This is a story I heard from the Master. It was the summer of my second year in university. Kanako, who is my master in the occult arts, wanted to get rid of a massive amount of somen noodles someone had given her, so she called me over under the banner of the "1st Grand Somen Festival." I figured they weren't going to spoil or anything, so there was no need to rush and eat them all at once, but when I actually saw the mountains of bags piled up, I thought, *Ah, this is impossible.* Inside the single room of the rundown apartment where the Master lived, the somen noodles were being boiled one batch after another. At first, we happily ate them, saying, "Delicious, delicious," but the fun concept of "let's stuff our faces with noodles all day" had an unexpected flaw, and after barely twenty minutes, I was ready to declare my surrender. "I'm completely stuffed." I tried mentioning it, just in case, but the festival's executive committee ruled that we had to continue. After that, we idly repeated a cycle of eating while watching TV, taking a break, and then eating some more. "Kojima, eat more." "It's Nakajima." The resident of the next room, who was always coming over to sponge food off the Master, had also been invited. But even he seemed sick and tired of eating nothing but somen, and his chopsticks kept stopping. "I want to eat something hard." Both of them ignored my muttered comment. It was a case of "don't spell it out." The room was wrapped in a stagnant atmosphere, and before I knew it, the Master was lying down in front of the television, using her bent arm as a pillow, slurping somen out of a bowl placed on the floor in a yoga-like pose. It wasn't a posture becoming of a young woman of marriageable age, but strangely enough, it somehow suited her. The channel we had on at first was broadcasting a rerun of some overseas drama. I’d tuned in halfway through so I didn't really understand the plot, but it seemed to be a tragic episode where the rancher protagonist's young son dies of a epidemic. *Is there no God?!* The protagonist wailed up at the sky while clutching his son's lifeless body, giving such a convincing performance that, despite not knowing the background of the story, I almost found myself tearing up. However, the Master remained propped up on her elbow on the floor, slurping her somen noisily, and offered a comment about the scene between chews.
"People who lament the absence of a merciful God—why aren't they terrified of the existence of a merciless one?" How optimistic of her. The Master muttered this with a snort. At those words, the neighbor named Kojima or Nakajima—with his blank, egg-like face that made it impossible to tell what he was thinking—nodded slightly. Once that drama ended, a news report about a typhoon started. It was a fairly large one, currently located somewhere around Ishigaki Island. On the screen, a rough sea was visible through driving rain. Letting out an "Ooh~," the Master cheerfully pointed at the TV screen with the chopsticks in her hand. "Speaking of typhoons, years ago, when I was staying on a smaller island in Okinawa, I got caught in one and thought I was going to die." "What were you doing there?" "I heard a rumor that the island still practiced the custom of *mogari* [temporary enshrinement of the dead]. I wanted to see it just once." "By *mogari*, do you mean that ritual where the surviving family spends time with the corpse?" Apparently, the building where the corpse is laid out is called a *moya*. "But it was no good. They wouldn't let outsiders see it. Even so, I camped out near the pier and refused to leave, and before I knew it, a massive typhoon was approaching. They finally decided to tell me about that much, and had me evacuate to the village headman's house." "So you didn't actually face any life-or-threatening danger." "That came after. They lent me a guest room, and after stretching out my legs to sleep on a futon for the first time in forever, I heard a bunch of noisy commotion outside the house. It was past midnight, and the wind and rain were getting pretty intense, but on top of the howling sound, I could hear multiple people shouting loudly. Wondering what was going on, I went outside myself, and saw family members and neighborhood folks gathered at the back of the headman's house." "Was the back mountain about to suffer a landslide or something?" "Yeah, basically that sort of thing, but the situation was a bit strange." The Master spread out her right hand in front of her face, making a gesture like she was stroking the empty air.
"The back mountain of the headman's house is covered by a stone wall, making it look a bit like a fortress. Apparently, it's the actual site where the local lord's fortress used to stand. A remnant of that. Anyway, that stone wall was acting as what you'd call a retaining wall nowadays—in other words, preventing a mudslide. Since it didn't have the sturdiness of concrete, there was a risk of it collapsing during a typhoon like that, so everyone had apparently put on raincoats and come to check on it. I understood that much right away, but for some reason, everyone was just standing there blankly, staring at the stone wall." "What were they doing?" "Just standing there. Trembling like leaves." Trembling? Probably because the stone wall looked like it was about to collapse at any moment. But if that was the case, shouldn't they have run away from the spot immediately? "I thought so too, so I tugged on the hem of the headman's raincoat and told him we needed to run, but he wouldn't budge. He just stared intently at one specific spot on the stone wall. When I followed his line of sight, I got a chill." The Master twisted her neck, tilting her face until it was parallel to the ground. "There was a face. Inside the stone wall. A human face. Embedded horizontally right into the tightly packed stonework. As if it had been there from the very beginning. That face was distorted in agony, groaning something. A sound like a scream was mixed in with the wind and rain." *It hurts...* *It hurts...* That's what it was saying. "The next second, that face was crushed. Crushed flat by the stones above it. I could even see the eyeballs pop out. Plainly. The crushed face turned into a mangled pulp and oozed out from between the stones. Right after that, muddy water started spurting out like a fountain from the gaps in the stonework where the face used to be. That's when I felt the danger to my life. When I screamed, 'Run!', everyone finally seemed to snap out of it and started fleeing. It was a split-second escape. Right behind us as we ran, there was a terrifying sound of the stone wall collapsing, and it came chasing after us. I felt like I was losing my mind." The Master recounted this flatly, but it was far too terrifying an experience. In the end, the mudslide didn't reach the headman's house; everyone somehow managed to escape safely to that point, and nothing worse happened. "What was that face?" When I asked timidly, the Master made a difficult expression.
"I don't know. Just that since ancient times, things like that occasionally happen on that island. Stone walls are everywhere on the island, but whenever they collapse, there is always a sign beforehand. Part of the stonework... transforms into a face like the one we saw. The face is fragile and gets crushed immediately. That's when the stone wall collapses." There are two ways to interpret this. Saying this, the Master held up two fingers. "When the stone wall collapses due to the rain, does that face appear as a precursor, or does the wall collapse because a part of it turns into a human face? Which is it?" When the typhoon had passed and I was leaving the island, I asked the headman... *That was the face of my younger brother who died five years ago,* he allegedly replied. *He suffered and suffered so much from cancer before he died—why does he have to suffer like that all over again?* "It wasn't really an answer. In the end, even the people of this island don't understand. Only that the faces appearing in the stone wall are invariably the faces of the dead." *Slurp, slurp, slurp.* While telling a grotesque story, the Master started slurping her somen again. She really had an appetite. "It was an island deeply steeped in death. Human death intruded far too much into daily life. Because I thought that, I asked one last thing." She chewed what was in her mouth, washed it down with barley tea, and slowly continued. *Is what you people are doing really mogari?* The Master looked at me and flashed a grin. "The headman didn't answer." Every time a typhoon comes, I remember this. The Master said this as she reached for the somen once more. It was an unpleasant story. I felt like my appetite had waned a bit. It had already waned plenty due to the capacity of my stomach, but this was even worse. On the TV news, the typhoon coverage ended, switching from national news to local broadcast. There followed a segment on a public servant's drunk driving accident and another on a charity concert held in the city. And then, after that, there was a follow-up report on the fatal JR line accident that happened the other day. "Apparently, a friend of mine actually saw this," the Master's neighbor muttered while wiping his mouth. The Master replied to him. "A friend of a friend? Nakajima."
"It's Oshima. He apparently really saw it. Blood gushed everywhere, and even bones were exposed." That careless neighbor—whose name kept changing between Kojima, Nakajima, and Oshima—raised his head and widened his narrow eyes with the fingers of both hands. "Well, whatever," the Master said without even a hint of a smile, shifting slightly from her lying yoga-pose and moving her chopsticks. "Come to think of it, a terrible accident happened a few years ago. Was that JR too? Do you remember?" I'm not from around here, so I don't know. Only the neighbor nodded. "That story about someone's head flying off, right?" "Yeah, yeah." That accident reportedly happened at a station in the city after the evening rush hour had ended. A man suddenly jumped in front of a freight train passing through the station and was struck and killed. It was said to be a suicide, but at the time, several passengers were waiting for the next train on the platform, and those people witnessed the decisive moment. And the account of the person who saw that exact moment of a human being being struck and killed turned into a creepy rumor that spread through this town. "The man's head, you see. The impact of the collision snapped it clean off its base, and it went flying through the air. It landed somewhere near the station kiosk, and the people nearby panicked and lost the use of their legs. Up to here, it's a true story reported in the newspapers." Right? the Master asked the neighbor. "Yeah. I believe that's right. The cause of the suicide was supposedly an impulsive action out of desperation after failing to find a job." "Ah. Up to that point, it's just a shocking story of a fatal accident. But this is where it starts to sound like a ghost story. According to the person who witnessed it, the head that flew through the air—their eyes met." The man's head had its eyes wide open, bearing an expression frozen in terror, as if trying to convey something. Its mouth was open as if to scream, but it wasn't emitting any sound. That was because the path for air supplied from the lungs had been severed. "The person who said their eyes met claims that the man might not have been dead yet at that exact moment. Indeed, even if a head flies off, the brain remains alive for just a few seconds. Unless they instantly blacked out, they might still have had consciousness. That severed head might have locked eyes with them in its final moment, and recognized that their eyes had met. The voiceless scream might have been directed at them. Just what was he trying to scream...? That's how the story goes."
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