About a Place in the Kinki Region p.1: "Strange Comments" - an article published in a July 2017 special edition of a monthly magazine

A-san is a 24-year-old office worker who was living in Tokyo at the time. Immediately after graduating university, he had secured a job as an engineer at a computer systems company, but quickly got the hang of his work to the degree that his life settled into a boring and depressing cycle.

A-san had no hobbies and no girlfriend, so he often relieved stress by browsing certain websites.
"It's embarrassing to say, but they were what you'd describe as adult sites. There's a lot of sites these days that illegally reupload adult videos for free, you know? Obviously I'm not condoning that sort of thing, but still. It was practically a daily routine for me—I'd browse a few of those sites at night, before heading to bed."
There was one such website he frequented often.
"This site posted brand new releases from big publishers, so I'm sure it got a lot of traffic. The site design was a little unique, though... Typically, below the video itself, you'd have a section for recommended videos. This site had a comments section there instead."
A-san continues, but prefaces his next statement by saying it's just his assumption as an engineer.
"The majority of these kinds of sites are operating in a legal grey area, so it's not uncommon for them to be shut down out of nowhere. Maybe because they don't expect to stick around for long, they don't put much time and money into the actual site design. They often just copy the design of a different website, which makes creating a site much easier; you don't have to build the whole thing yourself. Because of that, I assumed the comments section was just an artifact of whatever website they copied from, rather than being placed there specifically by the site owners. There's not many people watching pirated adult videos who'd want to have a discussion in the comments section."
Confirming A-san's assumption, there was rarely ever anybody posting in the comments section. When there were, they were mostly making complaints such as 'this video cuts off halfway' or 'upload something new instead' and there were never any replies from the site owners, so it seemed the comments section had no real purpose.
One day, A-san visited this site as he typically did, but came across a strange comment.
"That video in particular was the debut of a new adult actress working for my favourite publisher. I thought I'd hit the jackpot when I found it. After watching, though, I just happened to scroll down, and that's when I saw the comment."

"So cute. Won't you come to my house?"

"Seeing it, I just assumed it was some old man who didn't really get how the internet works. Still, there was something about it that stuck with me."
Around a month later, A-san found another video featuring the same actress on that same site.
"'Another video already!' ...is basically what I thought to myself when I was watching it, but I found another comment underneath."

"Won't you come to my house? I have persimmons."

"Of course, I immediately knew it was the same person as last time. There's no way the actress would ever be reading the comments on a site like this, and the way it was written was so strange that I felt creeped out."
From then on, videos featuring the actress were posted every now and again, and would almost always be accompanied by a similarly written comment. They stood out compared to the usual barren comments section.
"I actually began to look forward to reading them. Whenever a new video was posted with her in it, I'd look to see if there was a comment."
After a few months like this, yet another video featuring the actress was uploaded. Apparently, the following comment could be found beneath it.

"Won't you come to the mountains? I have persimmons."

It so happened that A-san had been in trouble with his boss that day, so he thought to vent his frustrations by indulging his curiosity.
"I just figured I'd mess with this guy a little."
A-san decided to write his own comment in reply.

"Won't you come to the mountains? I have persimmons."
"Thank you for always leaving me comments! I'm 〇〇 [the name of the actress]. Where do you live?"

A-san was satisfied having made the reply and moved on, forgetting he had even posted it.
He would eventually remember, when a new video featuring the actress was posted. A comment beneath it read as follows.

"You haven't come. Why? I've been waiting forever."

"I checked the earlier video immediately. They'd left a reply to my prank comment."

"Won't you come to the mountains? I have persimmons."
"Thank you for always leaving me comments! I'm 〇〇 [the name of the actress]. Where do you live?"
"●●●●●-●●-●●● [address has been obscured]"

"They'd written out their whole address. I was honestly shocked. I realised they had been serious this whole time, and that I'd replied to someone pretty unhinged."
Despite being put on edge by this, A-san had the idea to look the address up on a maps app.
"It wasn't like I was planning to do anything about it, I was just curious to see where a guy like that lived."
But he was surprised at what he found.
"It wasn't a house. It was a Shinto shrine. An old one too, far off in a rural area. I went into street view, and the shrine looked to be on top of a hill. There was this old torii gate placed on the side of a country road at the bottom of the hill, and from there a set of stairs led up to the shrine's main building. It was in ruins, like it'd been left to the elements."
"I didn't want to get any deeper into it, so I didn't use that site much after that. But there was this one time where I just happened to visit it again. Another video of that same actress had just been posted there..."

The comment left below the video read as follows.

"Be my bride."

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Translation Notes 1-8
The translation notes are organised by part. Please be careful of spoiling yourself by reading ahead.


This is an amateur translation of the web novel 近畿地方のある場所について as posted to kakuyomu.jp by the author 背筋. The web novel is freely accessible to the public, and this translation has no relation to any other adaptions. I claim no rights or ownership of the content presented.