Around the spring of my second year in university, I casually dropped by the apartment of my upperclassman and occult mentor. When I opened the door, he was sitting in the middle of his cramped room, looking at a photograph with a troubled expression. "What kind of photo is that?" I asked. "A psychic photograph." I stepped back a little. It wasn't that psychic photographs terrified me in themselves, but the real issue was the sheer volume. Albums were scattered all over the tatami floor, and there looked to be hundreds of them. "Where on earth did you get all these?!" I demanded. "A dealer," he replied, without taking his eyes off the pictures. Apparently, there was a shop in Osaka that specialized in this. When psychic photographs are brought into temples and shrines, the owners naturally ask for exorcisms, but they almost always ask to have the photos disposed of as well. Instead of being burned, the ones that get siphoned off end up on the collector's market. It was an unbelievable world.
I picked up a few and looked at them, but every single one was intensely disturbing. There were none of those mild ones that just looked like a bit of mist. There was a photo of a child playing in a park, missing their head. There was a photo of a man standing expressionless in water only up to his knees, in a spot at a beach that was obviously deep. And a family photo that inexplicably featured something resembling an altar... I asked my master tentatively, "These have been exorcised, right?" "Do you really think monks and priests who do proper exorcisms would leak stuff like this into the shadows?" "Well, in that case..." I tried to leave, but my master grabbed my arm. "No way!" Just being in this room felt like it would get me cursed. I wondered if this was what it felt like to encounter ten master detectives in a snowbound mountain lodge.
Resigned, I sat down in the corner of the room. My master was still staring at the photos with a heavy frown. Suddenly, I noticed a strange photo among the pile right in front of me and picked it up. Strange, or rather, it was strange precisely because it wasn't strange. It was just an ordinary landscape photograph. "Master, what's this?" I showed it to him. "Ah, there's normally a woman's face at the base of this tree... Wait? It's gone. It vanished. Well, things like that happen." Easier said than done! That was way too terrifying! I was practically on the verge of pissing my pants right there. Then, I sat quietly in the corner for a while. Suddenly, my master spoke. "Back in the old days, people used to say that having your picture taken right in the center would steal your soul or shorten your lifespan. Do you know why?"
"People in the center tend to be teachers, bosses, or older folks, so they're more likely to die soon anyway," I replied. "When people looked at old photos and talked about how this person had died, and that person had died too, those rumors probably just started naturally." "Then what do you think about a photo like this?" With that, my master pulled out an old black-and-white photograph. It showed three men in kimonos standing in a row in someone's yard. Around the head of the middle-aged man in the center, there was a hazy blur that looked uncrannily like a face. "Looking at this, you'd think your soul had been ripped right out of you." Indeed. If the man himself had seen this, he probably wouldn't have felt like he was among the living. My master made some lame pun like "Did your soul-gone?" [Tamatamatte?] as he slipped the photo back into the stack. "It's strange, though. They talk about something as dangerous as your soul being taken or ripped out, but it doesn't kill you instantly—it supposedly just shortens your lifespan at worst." I suppose he had a point. I had never thought about it that way.
"Maybe people in the past believed that souls had mass, and that losing a part of it..." That seemed to be where this was heading. "Then what happens if the spirit of the soul itself is captured in a photograph?" "You mean like a psychic photo? It must be as agonizing as having your flesh sliced off," I replied with a cheap joke. But when I thought about it more seriously, "Still, that's ultimately based on ancient superstitions, so you can't generalize it." I wore a smug look, thinking I had cornered him. My master replied nonchalantly, "What if it's the spirit of an ancient person who actually held those beliefs?" Hmm. "What would happen then?" "Wouldn't they come back to take it-back?" My master whispered those words. I wished he would stop. Even while tormenting me like that, my master went back to staring intensely at the photos with a troubled frown. Noticing that he had been looking at the exact same photo over and over again since I entered the room, I asked, "What is it?" fully knowing I was stepping on a landmine.
My master silently handed me two photographs. I took them, trembling. "Whoa!" I let out an involuntary gasp and looked away. I couldn't tell much from just a quick glance, but I had a violently bad feeling about them. "The exact same thing appears in photos taken at completely different places. Let's see..." My master flipped through a list. "Found it. The one on the right was taken in Urayasu, Chiba, during a family trip to a certain mouse kingdom. The other was a streetscape photo taken in Fukuyama, Hiroshima." He added that photos with attached information fetched higher prices. "And of course, the people who took them were different. Four years apart, and six years apart. They just happened to find their way to the same dealer, so there's no connection between them. Supposedly." Driven by curiosity, I tried to open my eyes just a slit.
At that moment, my master said, "Wait," stopping me, and walked over to the window. "It's nighttime," he muttered with that same troubled frown. Wondering what on earth he was talking about, I turned the photos face down. When my master pulled back the window curtain, the sun had completely set outside. I remember arriving around 5:00 PM, so it wouldn't be strange for it to be getting dark soon, I thought as I checked my wristwatch. The short hand was pointing at the 9. *What?!* Had really that much time passed? As I stared in shock, my master bit his lip and muttered, "This is bad. Really bad." Then he asked me, "What time did you think it was?" "Around 6:30, I guess." I certainly felt like time had been flying by, but I figured I had just been overly focused on looking at the photos. "I thought it was noon."
That was impossible! Yet my master's eyes weren't laughing. Had something warped our internal clocks? "Let's call it a day," my master said, shrugging his shoulders. Even though I didn't fully understand what was happening, I desperately wanted to go home. As I tried to clean up the photos scattered across the floor, my hand stopped right in front of the two photos I had faced down earlier. I was troubled by my master's words that "the exact same thing is in them," but my sixth sense was screaming at me: *You'd better not look.* At that moment, my master looked around the floor with a strangely amused expression. "It makes you truly realize that humans have an unconscious self-defense instinct, doesn't it?" What was he babbling about now? "What do you do at a zoo?" The conversation had leaped too far, and I couldn't make sense of it. "Go look at the animals, I suppose." "True. We pay money to go to the zoo, stand in front of various cages, and watch the animals inside. But how does it look from the animals' perspective? They're just sitting in their cages, and monkeys wearing colorful clothes keep showing up one after another without anyone asking them to."
I suppose I was supposed to equate the animals with psychic photographs. I was starting to grasp what he was getting at. Staring at the floor, my master murmured as if talking to himself: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster... No wait." "Was that Nietzsche?" "He who looks into the abyss should see to it that the abyss also looks into you." [Note: the Japanese text actually blends these two famous Nietzsche quotes in a specific way]. With a look that made it impossible to tell how serious he was, my master pointed at the photos scattered on the floor. "Why did you face those down?" When I heard that, my heart skipped a beat. It wasn't just those two photos from earlier. Among the countless pictures, several others were now lying face down. I hadn't been conscious of it at all. I honestly hadn't been conscious of it at all. Every photo should have been facing up. Did *I* turn them over? A chill ran through me, and my whole body trembled. "He who looks into the abyss..." So it *was* Nietzsche, after all! I didn't have the energy left to say that, let alone the courage to fight any monsters or flip the photographs back over.
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