Chapter 7.2

Miwako knelt over the welcoming fire, fixedly watching as the flame burned out. Seishin watched over his mother's form much the same way.

They may have been a temple family, but they still had ancestral spirits. Miwako dutifully set out to meet them every year. In Sotoba, they burned firs rather than hemp. Burning chips of firs released the visitors from within the firs. Miwako set out beside the welcoming fire a horse made of cucumber and a cow made of eggplant, facing the main wing of the house.

Every year, each time he looked at the small ride-able animals, he thought it'd have been fine to have them facing the outdoors. It was said they were positioned so one could ride on their backs towards the house but they could also serve the function of being ridden back when they returned to the grave just as well.

Miwako remained crouching, without a word. What she was so silently caught up in thoughts about each year, he didn't know. Perhaps it was her own deceased father, or maybe her eldest brother who died young. Even from before Seishin had come to look over the welcoming fire with her, Miwako was like this, eternally silent with her thoughts. Kneeling and looking only at the flame, she was occluded to him. Thus somehow, he had the feeling that she was not thinking of the dead of this family, but of the one whose homecoming was some other place. She was not thinking of the spirits invited to this home, but to the dead being invited elsewhere, the dead that she had no right to invite to this house. ---Whenever experience this feeling, Seishin thought of how while he knew Muroi Miwako quite well, he knew nothing of Yamamura Miwako.

Seishin was pleased with the village's Bon. The families here and there, their street corners lit with flame, had their family altars visible through transparent reed screens, lit with candles and Bon lanterns resembling revolving lamps. In the village, the thirteenth was the welcoming or Mukae Bon, the fourteenth was memorial services, the fifteenth was the dance of Bon Odori, and the sixteenth was the send off or Okuri Bon. Welcome, pray, comfort, see off. ----The dead awoke. In the midst of the days of toiling to one's own death, on this night, when the forgotten dead had life breathed into them together with the welcoming flame, once living beings and the days they left behind were all contained in the feeble embers; in other words, they were revived within the light of the Bon lanterns.

From behind he heard a small sigh like sound. As he turned to look back, Miwako scooped a ladle of water from the bucket. She gathered the small horse and cow in her arms and stood.

"I will be returning ahead."

There was his mother's usual face. It was not a motherly face, but merely the face of the one known as "mother" to him.

Seishin nodded and saw his mother off, then looked down at the road leading to the shrine. There was one less light, now. Captivated by the night winds, he idly walked along through the mountain gate. He walked halfway down the stone steps, then sat. The lights he could see far off became faint and then vanished.

The dead revived and returned to their nostalgic homes. To where they belonged. As for him,

He left behind a hollow grave. There he was embraced in pitch black darkness awaiting impatiently the emissary. Return to your own resting place, the earth wailed. In a betrayal of the fate of divine providence, why did the sin laden earth wish for such so resolutely?

Seishin smiled faintly and shook his head. As he thought to stand to return home, he saw a white shadow yonder on the night road.

At last from before him, he saw a white, pale outline of a human form.

It came again tonight from the grave.

Seishin watched over it. Soon it revealed itself as a small statured person. Drawing closer with steps lacking in destination the figure came close enough to be seen as a young girl, stopping as if she had noticed Seishin. Soon the girl was, with a distinct sense of purpose, walking towards him. Finally arriving at the bottom of the stone steps, she looked up at Seishin.

The manner in which she tilted her head was child-like. A hydrangea colored one piece outlined her thin frame. She seemed to be twelve or thirteen. Her long hair settled over her thin shoulders with a soft, silky sound.

"---Muroi-san?"

Seishin nodded. He had never seen the girl before. She didn't have the aura of one from Sotoba. Who it was, he quickly deduced.

With no hint of bashfulness to her, the girl casually ascended the stone stairway. She rose until she was able to meet evenly the seated Seishin's gaze, her feet coming to a stop.

"You are Muroi-san, aren't you?" The girl said. Maybe it was because she could not bask in the sun; her skin was white like wax.

"That's right, but..."

The girl smiled and folded her slender arms behind her back. "I rather like your works."

Having that said to him out of the blue, Seishin's eyes widened. For a moment, he was at a loss for words.

The girl inclined her head like a puppet.

"You are Muroi-san, yes? Of

Minotaur."

"Ah... yes. But," Seishin took a long, hard look at the young girl's face in bewilderment. "You've read it?"

"Yes. I have read it. Is it strange?"

"No," Seishin forced a smile. "Thank you. I think that you are probably my youngest reader."

She made as if to suppress a giggle.

"Oh yes, there were some difficult words, too," she added in with blunt, fast talk. "But, I do believe that any human can understand the feeling that they have been abandoned by God."

"Do you like books?"

"Oh yes. I like them. I've read many," said the little girl, adding further. "Indiscriminately. The truth is your book, too, was one I had borrowed from my father's shelves. There were six long novels, and two volumes of short stories. If that is all of them, I have read them all."

"That's amazing." Seishin showed a smile, but inside, he was dismayed. "That's all of them. This is the first I've met someone who's read all of them."

"Also there have been times I've seen your essays and the like in magazines. Last year, you wrote about this village, didn't you?"

Seishin blinked. "You knew it was this village?"

"I at least knew that it was where the author lived. When looking at your other books' curriculum vitae, a person may be able to suppose whereabout you live, don't you think? All that was left was to use the name of the temple in that curriculum vitae and to properly look over a map."

"I don't think this is the case but, ---you didn't look for me like that, did you?"

The little girl smiled. "The truth is, one of my father's acquaintances had brought it up. That there was an author inf the village. And it had turned out to be Muroi-san. I promise you though, that I had read your works before the little old man of Takemura had told me this."

"----I see. Thank you."

"In reading over the magazine, I found that essay. A village like a shrine, it had a nice feeling. I felt I'd want to try living there," said the little girl, adding on. "I am sure that Father had thought the same. It was when I had found the essay and presented it to Father that he began to talk seriously about moving."

"That's... an honor," so he said, but the truth was that he was disturbed. The little girl fixedly watched over Seishin.

"You're troubled, it's written on your face."

"That's not it. Just--- all of this this is really something unusual for me."

"All of this?"

Seishin forced a smile. "Suddenly meeting a reader."

"Is it? If I am the first, then it is an honor."

"Without a doubt, you are the first."

The girl gave a simmering smile. "I have been very interested in you, Muroi-san. I'd hoped to try to meet you."

"You're probably disappointed I don't fit your image?"

"That's true," said the little girl, looking Seishin over again from top to bottom. "At first I had thought you were an unexpectedly normal person, to be honest? I mean, I had the feeling that Muroi-san was the type who would have a horn or a tail, after all."

"Why?"

"Because those are the humans you write about. Stories of those abandoned by God, right? So perhaps Muroi-san has a horn too, I had thought, like a Minotaur. So, I was sad that you had no horns," Seishin smiled at that girlish way of phrasing it, and was frozen by the words that followed. "---But, even if you don't have horns, you have scars. I am satisfied with that."

Seishin stared at the little girl's face.

"...You..."

"I'm Sunako. Remember that."

"Sunako-chan, you..."

"Don't add -chan. I really hate being called that!"

Seishin closed his mouth. The little girl was really doll like, the way disgust warped her face, and unable to think what else to call her, Seishin had forgotten what it was he was going to say to her. Without thinking, he'd gripped at the wristwatch over his left wrist.

"I will tell you something, Muroi-san. The little girl set off, speaking in a small voice. "A person won't die just from cutting their wrist."

Seishin had no response. Sunako's upper half seemed to revitalize, a smile rising to her face that seemed to engulf her body. She descended lightly down the stone steps, her one piece flickering on the night road off into the distance. ---Like a phantom killer.

As if he had been struck by one attacking a random peasant to test out a new sword, Seishin watched the road down which the little girl had disappeared. There had been neither time to stand nor to call to her to stop.

"Mm, that's right," Seishin answered, however belatedly. "....I think that I probably knew that then, actually."

[Note: Cucumber horses and eggplant cows. 

A Bon tradition. In some regions, they are both put out, facing the house, for the spirits to ride in on. In others, the horse is put out during Mukae-bon for a fast return home and the cow during Okuri-bon for a slow return to the afterlife. The opposite also occurs, to express fear/respect of a lingering spirit]