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 get 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?