“I didn’t know you could tell your own fortune, though. Didn’t Sarai say something about that during your livestream? I think he said that people who couldn’t tell their own fortunes were frauds, right?”
“That’s right. That ticked me off, so I tried telling my own future.”
“Well, Sarai got his butt kicked, and he deserved it, too.”
“Do you know him?”
“He’s a regular at Kirikiri Basara. I’ve never met him, though. He was all set to humiliate you, and then he got wrecked. I laughed when I watched it.”
Myu-Pom’s expression suddenly darkened. Was she maybe worried about Sarai? I thought I remembered her saying something about his dad.
“I feel bad for poor Sarai.”
“Again, Ryotasu? That’s the third time you’ve said that. I’m sick of hearing it.”
“Poyayah...”
Just as Ryotasu looked down, depressed, I suddenly heard a muffled voice from down by my feet. A cold chill ran down my back. I imagined that someone was underneath my chair, and almost leapt back in fright.
It was a very faint voice. But it started to get louder, and it quickly became clear that I wasn’t hallucinating it. It sounded like an angry woman, moaning, her voice coming from deep beneath the Earth.
And suddenly there was a different woman’s voice. It wasn’t Japanese, but there was a melody, and it sounded like a song. Her voice was sad and lonely. I wondered where it was coming from, but I could only think of one place.
It was the case I always carried on my shoulder. The Skysensor was sitting at my feet right now. The song was coming from the radio’s speaker.
The voice was loud enough now that it was filling the whole café. The volume knob must have been turned all the way up, because the clipping was awful. I quickly opened the case and turned down the volume.
“What song is that?”
I glanced at Ryotasu and Myu-Pom, But neither of them seemed to know. I’d never heard the song, either.
It was dark and gloomy, and just hearing it was enough to make me feel down. The audio quality was terrible, so I guessed that it was an old song that wasn’t Japanese. I glanced over to the counter and saw that Master Izumin was staring at my radio, looking deathly pale.
“Master Izumin, do you know what song this is?”
“...”
“Master?”
“Huh? O-Oh... This song? Of course I know it. It’s a really bad one, I think.”
“A bad one? What do you mean?”
In answer to Myu-Pom’s question, Master Izumin came out from behind the counter and dropped his voice to a whisper.
“The song’s title is, um... something ‘Sunday.’ What was it, again? ‘Lonely’... no... It’s not ‘Scary,’ either... That’s right. ‘Gloomy Sunday’!”
“Sunday’s gloomy? If you ask me, I think Monday’s gloomier. ☆”
“Ryotasu, you see, this is something really scary.” Master Izumin normally always joked around, but now he was very serious. I started to feel a little scared, too.
“‘Gloomy Sunday’... I think I’ve heard of it, too,” Myu-Pom said, but she still didn’t seem to fully recall it.
I... I’d never heard of a song like that. “So what’s up with this song? Does it have a bad reputation or something?”
“This was an urban legend back when I was in high school, but... Hmm... I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s not exactly pleasant.”
“Come on, just tell us! Urban legends are always fake, anyway.” Master Izumin sighed and shook his head.
“‘Gloomy Sunday’ was written about eighty years ago, in Hungary. It’s an old song. And the urban legend is that this song... is called the ‘Suicide Song.’”
“The ‘Suicide Song?’” That sounded like something I could use for Kirikiri Basara.
“Tell me more!”
“The lyrics are about a girl remembering her dead lover. But in the end, she decides to kill herself.”
“Is that all? That’s not the only reason they call it the ‘Suicide Song,’ right?” There had to be something more sensational involved if an eighty-year-old song had earned urban legend status.
“There’s more to it than that. Here’s where it gets serious.” He paused for a moment to look around the café . Of course, there was nobody here but the four of us.
“It’s said that several hundred people around the world have listened to this song and then actually killed themselves.”
Several hundred...
If it had really negative lyrics, maybe someone who already wanted to commit suicide could hear it and then decide to do it? Was that possible?
“I don’t feel like dying right now, so I’m fine. ☆ What about you, Myu?”
“I think I’m fine too, but...”
“It’s not like every person who hears it kills themselves, I don’t think. If it were, there’d be more than a few hundred deaths. But there really are countries where this song is banned from the airwaves.”
“That sounds like something that has to do with mind control and hypnosis. I bet if you looked into it, you’d find some theories like that. I’ll keep that in mind next time I need a story.” It might be good to look it up when I had some free time.
“But it’s really weird, isn’t it, Gamotan?” Ryotasu must have been excited. Her cheeks were flushed
“Really? You can find urban legends about songs that make you kill yourself all over the world. It’s not really that special.”
“Not that! Why did your radio pick up that song?”
“Why? Oh, I see. I didn’t really tune the dial anywhere, did I?” Normally you’d only hear white noise. She was probably asking why it just happened to pick up “Gloomy Sunday” now. Sure, that was a little odd, but...
“But I’ve seen stuff like this before. Sometimes you just happen to have the right shortwave frequency to pick up a broadcast from some country somewhere.”
“That’s not it!” Ryotasu was fidgeting in frustration. Her melons heaved in time with each fidget. “That’s not it! Look, Gamotan. Your radio—” Ryotasu pointed to the power switch on the radio. “The power’s off.”
“Huh?” There was a switch that turned the power on and off. She was right. It was currently in the “off” position.
I didn’t remember touching the switch since I’d opened the case, but I could still hear the song coming from the speakers anyway. Me, Myu-Pom, and Master Izumin all fell silent as we looked at it. The only sound in the quiet café was a woman’s gloomy voice singing.
site 20: MMG
“Our suspicions were correct, and some of the bug receptors are behaving unexpectedly.”
“Unexpectedly?” Takasu put his teacup on the table, annoyed. “Even though it’s been over a century since Tesla created this system?”
“Yes...”
Takasu moaned to himself and looked at the room’s aquarium. It was lit up and filled with tropical fish, which were swimming peacefully, oblivious to Takasu’s worries.
“We live in an era when most of theology can be explained with science. Why are we having so many problems with this?”
The fish, of course, did not answer.
site 21: Toko Sumikaze
Monday, February 22nd
I could hear birds chirping outside the window and squinted at the sunlight’s glare as it came through the blinds. I tried my best to stifle a yawn.
“Hey, good morning.” Takafuji, the editor-in-chief, came into the department office and began to say hello to everyone. I quickly jumped out of my chair.
“Sir, can you take a look at this?” I shoved the project plan that I’d spent the whole night working on in his face as he was still taking off his coat.
“Hey, Sumikaze. You been here all night? Can you start by getting me some coffee? I’m freezing.” The editor-in-chief folded up his coat and tossed it on the desk, then motioned with his head towards the coffeepot in the corner.
“Sure. I can ge
t you some coffee right away, so please read this.”
“What is this?”
“It’s the story you asked me to look into. It’s a lot darker than I expected, so I wanted to spend some more pages on it.”
He still looked skeptical, but I pushed the papers into his hands. Then, I hurried to the coffeepot. I poured the black liquid, brewing since yesterday, into a paper cup. Then I walked back to the editor-in-chief and put it in front of him as he read.
“This is the thing with the mummy and the girl, right? Weren’t you whining about how you couldn’t find anything occult about it?”
“I wasn’t... whining.” At least, I hadn’t in front of him. I guess he’d heard me anyway.
“Hmm... Still, it’s too late to give you more pages for this. We just decided at the last editors’ meeting that our topic for next month’s issue would be the flying humanoids of Mexico.”
“Come on, don’t be like that. Just give it a read, would you?”
“You want me to read all this? Just give me a summary.”
“Oh, you’d prefer it that way?” That was just how I wanted it, too. Face-to-face, I could be pretty persuasive.
“Look at the second page.” The image on the second page was a copy of an old newspaper article. It was from the society section, and it wasn’t very big.
The headline read, “Live-Donor Kidney Transplant Fails in Tokyo, Donor Dies.”
“This article is from three years ago. A kidney transplant was conducted at Tokyo Medical University in Hachioji, and due to malpractice, the donor died.” The donor’s name was Takaharu Minase, age 27.
“Malpractice? Did something like that happen?”
“It did. It never went to trial, but after the incident, Yomikai Newspaper did a big series of stories calling them out for medical malpractice. Remember?” Evidently, he didn’t.
The kidney was to be transplanted from Takaharu Minase to his younger sister, Ria, who was just fourteen years old at the time.
“The transplant itself was a success. Her condition after the kidney transplant was just fine.” The editor-in-chief silently motioned for me to continue.
This was where the true darkness behind the case began. “After the operation, Ria was unable to accept the death of her beloved brother. Several days later, Takaharu Minase’s body disappeared from the hospital morgue. That day coincides with the day that Ria Minase left the hospital.”
“Did she take the body with her?”
“Yes... At only fourteen years old, she snuck into a hospital morgue and stole her brother’s body without anyone noticing. Or from her perspective, she took him home. She put him in a wheelchair and walked home.”
“Hold on. Where was this hospital?”
“Hachioji.”
The editor-in-chief fell silent at my answer. His eyes silently said, “Seriously?”
“She walked back to Kichijoji from Hachioji. That’s 20 kilometers as the crow flies, and this girl was recovering from a kidney transplant and pushing her dead brother in a wheelchair.”
“...”
“And once she got back, she started to live with her brother’s corpse. That’s strange enough, but what’s worse is that it took her relatives a full year to notice. Doesn’t that just make you shiver?”
The dark side of the modern nuclear family, the collapse of Japan’s village-oriented society... If you were to analyze this from a sociological perspective, you might use phrases like that.
But this family certainly wasn’t normal. They were so obsessed with keeping up their noble outward appearance that they covered up the disappearance of the body. It vanished into the darkness without making the news or the police getting involved. They must’ve gone searching for it on their own, too.
That wasn’t what interested me about this case, of course. “In the end, it was a year before her relatives found out about the body and took it away from her. Are you listening? ‘Cause this is where it gets interesting.”
I leaned forward. The editor-in-chief leaned away, obviously a little spooked. “Ria Minase still lives all alone in the same house. Now she’s changed her name and runs something she calls a ‘black magic agency.’ The place is located in Harmonica Alley in Kichijoji. So, pop quiz. When you hear the words ‘black magic’ and ‘mummy,’ what’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
He looked annoyed, and tossed the papers on the desk. “Listen to me, Sumikaze. What kind of magazine do you think Mumuu is?”
“Huh?”
“We’re not a gossip rag.” He sighed deeply and took a sip from his coffee, then winced. It must’ve been more bitter than he was expecting.
“For one thing, where’s the occult in that story you just told me? It just sounds like a crazy girl acting crazy.”
“Well, the plan is to talk about Aria Kurenaino— that’s what Ria Minase calls herself now. I know she’s trying to use her black magic to do something.”
“Sumikaze.” He glared at me. There was a piercing light in his eyes. “I told you to look into this case, but only insofar as we could find something to use for a Mumuu article. If you really want to do this, go find proof that this Aria girl can ‘cause supernatural events to happen with her magic,’ and bring that to me. That’s all.”
“What? Ascension, sir! That’s too harsh!”
“Come on, I’m being nice. Sheesh... This is the problem with kids these days.”
“When you call someone a kid, it’s because you’re actually a kid yourself.” Well, maybe I should be glad he didn’t tell me to kill the whole story. “All right. I’ll go over this all again.”
I took back the papers and reluctantly headed back to my seat. There was some truth to what he said. Instead of staying cooped up in the office and thinking, it felt like I needed to get out there and dig deeper. Otherwise, I wasn’t a journalist. I was just an amateur.
“So what should I do now?” With my tension gone, I was starting to feel really sleepy.
I bit back another yawn and wiped away the tears that were forming in my eyes, then looked out at the blue winter sky that peeked through the gaps in the blinds.
I wondered to myself...
What did the world look like to Aria Kurenaino? She was insane. I knew it. So what did she see? And—
What did she hear?
site 22: Miyuu Aikawa
Monday, February 22nd
Yuta Gamon, or Gamo, was a type of person I’d never encountered before.
Calling him an otaku wouldn’t be quite right. I had some otaku in my class, but he was more... to put it quite bluntly... just obnoxious.
Right now, he was muttering to himself as he fiddled with the switches on that radio he always carried around. It kind of looked like he was talking to the radio.
“What I’m saying here is that we need something with more impact than just an ordinary interview. Maybe we should just have Kirikiri Basara take over Myu’s Nicco-Nico Live Fortune-Telling. The best option would be to have her do a photo shoot in a bikini, but that’s no different than your average idol, and it’s not fair to ask an amateur to go that far. Hint, hint.”
“You don’t have to hint. It’s not happening.” I ignored him and took a sip of the “Prototype Ultra-Lucky Mango Lassi” that Master Izumi had just brought me. A sweet and sour taste filled my mouth. Oh, wow! This is really good. I don’t know what’s lucky about it, though.
Gamo must have been shocked by my cold refusal, because he sank into the sofa and sulked.
Whenever he asked for something, it was always crazy, but when I told him no, he always quickly dropped it. He was a little wimpier than I thought he would be. Maybe he was afraid of someone not liking him.
In other words... he was only tough on the internet? “I know, I know. This is just my personal wish, or maybe what I’m imagining. I mean, of course, I’ve imagined you wearing a swimsuit, but that doesn’t mean I’d actually want to do it. I’m not an idol producer or anything. But I know there’s demand for photo
s of you in a bikini. You know it, baby.”
“Don’t call me ‘baby.’” And anyway, it was winter. You’d have to be an idiot to wear a swimsuit when it was this cold out.
I felt cold pretty easily, so to me, that would be suicide. My body temperature dropped just thinking about it. It felt like I was going to start to shiver, so I pulled my hoodie over my head. I didn’t like the cold.
“Man, what’s the best way to do this? The nuance is really important here. Depending on the way we tell everybody that you’re working for us now, we could get loads of praise or start a huge flamewar. If we make it look like me and Myu-Pom are too close, the fans will get jealous, and the eggs on Twitter will start coming after me. Just me, you see. I want to avoid that.”
“I don’t think I’ve got that many passionate fans. I’m not really an idol or anything.”
“You don’t get it! You don’t understand your own popularity at all.” Gamo pointed his index finger right at my face in frustration.
I wish he wouldn’t point at people like that.
“Dancers and singers on Nico get a ton of attention! There’s even scandals involving them. You’ve got a ton of views on your account, and you’ve been on TV, too. You’ve got dozens of times more fans than your average idol. I know it!”
“Huh...” He probably didn’t have to worry about any of that, I thought.
Still, he sure liked to talk...
When I first met him at school, he was much more awkward. Like, I’d never seen a boy so shy.
When he talked, he always sounded so wimpy, too.
It was pretty tiring to listen to him, maybe.
Would being with him really open up the future? It’s not like I doubted my own power, but he didn’t look like the kind of person who would open up the future for me. I was feeling super-nervous.
“Gamotan, you’re worrying too much!” Narusawa, who had been dancing around the room and singing, said to him. Her huge breasts wobbled as she spoke. Those things were so big that, even as a girl, I couldn’t help but stare.
Occultic;Nine: Volume 1 Page 18