The Shisho Series: The Twins (3/4)

"The Twins 3/4" https://www.pixiv.net/novel/show.php?id=8549293

3 <June 27> Minoru Tsukimoto

I woke up with Shisho's foot pressing down on my head. Huh? Did I sleep in? Panicking, I sat up and saw the clock in the room pointed at 7:00. "It's only seven," I said. "Don't lump me in with your upside-down, night-owl college lifestyle. Out in the real world, this is breakfast time." Come to think of it, he had mentioned that breakfast would be at seven-thirty. Reluctantly, I got up, stretched, and yawned. "Hey. Did anything happen last night?" "Someone propped a stick under the door handle." "What? Seriously, you...?" Shisho grabbed his own shoulders and backed away. Instantly, my head cleared. "N-No way. I just thought I heard something in the middle of the night, so I was checking if I was awake." As I made excuses, Shisho leaned in close and whispered, "The car's been wrecked." "...Really?" I was completely shocked. "It won't start. The timing is way too convenient for a normal breakdown. Somebody definitely messed with it." "Somebody?" "I don't know. Is it someone who doesn't want us poking around this village, or..." "Or what?" Shisho shook his head and said, "Anyway, get changed. We're eating."

My heart pounded as I changed my clothes. They'd really go that far? This job was way more dangerous than I'd imagined. Who was the culprit? Anyone who knew we were staying here... That thought brought the face of the Iwakura Shrine's chief priest to mind. Next were the young men from the forestry association. If outsiders were staying here, it was obvious they'd be at the Yamatoya inn. And if there was an unfamiliar car in the inn parking lot, it wouldn't take a genius to figure out it belonged to us. Was this the work of someone hostile to us, searching for our separated twin siblings? Were they trying to stop us from finding them? Finally, the faces of the inn owner and her husband crossed my mind. Leaving the husband aside, the inn owner? Surely not. She'd been interacting with us quite normally. If she turned out to be the culprit, I'd lose all faith in humanity.

"The damage isn't obvious at a glance. It looks just like a normal mechanical failure. It had to be the work of someone who knows cars," Shisho said before we headed down the stairs. "Wait, were you trying to wake up early and go somewhere?" The fact that he said the engine wouldn't start meant he must have tried to start it. "Well, just wandering around the neighborhood. To see that thing called the *kataware-doki*." "You woke up that early? Wait, did you open the front door on your own? Did you see anything?" "The air was so clear, taking a deep breath felt amazing. Since this place is surrounded by mountains, the sunrise is late. A faint, pale light was just barely touching the distant mountain ridges, and it refused to spread. Beneath the sky, it was dark, and the mist rolling in from the river kept visibility low. If you thought to yourself, 'Someone's out there in that mist,' it would definitely feel a bit creepy." The scenery I'd seen from my room's window earlier hadn't been fully bathed in morning light yet. Despite it being 7:00 AM in the middle of summer, the flow of time here was different from the city we lived in.

We went down the stairs and headed to the living room, where the inn owner was setting the table. "Good morning. Did you sleep well?" "Yes." Breakfast consisted of grilled fish, rolled omelet, nameko mushroom miso soup, and blanched spinach. "Oh, the car?" "Yes. We just tried to start the engine, but it wouldn't turn over." Hearing about the car from Shisho, the inn owner looked genuinely surprised. It didn't seem like an act, but who could really tell? "Oh dear, that's a problem. Shall we have my husband take a look?" After we finished eating, the inn owner brought her husband, Mr. Takino. Perhaps before heading out to the fields, he was wearing the same farm work clothes as yesterday. He was just as sullen and unfriendly as last night, but he opened the hood of Shisho's compact car and checked the engine area. "The battery's dead." It seemed a battery replacement was necessary. Since he suggested having a mechanic look at it, he had the nearest auto shop called. About thirty minutes later, the auto shop's truck arrived. A bearded technician fussed around for a while with a full set of tools and a new battery, but finally shook his head and closed the hood. No good. Apparently, it wasn't just the battery; the engine itself was messed up. The technician muttered that at least a fuse had blown. "Is it a short circuit? Or did someone deliberately flood the electrical system with a current...?" To Shisho's question, the mechanic only replied, "Hard to say."

In the end, the car had to be towed to the garage on a wrecker. It would be great if it got fixed right away, but until then, we'd be left without transportation. When we asked if they had a loaner car, they said they didn't have any available. Hearing this, the inn owner said, "I have bicycles," and brought two of them out from the shed. They seemed to be the ones her children used to ride when they were small, carefully kept ever since. They were somewhat rusted, but looked like they'd be rideable. We thanked her and decided to borrow both. Right in the middle of all this commotion, there was a call for us at Yamatoya with a message. "The priest's son?" "Yes. Minoru-kun says he wants to meet at one o'clock. He'd like you to come over to the shrine." Shisho and I exchanged glances. Then, dropping his voice, Shisho muttered, "Is this a preemptive strike?" "Who knows?" Minoru Tsukimoto, the priest's son, had said he worked at the forestry association. Was he among the guys we saw yesterday? If so, it made sense that they'd figured out where we were staying right away.

After watching the wrecker tow away Shisho's piece-of-junk compact car, we finally got moving. The inn owner invited us to come back for lunch, saying she'd boil some soba noodles if we liked, so we decided to return later. Before heading to the Fujisaki household—where the other candidate for the twin brother lived, as pointed out by the inn owner—we stopped by the tobacco shop next to the inn. Tomo, the old grandmother, was minding the store in the same outfit as yesterday. With a look that made it hard to tell whether she was awake or asleep, she sat behind the counter. "You smoke?" Shisho gestured by bringing two fingers to his mouth, prompting me to protest firmly: "I don't. And isn't it a bit late to ask?" "Well, I've quit smoking too," Shisho said, and bought some gum at the shop. Using that as a pretext, he started talking to Tomo. Do you know this song? he asked, making a motion like conducting an orchestra. Right, right. I just needed to sing it. As I began singing the "Kagome Kagome" song, Tomo seemed to recognize it and tapped out the rhythm with her hand. Of course she'd know it. Any Japanese person knows Kagome Kagome. That's what I thought, but Tomo mumbled in a vague tone that it brought back memories—fond, nostalgic memories. "So you know this song: *'When will it sleep, in the split-moment twilight, seven days, wandering..."*?" Tomo nodded. "Does this represent the *Oo-gomori* (the Great Seclusion)?" She nodded again. "Then what about *'nanuka, nado'te, tsu'betta'*? *Nanuka* probably means seven days. But what does *'nado'te'* mean? The word *nadoru* means to trace, but 'tracing seven days' doesn't make much sense. I figured it must be a local dialect." To Shisho's question, looking half-asleep, Tomo replied: "Nadou, that means to get lost." "To get lost? So the lyrics *'nanuka, nado'te'* mean 'getting lost for seven days'?" Tomo nodded. "Getting lost for seven days and slipping. No, that 'slipping' part is considered mostly meaningless even in the original song. Since that part hasn't changed, the only parts holding any actual meaning in this Iwakura song are the ones they deliberately altered: *'itsu-itsu neyaru, kataware-doki ni, nanuka, nado'te'*, those parts alone." Shisho muttered to himself, as if talking through his own thoughts. "When will it sleep, in the twilight. And wander for seven days. What is the subject? Where is the origin?" Suddenly snapping out of it, Shisho raised his head. "Wait a minute. Seven days? No way." "Eh, what is it?" He seemed to have realized something, but when I asked, Shisho refused to answer, saying, "I have something to check." Instead, he turned directly to Tomo and asked: "What is this song about?" Upon being asked, Tomo put her palms together and began chanting a Buddhist prayer: "Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu." Dread. The expression of profound awe and fear on the face of the folklorist old man Sato and the people of this village. The dread of something they refused to speak of any further. It was clearly visible even on the face of the old woman in front of us. "I'm sorry to have bothered you." Shisho bowed to Tomo and left the tobacco shop. "That's probably a threatening song." "Huh?" "It's a type of nursery rhyme. Remember in that horror novel that came out last year—was it *Ring*? The one where it says, 'If you just play in the water all the time, a ghost will come get you.' It's a pattern of educational rhymes: if you do X, then Y will happen to scare children into doing or not doing something. But some don't spell it out directly. What they all share is that they're educational songs meant to frighten kids into compliance. You must not sleep on the night of the Great Seclusion. And who is it that wanders for seven days? Is it being lost for seven days that's terrifying, or is it *something* that wanders for seven days... *Who is behind you?* Who is that right behind you?" Midway through, Shisho's words had turned back into self-questioning. "Oh, right. Wait here a second. I'm going to borrow a phone." Leaving me behind, Shisho went into Yamatoya. He came right back out, but I wondered who he had called. "An acquaintance at university. I asked them to look something up for me." With that, he brushed it off. It bugged me, but when he got like this, Shisho wouldn't give me straight answers until things became somewhat clear. "Alright, off to the Fujisaki house!"

We hopped on the bicycles and headed for the house this Fujisaki person lived in, as we'd been told. Starting from the former elementary school right about in the middle of Iwakura, we headed further and further north until we found a two-story house. Confirming the "Fujisaki" nameplate, I called out from the outside, and a man in a tracksuit came out. He was young, with bedhead. He looked like he'd just woken up. "What do you want?" We introduced ourselves as university students majoring in folklore, directed here by Yamatoya, and asked his name. Sure enough, he was Akira, the son of this household. His parents apparently out working in the fields right now. When we asked about his own job, he mumbled something about helping out his parents. Yeah, right. Not when he'd been sleeping until this very moment. In short, he was probably a good-for-nothing slacker. Though I thought that, I kept it off my face and tried to support Shisho—who was somehow managing to keep the conversation going with a man who clearly wanted to cut it short. "Twins? I don't know anything about that. I don't have any sisters." With that, Fujisaki Akira turned his shoulder to us. It was what we expected, but we couldn't get any information out of him at all. I stared intently into his eyes, but I couldn't tell if the agitation flickering in them was because he was lying or because he was terrified. "Um. What time did you go to sleep last night?" "What is this, a police interrogation? It's none of your business. Go home already." Taking a hostile attitude, Fujisaki Akira tried to go back inside. "Ah, wait. Wasn't your Fujisaki family originally from the Shinoda district? Do you know anything about a family named Hanegawa?" "That's ancient history. The Fujisaki house in Shinoda is just that rundown shack, right? They just left a pre-war house to rot. My family's always lived right here. I don't know any family named Hanegawa either. Now leave us alone." As a parting shot, Shisho called out to his back: "Tomorrow is the Great Seclusion, isn't it?" "So what if it is?" With those words, the front door slammed shut violently. Shisho and I exchanged glances and shook our heads. "I wonder what's up with him?" "He's scared. He's terrified, too." "Of his twin sibling?" "Or maybe, like I said yesterday, he's just driven paranoid. Wondering if there's a twin sibling he never knew about out there somewhere." In the lingering darkness of the pre-dawn twilight, before I knew it, someone standing right behind me... Imagining that made even me terrified. "It looks like the Hanegawa family didn't have any neighbors nearby, either. What should we do now?" "Depends on the priest's son who went out of his way to summon us. That guy seems like he might have some important information." With that, Shisho straddled his bicycle. "Alright, let's go worship some Doshojin stone markers until noon!"

Riding our bikes, we headed south toward Lower Iwakura. We stopped by the community center from yesterday, but it looked deserted. The door was locked, too. Passing it and heading further south, we found several Doshojin stone markers, just as the inn owner had mentioned. Large paired Doshojin would suddenly appear along the unpaved, poor-visibility mountain road, making me jump in surprise. They looked even older than the ones we'd seen yesterday, but the composition was very similar. Touching one of the Doshojin, Shisho remarked: "Placing this many Doshojin means they were deathly afraid of foreign objects invading their settlement. Even after going this far, they're still afraid of something. That's why they gather in one place for the Great Seclusion." "Are they afraid that the twins they threw out into the world might come back?" "For that, isn't this a little too much faith in the gods? Feels like something more..." Just as he was saying that, Shisho peered down at the base of the Doshojin. "Again." "What is it?" "Look at the feet. The foot is big again." Sure enough, the foot of one of the statues looked abnormally large. "Maybe they just got lazy halfway through carving it?" "No way, would they cut corners like that? In a village this obsessed with Doshojin?" Shisho looked back down the road we'd come. "Again. Only the statues on the outer side of Iwakura have big feet." The statue closer to the path was female. The statue further back was male. On that male statue, the foot was oversized. The statue at the village entrance yesterday had the female on the outside and the male on the inside, and the female's foot had been oversized. "It's not about gender. Only the statues on the outer side of the village—the *soto* side of the village—have big feet. What is this?" Let's check more of them. Saying that, Shisho started looking for the next Doshojin. After turning down a different path and pedaling for a while, we found another one shortly after. This one seemed even older. It felt like the further south and deeper we went, the older they got. When I pointed that out, Shisho said that made sense. "Didn't you hear? North Upper Iwakura, where the Iwakura Shrine and village office are, is the center of this place. The northern settlements have more money. That's why they can remake their old Doshojin and Koshin towers. By contrast, the Doshojin in the poorer southern settlement are left as old as they are." Looking at the base of this new Doshojin, Shisho said, "Ah." "What's wrong?" This time, too, the tip of the foot on the statue further back along the path was oversized. Call me crazy, but it felt like it was sticking out sideways even more than the last one. "Could this be... a degeneration of craftsmanship?" Shisho muttered that, pressing a hand to his mouth. "What does that mean?" "It means designs don't always evolve." Uttering things that made no sense, Shisho checked his wristwatch. "Already 12:00? We have to head back. We can look into this more later." With that, he got back on his bicycle. Without fully understanding what was going on, I followed Shisho. Right before we turned a corner of the road, when I casually glanced back at the Doshojin, my eyes beheld something unbelievable. "Whoa!" I cried out involuntarily and hit the brakes, nearly tumbling off. "What is it? What's wrong?" "No, I... I thought I saw something like a *Yama-jii* (mountain old man)." "There's nothing there." It was gone. I rubbed my eyes, but it had vanished into thin air. "Um, it was right over there by that tree branch in the back. It was staring right at us." "A yokai this time? And a Yama-jii of all things." Shisho didn't seem to believe me and just laughed. "It's true! It had one eye, no ears, and it was all covered in hair." *“Hmm. One eye, huh?”* Shisho walked back to the Doshojin and looked up into the woods behind it. At that moment, a rustling sound echoed from deep within the forest. "What's that? A monkey?" "No, isn't that the thing I just saw?" With his extraordinarily sharp eyesight, Shisho thrust his face forward and strained his eyes, then said, "That's just a monkey." "You must have mistaken a monkey for something else." "No way... Do you think so?" I was starting to lose confidence. *"One eye, huh?"* Shisho muttered that again. "Oops, no good. We have to head back." We had an appointment at the shrine at 1:00 PM. We had to hurry.

Pedaling hard, we returned to Yamatoya. I slurped down the local specialty soba noodles the inn owner had prepared for us, and we rushed off again. Bicycles are great for sharp turns, but in an area this wastefully wide, they were pretty exhausting. From the east-west road, going a bit east of the former elementary school, we turned north. We proceeded while looking up at the pointed shape of Mount Tenjin. When we arrived at the entrance to the approach, a young man was standing near the *torii* gate. "Oh. You're not using a car?" Seeing our bicycles, he asked us. "Well, the weather's nice, so we borrowed these," Shisho said, omitting the fact that the car had broken down, and asked, "Are you Minoru Tsukimoto?" "Yes. Sorry to drag you out here. My father mentioned you guys to me." He gave a refreshing smile. He wasn't a face I'd seen among the members of the forestry association yesterday. At first glance, he gave the impression of a fine, upstanding young man. "Ah, could you hide your bikes behind that tree over there?" "Why?" I asked. Minoru replied, "Well, actually, this is a secret from my father." "He had to go out for business and won't be back for another two hours or so, just in case." "The chief priest—your dad—really gave it to us yesterday. Though it's our fault for saying rude things. Your father is a strict man, huh?" "He's so stubborn it drives me crazy." Laughing brightly, he guided us into the shrine's approach. I thought he was going to take us to the shrine office from yesterday, or perhaps to the residence-like area just behind it. Instead, however, Minoru led us further inward from a pathway beside the shrine office. He took us around to the back of the hedge. "Could it be...?" As Shisho started to say, Minoru turned around and said: "Yes. I'll guide you to the place where the *Iwakura* (sacred boulder) used to be." "Is that okay?" "It's fine. It's our shrine's land anyway." Saying this, he casually ducked beneath a *shimenawa* sacred straw rope acting as a barrier along the way, and advanced into the tall, thick forest. Surprised by his easygoing attitude, which was the exact opposite of his father's, we followed him until the forest eventually opened up. Beyond it was a rocky area with quite a steep incline. It was right around the true base of Mount Tenjin. "This is it?" Before our eyes, *shimenawa* ropes were strung across in all four directions. The ground inside the sacred ropes was a step lower than the surrounding earth, and weeds were overgrown across the entire surface. It was a space about ten meters in diameter. Here and there, the sharp tips of stones peered through the weeds. "This is the place where there used to be a giant boulder called the Iwakura. It's the stone that gave our Iwakura Shrine its name, and the name of the village as well. Since ancient times, it has been worshipped as a guardian deity of the people of this land. They say that about a thousand years ago, a Tengu star fell down, collided with it, and shattered it." "A Tengu star... you mean a meteorite?" "Yes."