Around my third year of university, I was barreling steadily down the path of a hopeless student. I had already started skipping lectures in my second year, and by the time my third year rolled around, I stopped setting foot on campus entirely. That spring, a classmate named Sunami, who worked at the same part-time job, had asked me timidly at work, "The deadline to submit your course registration was yesterday, did you turn yours in?" That was how I found out I was being held back for another year—shameful behavior for a child, to put it mildly. So, what was I doing instead of going to university? I spent my days and nights drowning in gambling like pachinko, mahjong, and horse racing, constantly struggling for living money, and working part-time jobs on both weekdays and holidays just to afford food. It was a pathetic existence. I still showed up to my university circle occasionally, but my closest senior had graduated, and I drifted away naturally. That senior had gone on to graduate school and landed a job as a librarian at the university library. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call him the mastermind who led me astray, though I never expected him to land such a straight-laced job. For the two years since I entered university, we had hung out and played together constantly, but the moment one of us was no longer a student, a sudden wall seemed to go up between us, and we naturally grew apart. While building our respective new worlds—workplace colleagues, gambling buddies, part-time coworkers—we were connected by little more than a childish, shared love for the occult. Looking back, he probably seemed strangely lonely back then, perhaps because his girlfriend had also graduated and found a job outside the prefecture.
It must have been around the end of the rainy season. I received an invitation to an offline meetup from members of an online occult forum I used to frequent. Ever since two of the core members left, the place had filled up with entirely new people like a changing of the guard, and feeling somewhat out of place, I hadn't been interacting with them much. Just past 8:00 PM. The gathering was at a family restaurant in the city, and I walked inside feeling strangely nervous. Hearing a voice call out, "Hey," I spotted Mikatchi-san, an old acquaintance, and felt a slight wave of relief. The languid atmosphere of past meetups with the same familiar faces was gone. Instead, there was a glaring, high-energy space filled mostly with strangers. A compulsive pressure that we had to talk about the occult just because it was an occult meetup, combined with shallow, slippery small talk, made it an exhausting place for me. Among the conversations, one woman stood out. She wasn't actively participating, yet the surrounding men kept trying to talk to her. The reason was obvious: she possessed the looks of a beautiful young girl, effortlessly pulling off gothic-style black clothing. In the days when I didn't have a girlfriend, I too had sometimes attended meetups with the hidden agenda of hoping something might happen. But watching that scene unfold objectively from the sidelines now, it looked incredibly foolish. The girl, seemingly used to that kind of attention, brushed them off with a flat indifference. Yet, for my part, her appearance drew my attention for a completely different reason. I had a nagging feeling I'd seen her before. Unconsciously raising my already-emptied glass of cola to my mouth, I kept glancing over at the girl. For a split second, our eyes met. I immediately looked away, but the awkwardness drove me to mutter, "Bathroom, bathroom"—a pathetic excuse to myself—as I stood up from my seat.
When I came out after using the men's room, to my surprise, the girl from earlier was waiting right outside. "Got a minute?" she asked. Taken aback, I replied, "Huh? For what?" but hearing that familiar voice finally jogged my memory. "Onkyo or something, right?" About two years ago, at an occult forum meetup attended mostly by young kids, she was the girl who had forced something terrifying called the "Black Hand" onto me. "My handle is Kyo-ko now," she said, dancing her index finger in the air. Kyoko. I vaguely remembered people from the thread calling her that earlier. However, to me, that sound carried an ominous premonition. "So your real name is Oto-something Kyoko? Like Otoda or Otonashi?" It seemed like unnecessary prying. At the sight of her displeased, frowning brows, I instinctively shut my mouth. "I’ve got a bit of a problem... and I want you to help me." "Huh? Me?" Onkyo (though even in my mind, I didn't want to use the word 'Kyoko') glanced back toward the table where the meetup group was sitting and said in a mocking tone, "Those guys are totally beneath me." Well, that was probably true. While agreeing with her, the question arose: Then why me? As if reading my mind, she said, "The Black Hand was real." And then she added, "I heard you somehow managed to escape from it, and I've been wondering about it ever since."
I almost blurted out, "No, my master just saved me," but to my shame, what actually came out of my mouth was, "Well, something like that." There was no doubt that my bravado stemmed from the fact that she happened to be quite pretty. "Let's go outside and talk," she said, and I nodded. I had started feeling the harsh, prickly stares of the meetup group on my skin. I had no intention of letting the two of us stand around chatting outside the restroom any longer. Ducking the hostile glares of the guys, I went to the register to pay. Glancing over at Onkyo, she looked fully expecting me to pay for her too, but I ignored her and paid only for my own share. Stepping out of the restaurant, seen off by Mikatchi-san’s incomprehensible thumbs-up, I suddenly found myself at a loss for where to go. There was a park nearby, but it gave off a rather sleazy vibe. "How about an izakaya?" I asked. Onkyo shook her head and said, "Minor." When I irresponsibly mentioned that 18 and 19 were legally treated as adults, to my surprise, she pointed at herself and said, "Sixteen." I quickly did the math in my head. "Third year of junior high back then, second year of high school now," she anticipated and answered. Didn't she say a senior at school gave her the Black Hand? The moment that thought crossed my mind, she anticipated me again. "Integrated junior and senior high." Thinking she was remarkably quick-witted, I led the way into a nearby coffee shop.
I ordered orange juice and Onkyo ordered pineapple juice. As we sat side-by-side, a brief silence fell over us, and we gazed for a moment at the night cityscape visible through the glass. Before long, I thought I heard a faint sound like paper being cut, and shifted my gaze into the shop. Onkyo was facing forward, almost unconsciously tearing at the paper coaster in her hand. Perhaps noticing my puzzled gaze, she stopped her hands and flicked one of the scraps with her finger. "There’s a god called the Scissors-sama in the mountain near my school. It’s hidden away in the bushes, in a spot you’d never find unless you already knew where it was. It looks just like an ordinary, old stone Jizo statue, and there are three identical ones lined up in a row. But only one of them is the Scissors-sama. You won't know which one is the Scissors-sama unless you go there alone at night." Though she spoke fluently, a tense undertone lurked in her voice. I stopped her for a moment and asked, "What? Is that some kind of trend at your school?" to which she replied, "Yes." "You offer the pair of scissors you usually use to that Scissors-sama and chant your name three times. Then, before long, the person whose name was chanted ends up cutting their hair." A kind of curse, then. It sounded very typical of high school girls. "Cutting their hair... is that a metaphor for unrequited love?" "Right. Basically, it’s a curse to make the girl hitting on the guy you like get rejected. It even works on couples who are already together." As she spoke, she mimed trapping her bangs between her index and middle fingers. "Insidious." When I voiced my honest thought, she calmly counterattacked, "That's rich coming from a guy who goes to a black magic circle meetup." "So, because of this Scissors-sama, something troublesome happened?"
Onkyo finally took a sip of her pineapple juice and looked as though she were deep in thought. Her profile mixed age-appropriate bewilderment with a cold, mature expression. "I heard about a few girls in my class doing stuff like that, so I tried it." "With your own scissors?" "Red ones. I've been using them since elementary school. I went up the mountain alone in the middle of the night, brushed aside the grass, saw the heads of the Jizo statues, and then closed my eyes to search for the Scissors-sama." "You can't find it unless you close your eyes?" "If you keep them open, you can't tell. They all look the same." "Can't you ask a classmate who did the ritual beforehand—like which one is in the middle or on the right end?" "No." "Does teaching the secret make the curse stop working?" "Yes." "How do you search with your eyes closed?" "By feel. Touching them." "Can you tell just by touching?" "Hair is growing out of it." The moment Onkyo uttered those words, the sound of paper fibers being shredded reached my ears once again. A chill ran through me as I sat up straight. Before I noticed, slender fingers had extended from the cuff of her black long-sleeved shirt and were quietly tearing apart my coaster. I hadn't even realized when she had lifted my glass. Tremingly, I asked, "Do you know what you're doing right now?" "I know," came her slightly irritated reply. I intentionally dropped the subject and asked instead, "The hair... is it moss or something?"
Onkyo didn't answer that. "Shh. Wait a second," she said, freezing. She sighed, and just as she reached for her orange juice, I felt a heavy, unpleasant mass of air brush past right behind my back. An unformed, dense atmosphere that hadn't even taken shape as a presence yet. All around us, the voices of young people staying up late in the brightly lit shop were flying back and forth as if nothing were wrong. Tense in the middle of it all, I felt a hard-to-describe sense of comradeship with the young girl sitting beside me, wearing an equally stiff expression. After the unpleasant feeling passed, she finally exhaled deeply and said, "Anyway." "I offered my red scissors to the Scissors-sama and chanted my name three times." With her eyes cast down, her long eyelashes trembled faintly. "Whose name?" Depending on how it sounded, it might have been a nosy question, but I asked it reflexively without any ulterior motives. "My own." The moment I heard those words, the rational part of my head tilted in confusion—and while still tilted, I was struck by a strangely nostalgic sensation, as if a door leading to another invisible world had cracked open just a fraction. "Why?" "Because I wanted to know what would happen." Ah. She, too, was standing at the edge of a dark abyss. That’s what I thought. "So, what happened?" In response to my words, a fading, whispering voice returned. I could hear the snip of scissors...
"Wait a minute. Isn't a pair of scissors supposed to be a metaphor for ending up cutting your hair because of a broken heart?" "I don't know," she shook her head. "I don't even like anyone right now. There's no way my heart can be broken." I couldn't tell if her words were true, but I pressed on with another question. "Among the girls in your class whose names were chanted, is there anyone who actually cut their hair, or was 'made' to cut it?" "I don't know. I heard a rumor that a girl really got dumped, but I don't know if she actually cut her hair." "What about the scissors you left at the Scissors-sama's place?" "...We're actually not supposed to go back and look, but when I went again the day before yesterday..." "They were gone." Onkyo knitted her flat-toned brow and, continuing with "What do you think I should do?", she raised her face. "I want you to tell me a bit more before that. Were there zero scissors? Not even ones that weren't yours?" Seeing her nod, I felt a lingering sense of unease. "As a ritual rule, aren't you supposed to leave the scissors there and never go back to get them? If so, why are the scissors that the previous person supposedly left gone?" When I asked if it was custom to go back and retrieve them once a wish was granted, she said no. I asked if it looked like someone was maintaining the Jizo statues, but she replied that it was completely abandoned—weeds were overgrown, not a single flower was decorated, and it looked entirely forgotten by people.
Something was wrong. Above all, the unpleasant flow of air I had felt just moments ago only intensified the incomprehensibility of the situation. "Hey, is this ritual called Scissors-sama an old thing? Like rumors passed down from seniors?" "I don't know. Probably." "If so, it's possible the details shifted as the rumor was passed along. Maybe the original ritual was a bit different. For instance..." I hesitated, wondering if I should say it, but said it anyway. "If you offer scissors and chant the name of someone you want to die three times..." With a loud *clatter*, the round chair shifted, and a hot sensation raced across my cheek. "Ah," Onkyo said, standing up and staring at her own right hand. It had been a slap. "I'm sorry." Seeing her lower her head like that, the pain in my cheek no longer mattered, and I felt a surge of anger at my own childishness for purposely trying to scare a terrified girl even more. "Got it. I'll handle it." I didn't think it was an empty promise. Before I had to cry to my occult-loving senior who worked as a librarian, a plan to manage this on my own was already forming in my head. "For now, tell me where that Scissors-sama is." With a nod, Onkyo took a cute notebook out of her bag and began drawing a map. She didn't seem to have any intention of guiding me there herself. Given that she was terrified of something unknown, that was probably unavoidable.
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