It was the early summer of my second year in university. Led by my mentor in the occult, I was heading into the mountains. He had told me, "I'm about to get my hands on something interesting," so I had tagging along without a care, but since his definition of "interesting" differed from that of normal people, I had been braced for it from the start. Still, when I learned our destination was a temple, I grew even more tense. Apparently, it was a temple he was acquainted with. They had contacted him. We must have driven for over an hour from the city. "This is it," Shisho said, pulling his micro-car over to the side of the road. The surroundings were enclosed by fields, and a brisk afternoon breeze blew through the mountain gap. Passing through an antiquated gate and entering the grounds, I saw the main hall standing beyond a modest grove of cedars. In the garden alongside it, a stagnant-looking pond sent ripples soundlessly across its surface through the wind. "It's a Shinshu Buddhist temple," Shisho remarked. A turtledove called out, its faint fluttering swallowed by the deep green forest. I saw a bell tower on the right, but its roof was tilted, and the bell itself was missing. It seemed to have been abandoned. "That bell was reportedly requisitioned during the war and never replaced." The moment I turned my head back toward Shisho's explanation, I felt as though something white had flashed in the corner of my vision. I cast my eyes around, craning my neck while hurrying after Shisho, but nothing was there. I felt a slight chill, thinking that white object might have been clothing. After all, I had thought there was no one else on the temple grounds. Shisho marched straight past the main hall and headed toward a single-story building. It seemed to be the residence of the head priest. The *kuri*, I believe it was called.
Trying to round the corner toward the entrance, a voice called out, "This way, this way," and someone was beckoning to us from the back. He was a remarkably tall man. My mentor and I were ushered in through the back door and led into a tatami-matted room that looked like a living room. "Where's the old man?" To Shisho's question, the man replied, "Out. Probably playing pachinko." Then, "Well, I'll go get that thing," and he left the room. Left behind, I nudged Shisho. "That guy is Kurotani-san, a bad guy. The 'old man' is the head priest here. He's a bad guy too. After all, he's trying to sell me items entrusted to them for memorial services." Shisho grinned. I recalled the bundle of psychic photographs he had shown me the other day. Those, if I recall correctly, were also secondhand items he'd bought from dealers. "Ah, some of them were bought directly from here, too. Well, this place is sort of a hidden renowned temple for memorial fire rituals, so things tend to accumulate here. But still, the genuine ones are less than ten percent." As Shisho spoke, he casually fiddled with an Ichimatsu doll and hanging scrolls haphazardly displayed around the room. Before long, the man called Kurotani returned and placed a paper bag in front of Shisho. When Shisho reached out his hand, Kurotani smoothly pulled the paper bag back and opened his palm. He wriggled his five fingers to emphasize them. "Five is too expensive." Shisho puckered his lips, and Kurotani, scratching his unkempt hair, said, "Oh, well," and started to stand up with the paper bag.
"What kind of person brought that in?" Without missing a beat, Shisho asked. Half-standing, Kurotani replied: "A middle-aged woman. Deep hat, sunglasses. Unknown address. Unknown name. Unknown provenance of the item. But she left all her toe nails as memorial fees." "All twenty?" Shisho's face turned stern. Then, saying "Understood," he tossed his wallet, pulled from his jeans pocket. Kurotani caught the wallet and handed the paper bag over. Shisho peered into the paper bag and gave a small nod. I couldn't help but lean in to look as well. Inside the bag, I saw a single black videotape. "It's not enough." At Kurotani's words, Shisho made an awkward face and said, "I'll bring the rest next time." "When is 'next time'?" An awkward atmosphere hung in the room. Unable to bear the tension, I blurted out, "How much is missing?" I thought to myself, yet again acting entirely according to Shisho's intentions. In the end, I pulled my last 7,000 yen out of my wallet and handed it to Kurotani. I wanted to see it, too. There was no way I could restrain myself after coming all this way. "I'll contact you if anything else comes in." Kurotani said this and stood up. When leaving, Shisho and I were directed back through the back door. Even though our shoes were left there, it made me feel like I was doing something wrong. No, indeed, it probably *was* something wrong. Buying things brought in with the wish for memorial services just to satisfy our own curiosity. What kind of feelings had the woman who brought this in had when she walked through the temple gates? Suddenly, my arm was grabbed. My heart skipped a beat.
"Are you that guy's disciple?" It was an incredible grip. Kurotani pulled me close and whispered. Shisho was already outside and out of sight from inside the house. "Did you hear about me?" Wincing from the pain in my grabbed arm, I nodded. "Then did you hear about Urai?" "I haven't heard everything yet." When I finally managed to say that, he finally let go of my hand. Kurotani cast his gaze into space, as if deep in thought, but then twisted his mouth into a grin. "That video is dangerous," he said, waving his hand as if to say, "Get going." The back of my elbow, where I had been grabbed, burned with pain. I slipped my shoes on as if fleeing and went outside. Outside, Shisho seemed to have noticed someone and was walking toward the main hall while talking to someone. Mindful of the house's doorway, I hurried after him. In my line of sight, a girl wearing white clothes appeared. *Ah, the one from earlier,* I thought. It hadn't been a hallucination. Shisho called out, "Aki-chan," and approached her. Sitting on the edge of the main hall's wooden veranda and swinging her legs, she responded to Shisho's call with a light nod. She looked to be around junior high school age, slender and pale-skinned. After exchanging greetings as if they hadn't seen each other in a while, Shisho asked, "Looks like you'll make it to high school?" Come to think of it, today should be a weekday. Was she skipping school? The girl smiled shyly and replied with a voice like chiming wind chimes, "I think... somehow." After that, while we walked back along the temple approach, she sat in that exact same posture the whole time. Every time I looked back, she seemed to become smaller than the surrounding scenery.
In the car on the way back, I fastened my seatbelt and turned to look at Shisho. "Her name is Aki-chan, right?" "Yeah. Because she was born in autumn (Aki). That old man's younger sister. Her health is poor, so she seems to miss school a lot." They were a pair of siblings with a significant age gap. More than that, the contrast with that solidly built man was vast. "It's true they're blood-related; she wasn't kidnapped from somewhere. Besides, that guy, despite how he looks, should still barely be in his twenties." Shisho said this in a cryptic tone, then downshifted from the footbrake to switch to engine braking in order to navigate the steep mountain road. "Well, I'll tell you about that old man another time." With a look that said, *More importantly, this,* Shisho gazed hungrily at the paper bag beside him. We both had business in the afternoon and reunited again close to midnight. "Nighttime has a better atmosphere, don't you think?" With that, Shisho pulled the videotape—which he hadn't watched yet—out of the paper bag to show me. Sitting cross-legged on the tatami mats of Shisho's apartment, I sat in front of the television as usual. Roughly shoving aside small, miscellaneous items that could have been furniture or trash, Shisho sat down beside me. "It looks like an old tape. Good thing it's not a Beta or whatever." Muttering things like that, he flipped the flap of the black videotape back and forth. It looked like an ordinary 120-minute tape. There was no title label. "Now then, an item requested for a memorial fire ritual. Let's take a look." In a light tone, Shisho shoved the tape into the VCR. The word "PLAY" appeared on screen, and the black screen turned into static.
With a slight flutter in my chest, I watched the screen intently, but the static refused to clear up. Just as the suspicion began to well up that we might have been scammed into buying a blank tape, the screen finally changed. It looked like a train station interior. It seemed to be nighttime, and the contrast between the lit areas and the unlit ones was sharp. It looked like a small station, and the camera remained motionless, showing a platform with sparse human figures. Just as I thought it might be some kind of documentary video, a young man wearing a pale green shirt appeared from the right edge of the screen, gazing at the opposite platform and muttering something. He wore a white, expressionless mask on his face. I couldn't quite catch what he was saying. I caught words like "alibi," so it seemed they were filming a mystery drama as a home video. The audio wasn't picked up very well, and with the style of a flat monologue, I couldn't imagine the production quality was very good. I guessed it might be for a presentation at a high school or university cultural festival. Or perhaps it was at the rehearsal stage. The white mask, with holes cut only for the eyes, didn't feel particularly creepy. It just looked like his face was hidden. Why it was hidden, I didn't know. With no trains pulling in and no station announcements playing, amateur acting continued endlessly against the backdrop of monotonous footage. Just as I was bracing myself for whatever was going to happen next, I gradually began to feel let down. The footage shook from time to time, so someone was acting as the cameraman rather than the camera being stationary. Was it shot by just two people? Or would another character appear later on? Just as I was thinking that, the footage abruptly cut out. Static again. Shisho pressed the fast-forward button. However, the screen remained filled with static. He pressed the stop button and started rewinding. Shisho opened his mouth.
"Was something weird about it?" That was what *I* wanted to ask. Was *this* what a 50,000-yen suspicious videotape was? Ah, come to think of it, did Shisho even intend to return the 7,000 yen I had chipped in? We played it again from the beginning. After the static, the station interior appeared again. The white-masked man appeared and spoke in front of the camera. No trains pulled into the platform. It was wrapped in a murmuring sound. Monotonous footage continued, then cut out. And then, static. It was the same. Nothing particularly strange. I looked at Shisho's face, but like me, he looked unconvinced. After that, we repeated rewinding and playing two more times. But still, we found nothing. "Did we get ripped off?" At my words, Shisho replied with a yawn and said, "I'm going to sleep," looking displeased. Then he laid out his futon and went to sleep. Lightning speed. What was I supposed to do? I looked toward the entrance, thinking of leaving, but shook my head, feeling a creeping unease. Kurotani's words—*“That video is dangerous”*— The premonition that something out of the ordinary was attached to those words clung stubbornly to my mind. It couldn't *just* be something like this. I pressed the eject button on the VCR and pulled out the videotape. Holding it up to the light, I observed it closely once more. Though it felt somewhat old, it was still an ordinary tape. The brand name of a well-known manufacturer was stamped on it. I checked for any ominous substances like bloodstains, but there didn't seem to be any. That meant there had to be something strange about the *content*, after all. As I was deep in thought, Shisho muttered something in his sleep about the light being too bright and rolled over, so I turned off the light.
Beneath the dim, low-wattage bulb, I set the video into the deck once more. Playback started with a tired-sounding whirring noise. Static. Station interior. The white-masked man. Monologue. A faint flow of people on the opposite platform. A slightly shaking screen. And static. Stop. Rewind. Play. Static. The sparse night station interior. The white-masked man's green shirt. Acted-out monologue. The opposite platform. A video camera likely held by another person. Murmurs. Monotony. And static. Stop. I sighed. No matter how many times I watched it, it was the same. I understood nothing. If there was anything weird about it, it was simply the surreal sight of a white-masked man standing on a station platform, but even that, to put it bluntly, was "just that." There was no need to go requesting a memorial fire ritual at a temple for *this*. However, if there was anything to it, it would be a ghost story predicated on information I didn't know. For instance, a kind of ghost story where no one should have been in front of the camera when the video was filmed, yet the white-masked man was somehow captured on it anyway. I felt a slight chill thinking about such things, but the presence of that masked man felt too raw and vivid, ill-suited for a ghost story. No matter how sideways I looked at it, the format of an amateur home video remained intact. Tilted my head in puzzlement, I reached out my finger to the VCR once again. Play. Static. Suddenly, the night station interior appeared. The white-masked man appeared from the edge of the screen. His voice muttered while facing the platform. A shaking screen. The murmuring sounds of the station. At that moment, a sense of dissonance sprouted within me. What was it? I felt like something was off. What could it be?
The moment that thought raced through my mind— I heard a swelling, booming sound. From the edge of the camera angle, at the corner of the platform screen, a bullet-like mass flew in. A train. A train was passing. Through the platform. That gray box dragged a tail of afterimages and sped across the screen from right to left. I opened my eyes wide in front of the TV, stiffening my body and holding my breath. It was a sight that shouldn't have been there. The videotape, on which I should have found nothing no matter how many times I replayed it, suddenly turned on its heel, as if transforming into an ominous figure. Involuntarily cringing, I looked around. The room in Shisho's rundown apartment seemed to sink darkly and quietly beneath the light of the bulb. There was no precursor that something terrifying was about to happen. No ringing in my ears. Aware of my quickened heartbeat, I looked at the screen again. After the noises scattered by the passing train subsided, the white-masked man showed a troubled gesture and said "Cut, cut" to the camera. His lines must have been drowned out by the sound of the train. Those words were so profoundly human that, by a narrow margin, they anchored my heart back into everyday reality. That was probably why I managed to endure the scream that happened afterward. Yes. The scream happened inside the screen. Just as the masked man was making a cutting gesture toward the camera, a woman clutching a large paper bag on the opposite platform suddenly let out a shriek. Startled, the masked man turned around to look. After the camera shook violently, its angle shifted to point toward her. On the opposite platform, several people came running over, leaning over the edge to look down at the tracks where the woman was pointing while screaming.
What was it? With the camera filming the platform from the side, the lack of angle prevented us from seeing the tracks below. However, considering the train that had just passed by, I felt like I understood what had happened. As the camera tried to approach the edge of the platform, a rough voice shouted, "Hey," and something blocked the lens. From the hem of the uniform briefly glimpsed, I could infer that a station employee had stopped the filming. From beyond the darkened screen, angry shouts and instructions were mixed and audible. And then, abruptly, playback ended with a click, and static began. I tried to calmly process what had just happened before my eyes. The contents of the video had changed. And drastically, at that. I wondered why such a thing could happen. Being scared would come after I figured it out. The static continued in front of me as I silently stared at the screen. Staring continuously at static in a dark room puts you in a strange mood. Having your face illuminated by radial light seemed to make the existence of the body beneath it grow faint. It felt as though only my face was floating in the dark. I don't know if I had any intention of doing anything, but the moment my index finger pointed almost unconsciously toward the VCR, I realized. The rewind. I hadn't rewound it. The previous playback had ended, static had started, so I had pressed the stop button. After that, I had pressed the play button, forgetting to rewind. And the video, starting from the continuation of the static, had once again projected the white-masked man's one-man show, ending right after the scene where the train I had just seen passed by. Did that mean it was different footage?
Excitedly, I immediately pressed the rewind button. During playback, rewinding spins rapidly while images still flicker on the screen. The static ended, the train moved back from left to right, and after the scene where the masked man muttered something toward the platform, it returned to static. And then the scene of the platform was projected once more. The boring footage of just the white-masked man appeared, cut out again, and returned to static. Before long, with a clunking sound of impact, the green letters "STOP" floated onto the screen. Let's organize this. This videotape contained a second piece of footage on the other side of the static. When Shisho had fast-forwarded earlier, it seemed he simply hadn't fast-forwarded long enough. And the two pieces of footage appeared to have been filmed at the exact same time and in the exact same place. They were probably doing a retake for some kind of video drama. Though the composition was almost identical from the beginning, there were small differences, like the placement of people on the opposite platform, and the slight sense of dissonance I had felt was likely due to that. And because a train happened to pass through the station during that Take 2, right after the character in the mask demanded a cut, some kind of anomaly occurred. Most likely, a person had been struck by a train. I paused the video just before the train appeared from the edge of the screen in Take 2, and pressed the slow-motion button. With a stuttering motion—*click, click, click*—the screen moved, and amidst the dirty, noise-infused footage, I stared intently at the figure wearing a coat on the far right of the opposite platform.
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