What on earth was she counting? The room smelled faintly of old wooden architecture. Facing the garden, with fresh light pouring in through the window glass, it felt as though an entirely different room had been superimposed over this one. White and black. Negative and positive. What was lurking in there?
Yet, that unsettling sensation was so faint that every time the little birds playing in the garden went *ch-ch-ch...*, I was snapped back to the reality of myself sitting in a completely ordinary landscape. "People who don't believe in ghosts often say this: If people died and became ghosts, wouldn't the whole world be crawling with them? ...And they're right. The world *is* crawling with ghosts. The only difference is whether you can see them or not." The Master pointed to the corner of the ceiling—the exact spot I had sensed. "There are strong ones like that, and weak ones like that over there, or right here. Whether something is recognized as a ghost depends on the density of the remaining thought-form and the precision of the receiver's perception. You know what a Landolt C is, right? It's that circle with a gap in it used in eye exams, shaped like the letter C. To you, the bottom row might just look like a line of tiny circles or dots. But to someone with sharper sight, they all look like Cs pointing down or to the side." "Hey, Natsuo," the Master called out, breaking his gaze from me. "Which ones do you see?" Looking sullen, Natsuo pointed his finger, tracing the three locations the Master had just indicated: The ceiling, the edge of the cabinet in the back, and somewhere around the calendar hanging on the closet door. I couldn't sense anything except for the ceiling. Cold sweat began to bead on my forehead. "Four plus three makes seven. Too bad. Over by the wardrobe, there's another one overlapping," the Master remarked. At that, Natsuo raised one eyebrow with a "Huh?" and yawned, saying, "Maybe so." He had one knee pulled up on his cushion, resting his arm across it. It wasn't the kind of posture you'd take in front of guests, but then again, sitting properly was just beyond this guy's nature. "The lingering thoughts of the dead start off with varying degrees of strength. Not only that, but as time passes, they gradually fade. It's aging, like wear and tear. Even someone with immense regret or deep-seated resentment will eventually fade away. Put another way, the old samurai ghosts you can still see today are seriously dangerous entities. But that very process of fading away is where my limits and Natsuo's limits lie." The Master spread his right hand as if to encompass the entire room.
"In reality, they probably haven't vanished. They're just invisible because the receiver's precision is too low. Beneath the row of Landolt Cs you thought was the very bottom, there's another row. A row that looks like mere blank space to someone who can't see. The world is filled with those kinds of ghosts, whose existence has become infinitely thin." A rainbow suddenly popped into my head. That seven-colored rainbow isn't actually divided into seven distinct bands; it's made of a smooth gradient of light ranging from red to violet. Depending on the country or region, people might call a rainbow seven-colored, five-colored, three-colored, or even just two-colored. I perceived the presences in this room as five colors, Natsuo saw seven, and the Master distinguished eight. Yet Aki could discern even finer nuances between the colors we saw. And not just a few—an overwhelming number. Dozens, hundreds of brilliant, hyper-vivid colors. Aki nodded along as she listened to the somewhat abstruse conversation unfolding right before her. Was this child actually seeing spirits that even the Master, with his exceptional spiritual awareness, couldn't perceive? Even hearing it, I found it hard to believe. "For instance, even if I can only faintly make out a face, this child sees the entire body, right down to the pattern on their clothes. It's the same with ghosts from hundreds of years ago. Spirits whose thoughts have mostly scattered and thinned away due to the passage of time, leaving them with no connection whatsoever to this physical world. We can't see them or touch them, and they can't exert any influence on us from their side. You could say such entities have already vanished from this world. Yet, right alongside the world defined by normal people like us, a different landscape seems to be spreading out behind a skin as thin as tissue paper." 'Normal people,' he says. Coming from the Master. What does that make the rest of us?
"Wanting to know where this child's limits lay, I once had her describe what she saw so I could draw portraits. Once I started sketching them one after another, they just kept coming... a whole parade of people wearing ancient Japanese clothing like you'd learn about in Japanese history class. We're not talking centuries here. I can definitely trace them back to the Nara period at least." I couldn't tell how much of it was true, but the Master said this with genuine excitement. "However, I couldn't find any ghosts from the Kofun period. It might simply be a matter of probability due to the smaller population at the time, or perhaps that era marks this child's limit. But here's the thing." The Master lowered his voice slightly. "Among the portraits, there were also figures that looked like people from the pottery age or the stone age. If that's accurate, it means ghosts from the Kofun period are completely missing. That is remarkably interesting. Do you know why?" "No idea," I answered honestly, shaking my head. "It's because of the concept of *Yomi*—the underworld. This is a bit different from what we call the 'afterlife' today. It's not the place souls go after leaving the physical body. In myth, Yomi is connected directly via Yomotsu-hirasaka to Ashihara no Nakatsukuni— in other words, it's another world linked seamlessly to the land of Japan. It's a country of the dead sitting right next to the country of the living, and death simply meant moving there. In other words, for Japanese people of an era that held the concept of Yomi as part of their mentality, death meant going to Yomi while retaining a physical body, and the very idea of wandering this world of the living as a stray ghost or soul simply didn't exist." If Izanagi had succeeded in bringing his wife Izanami back from Yomi to Ashihara no Nakatsukuni, that would have been a return to life (*yomigare*) with her physical body intact, and for the dead to come to the world of the living meant nothing less than becoming a living person again. Therefore, vague and ambiguous things like ghosts were impossible. The Master spoke dramatically, as if revealing a secret. "Even through this child's eyes, you can't find a trace of anyone from that era anywhere. Fascinating, isn't it?" As the Master spoke happily, Natsuo punctured the mood with a sharp, "Tch." "Just get on with business already." As much as it panned the Master, I couldn't help but agree. It was a fascinating story, but we had to investigate the photograph and report back to Matsuura by nine o'clock tonight.
Glancing at the clock, I saw it was past three in the afternoon. Six hours left. The Master made a gesture acknowledging it and turned to speak to Aki. "Was that your friend who caught your dad's vestment in the door earlier?" "Ehehe," Aki put her index finger to her lips with a mischievous expression, turning toward the empty space beside her. Someone must have been there. A *shh* gesture? Of course, I couldn't see a damn thing. "Hi-chan, was it? Natsuo, can you see her?" When asked, Natsuo also shook his head from side to side. Among the countless spirits visible to her, Aki apparently had a close friend named Hi-chan. Though, to Aki herself, there didn't seem to be much distinction between the living and the dead. That Hi-chan was invisible to both Natsuo and the Master, meaning she should be a spirit of remarkably faint existence, yet she could somehow exert physical influence on reality, which made her a bit of a mystery. If she possessed the power to do that, the Master should at least be able to see her. "Ah, well, never mind. Tell Hi-chan not to pull any more pranks today." Aki nodded, turned her head to the side, and whispered something. Just a moment ago, she had acted as though she despised the Master, but now she was being remarkably obedient. I later learned that because I—a stranger—had tagged along, she had simply been over-excited. When the Master visited alone, she would sometimes barely say a word to him. "Now then, to business." Gauging Aki's mood, the Master pulled an envelope from his backpack. He lined up the five photographs from inside it onto the table. The one forced upon us by Tamura, and the four pushed onto us by Matsuura. All of them were photographs that a photo expert had concluded just hours ago were not psychic photos at all. Natsuo and Aki both leaned in eagerly to examine the pictures. "Well, these are—" Seeing the Master remain silent despite the looks demanding an explanation, I started to speak up. Instead, I was jabbed in the ribs to stop me. "Never mind the details."
When the Master said that, Natsuo nodded in agreement. "Yeah. I don't want to poke my nose into some stupid crap and get dragged into it needlessly." "I figured you'd say that. Aki, I have a favor to ask. Could you do that thing? *That* thing." With those words, the Master held his right hand over the photographs and made a stroking motion. Aki looked back and forth between the Master and the pictures, then glanced up at Natsuo's face. "Hey. That takes a toll on her afterwards. Don't ask so casually." When Natsuo spoke in a harsh tone, the Master rubbed his palms together in front of his face. "Just five. Only five pictures. Come on, Aki." Prompted like this, Aki gave a cautious nod. After letting out a sharp click of his tongue, Natsuo wore a stern expression and asked his younger sister, "Are you really okay?" "I've been feeling fine lately," the dark-haired girl replied with a bright smile. She cast a quick, shy glance in my direction. What were they going to do? Filled with intense curiosity, I watched how things would unfold right before my eyes. Natsuo stood up and began closing the wooden storm shutters over the windows. The Master brought over a candle from atop the cabinet and struck a match. As he shut out the outside light and turned off the room's electric lights, the candlelight flared larger. He stuck the candle into a heavy candleholder and moved it to the center of the table. The flame flickered in the faint draft blowing through the gaps in the *fusuma*, making the illuminated photographs seem to waver. A sudden chill ran down my spine. Even completely ordinary photographs would look eerily uncanny if displayed in a setting like this. "Alright, let's start from this end." The photos were arranged in the exact order we had shown them to the "photo shop." At the Master's cue, Aki nodded and, looking slightly tense, held her right hand over the first photograph. It was a snapshot from a drinking party. The faint glow of the candle was blocked by her small palm, plunging the picture beneath it into darkness. But it lasted only a second. Aki twirled her hand in the air with a smoothing motion, then withdrew it swiftly. The photograph reappeared beneath the candlelight. The moment it did, however, I felt a sudden shiver run through my skin, as if some kind of power, life force, or invisible energy had vanished right before my eyes.
What? I didn't know what was happening, but something definitely just occurred. I dropped my gaze to the photograph. There were no visible anomalies in the drinking party picture. What on earth had happened? "Look closely," the Master whispered in my ear. "The old man on the far left. He has his eyes closed, doesn't he?" Now that he mentioned it, both of his eyes were shut. He must have been blinded by the camera flash. The next second, however, the Master picked up the photo and flicked it in the air a few times as if brushing something off. Then he placed it back down on the table. True to form, the drinking party scene in the photo hadn't changed. Or rather... My eyes were instantly glued to the figure on the far left. The elderly man's eyes were now open. As if his previous state with them closed had been an absolute lie. "His eyes were open from the beginning. Remember that much at least." I didn't understand. Was this some kind of magic trick? As I sat there unconvinced, the Master continued. "It's this child's power. No one else can imitate it. She alters photographs that are supposed to eternally preserve a single frozen fraction of time, retroactively." The dead close their eyes, he murmured. "People who are currently dead close their eyes within photographs. And if the things captured in them are spiritual in nature, it triggers a certain change." The Master signaled to Aki. Reach for the next photo, she did. She swept her palm over it just like before and pulled it away smoothly. It was a photograph of a family at the beach. Once again, at first glance, there was no change. I looked at the faces of the parents and child, but their eyes remained open. The missing right knee and below were still missing. When the Master nodded, Aki hovered her hand over the next picture. It was a couple flashing peace signs while holding ice cream cones. Both of them had their eyes open, and the mysterious hand resting on the woman's shoulder showed no abnormalities either. In the subsequent photograph, taken in front of a house, the mother's eyes closed. Yet my memory was certain her eyes had been wide open in the shot. The faint figure of a man captured inside the house window showed no change. Though his face was vaguely visible, the original photo had never made his eye area distinct in the first place, so it was impossible to tell whether they were open or shut.
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