About a Place in the Kinki Region p.12: Interview transcript 1
Goodness me, it really has been a while. The last time we saw each other was that ghost story talk show in Shibuya, which means we haven't spoken in about a decade.
What do you want to drink? Ah, yes, I'll have an iced coffee, black. Is it alright if I order you the same thing? Hah. Brings back memories. We always used to get the same drink when we'd have meetings, didn't we? Made ordering easy.
Yeah. I'm getting by with freelance jobs these days. Thankfully I have plenty of connections from when I used to be an editor, so finding jobs isn't too difficult. I'm not involved with the paranormal anymore, though. I'm sure you know how it is, you can't really make a living sticking to the paranormal nowadays. Right? Well, I was never a horror fanatic like you were. I just ended up in that editorial department by chance.
In any case, I'm always happy to hear from an old colleague.
Hey, no need to be so polite. I'm not the one giving orders anymore. Actually, in terms of industry experience, you're my senior.
What happened back then? It was rough. All of a sudden the higher-ups told me the publication was getting the axe. Well, not like there hadn't been whispers about it happening for a while. We'd been downsized to just three people by then, including the editor-in-chief. On that point, I'd like to apologise. All I gave you was a quick phone call out of the blue to break the news. I know you had some drafts ready to go and all...
The department was shut down and the three of us eventually left the company. It would've been awkward to get transferred somewhere from a dead department. That's when I decided to become a freelancer. The other editor, O, moved to a different publishing company after I'd left. I still go out for drinks with them occasionally. Sometimes they've got jobs for me. Now that I think about it, you never met them or the editor-in-chief, did you?
The editor-in-chief? That'd be S. What's he up to now, I wonder...? I've got no idea. Me and him, we weren't exactly close. He was first to leave. Didn't even say goodbye.
I'm free to admit this now, but I never really liked him. Why not? Umm, it was really a matter of editorial approach—O and I wanted to give 〇〇〇〇 an entertainment focus but S, well, he preferred a more factual approach. Now, I agree that some realism is necessary for the paranormal. Readers want something that feels real, not stories made of pure fiction. But my opinion is that the most important thing is that it's still entertaining. So realistic stories are fine so long as they entertain. S didn't see it that way. He had a high standard when it came to his projects and drafts—needed to be from reliable sources with actual evidence. But nobody can actually prove that ghosts or aliens exist, right? How were we supposed to know if our sources were telling the truth? We didn't have the time to vet every single story. It's a magazine, not a newspaper. S didn't really tolerate any of that, though. We must've butted heads over it countless times.
Well, at the end of the day, we were all grown-ups. S was the editor-in-chief, so we went by his vision for the magazine. Privately, O and I disagreed with quite a few of his decisions. Honestly, you were a huge help. Your submissions were always very high quality so all three of us trusted your work. I don't remember having to call you back for second drafts much. Writers like you are hard to come by in this industry, you know? Working with you taught me a lot about how to dissect and look at information.
Since we're talking about it, there's something else I can't really forgive S for. I told you before that the department was shut down and we all quit but, when I spoke to a colleague in human resources about the whole situation, they told me a different story. According to them, S had suddenly announced his resignation and the higher-ups only decided to axe the publication because he was leaving. Now, I don't know if that's true, but it would explain why they axed a publication right before the fiscal year was over. I mean, obviously choosing to resign is your choice, I'm not saying he was wrong to do it but, if what my colleague said was true, he could've at least let O and I know. It rubs me the wrong way to just up and leave one day and expect everyone else to pick up where you left off. I suppose 〇〇〇〇 got axed so we didn't have to put any effort into handing off our work either. What's that? You're saying the archives are disorganised? Hah-hah. I'm sorry. That's our fault, huh? We left a big mess for the new kids to clean up. But still, a part of me is happy to see it still being published, even in the state it's in now as a special edition.
Apologies. I got nostalgic. I've just been rambling. So, you want to talk about ●●●●●, right?
Ah, you're getting this on tape. Right, these days people just record with their iPhones. Yeah, I still say 'on tape' out of habit. Hah.
Normally I'm the interviewer, so I'm always a bit nervous being in the hot seat myself. Have you been recording this whole time? That's pretty underhanded, you know? Please keep everything about the editorial department off the record.
That brings me back, though. I've been to the place myself as part of an investigation. I think it was a, umm, what was it? A tunnel. I remember it being some kind of paranormal experiment. We staked out the tunnel the whole night but nothing happened. I think we ended up just publishing a photo with some vague orb-shaped thing. Paranormal magazines were really booming back then, weren't they? Well, it was a lot of fun. I'm sure I remember one of my seniors talking about putting together an article on some cult compound over there. That's what people were into back then.
I was pretty surprised by your phone call. That new kid is sharp. I'd never noticed—when you include the other side of the mountain, that whole area is one big haunted hotspot. Now that he's pointed it out, I can see it.
Like I said earlier, once the decision to axe the publication was official, we were all focused on finding new jobs. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but the handover process was basically just shoving everything into boxes and tossing them in the archives—back issues, CDs, documents, all of it. Everything that was on my own personal PCs or in my notebooks never got archived. That included a lot of project plans, interview notes, and drafts from writers. I imagine it's the same for O. Despite that, I didn't throw everything away. When you contacted me, I had a look at some of my old interview notes for the first time in a long while. It was only a cursory search, really, but I did find something. It's a story about ●●●●● we never ended up putting to print. To use the new kid's phrasing, it's from the east side, opposite the dam.
Although, it was never formatted into a proper article. You'll have to forgive me, because I'm going entirely off of my notes and my own memory here.
My source was XX-san, but let's call them A-san. I have on my notes here that they were a 22-year-old male. University student at the time. A writer I knew, F-san, introduced him to me.
The interview is dated March 4th 2012.
A-san had been studying psychology at a university in Tokyo. The Great East Japan Earthquake was about a year earlier, so finding a graduate job was difficult. He'd managed to finally secure one, though, and was due to enter the workforce in April. He'd just submitted his thesis, too. It was like the calm after a storm.
This story is about A-san's thesis.
The topic of the thesis was 'communicating fear through physical expressions.'
He'd show test subjects a short scary video and then examine how the subjects physically expressed themselves, like with gestures, while verbally communicating their feelings on the video to someone else. It's a pretty unique idea, right? As it happens, A-san is a huge horror fan—he wanted to do his thesis on a topic he was interested in.
It wasn't just about finding similarities in how all the subjects acted, A-san was looking for the differences in how the subjects expressed themselves based on their personalities, so he divided them into groups.
To do that, he gave them all a questionnaire of about ten questions beforehand. This gave them all characteristics such as 'likes horror' versus 'dislikes horror,' 'good at talking' versus 'bad at talking,' 'has siblings' versus 'doesn't have siblings.' Then he used the results from the experiment to compare around fifty test subjects to find out which opposing characteristics correlated with different kinds of physical expressions.
A-san argued that 'communicating fear through physical expressions' would require a scary video without any kind of narrative, otherwise it'd be easy for the test subjects to just describe what happened. He wanted something more abstract that'd instead leave the viewer with only the hard-to-explain emotion of 'it was scary.' To achieve that, he chose a 'cursed video' that had been uploaded online.
I'm sure you're familiar with the concept. The film 'The Ring' is a famous example, where the characters are cursed to die in seven days after watching a video tape. Cursed videos like that has become a bit of a trend, with their abstract content and scary atmosphere. After 'The Ring' blew up, plenty of amateur 'cursed videos' cropped up all over the internet.
The video A-san chose was one of those dime-a-dozen 'cursed videos.' The runtime was about three minutes and he described the content as pretty generic—every few seconds it would flash between scenes like a bloody knife, shadowy figures standing in ruined buildings, or the face of a woman with a horrifying expression. A-san recognised some of the footage as being recycled from a famous horror film. Essentially it was amateur work—just slapping together some existing horror footage. Do I have the video? No. I did look around when I was getting things together for this interview, but I couldn't find it anywhere. It must've been taken down.
So the test subjects were made to watch the video, then they had to explain how they felt to someone else. There was a wide range of expressions: some people hugged their shoulders and just said 'it was scary' while others would explain that 'it reminded them of a nightmare they'd had.' Apparently, given the topic, it was difficult to get a whole fifty test subjects.
I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but isn't it an interesting idea? I was interviewing him to put together a scary story, but I ended up paying more attention to the nitty-gritty of the experiment. The results? Right, of course I noted that down. They measured the physical expressions by type, frequency, and length. Overall there wasn't much difference between many of the opposing characteristics, but the people who 'liked horror' versus 'disliked horror' diverged significantly.
The people who 'liked horror' used descriptive gestures to depict scariness, like imitating a ghost, far more frequently and longer than the people who 'dislike horror.' You know, like holding your hands out in front of you and going 'cuuurse youuu...' Those kinds of gestures. On the other hand, the people who 'dislike horror' used a lot more filler gestures. Those are gestures which are mostly meaningless that are used to fill dead air, like moving your hands without much reason when you have to pause to think.
A-san concluded the following when he was writing the paper.
Those who like horror get enjoyment out of the experience, even if it frightens them. Therefore, they want others to have the same enjoyable experience by sharing that fear. To that end, they try to properly communicate the frightening parts of the experience for the sake of entertainment. Those who dislike horror, comparatively, experience the fear as something painful—they're interested in having others empathise or sympathise with them. They would often be overtaken by emotion, leaving them struggling to explain themselves. This could be why they used more filler gestures.
It's a sensible explanation, isn't it? Right? It's very interesting. Think about it, doesn't that relate to paranormal magazines? As their creators, we communicate occult topics to our readers in a variety of ways for the sake of entertainment. Some readers, though, react badly to specific topics. They're the types who end up contacting the editorial department with highly emotional letters and such. Didn't you mention those in your explanation before? The reader letters? I feel like issues featuring ●●●●● received a lot more responses from our 'regular readers.' Not the usual 'I've also seen a UFO,' but things like 'I'm scared. I'm in trouble. Please help me.'
I've really gone off-topic, haven't I? It's a bad habit of mine, going on unimportant tangents.
So, for the experiment, A-san had to make a record of the gestures of a whole fifty subjects. Manually. When he described the process to me, I thought it sounded quite analogue.
As he told it, he made a video recording of each subject doing their explanation and then watched over them later to record the gestures. He'd count them one-by-one in a spreadsheet alongside the subject's details and input the 'type,' 'frequency,' and 'length' of each gesture. The scary video was only three minutes long but the subject took about five minutes on average to express it. Some subjects even took over ten minutes. Seemed to me like a lot of hard work.
Once he'd recorded the gestures of the first twenty or so, he'd started to get into the flow of things and was entertaining himself by predicting what would happen, saying to himself things like 'I bet they're going to speak in this or that way.'
Among all the subjects, two really stood out for how they acted.
One was a man and the other was a woman. Their gestures weren't anything special, though. Rather, they would sometimes look like they'd seen something while talking, and start looking at it instead of the person they were explaining themselves to.
Both of them looked in the same direction, in front of them and to the right. They were looking out of frame, but A-san recalled that it had just been an empty corner of the room.
Stranger still, it didn't seem like they were intentionally trying to look in that direction. Apparently they'd even pause mid-sentence to look there. As if someone had just called their name all of a sudden. A-san had deliberately ensured no noises or distractions would interfere with the experiment for the sake of accuracy, so he was quite confused.
Were it only a single subject, it'd be easy enough to assume it was just how that individual acted. But there were two, and they were both looking in the exact same direction. A-san was concerned something had interfered with the experiment, so he decided to review their questionnaires.
Actually, I neglected to mention this earlier, but A-san had added a throwaway question just for fun. He'd asked the subjects to select whether they 'can sense spirits' or 'can't sense spirits.'
Yup, you got it. Out of all fifty test subjects, those two were the only ones who said they 'can sense spirits.'
As a horror fan, this really caught A-san's attention. He asked each one to come in for an interview. According to him, they were reluctant to talk at first but, after enough pestering, they gave in.
Their explanations mostly lined up. They described hearing a sound coming from the corner of the room while they were talking. It was a banging noise that kept repeating. They both quickly realised they were hearing something supernatural—they'd spent their entire lives seeing and hearing things nobody else could perceive. It was just another in a long list of supernatural phenomena, so they ignored it and moved on.
But still, they couldn't stop themselves from reflexively looking at the source of the sound. That's what A-san noticed in the recording.
He asked them something along the lines of 'was the room haunted by a ghost or a spirit?' The subjects thought it was actually the video—the one they'd watched for the experiment. The sound stopped as soon as they finished talking about it.
The man described seeing a black shadow, too. It was bouncing up and down in the corner of the room in time with the noise, making it seem like the noise they heard was the sound of the shadow hitting the ground while jumping.
He told A-san this:
"It's best to pretend you didn't see anything. If they realise you've noticed them, it could end badly. It's not worth satisfying your curiosity."
His advice carried the weight of experience. A-san decided to stop there, and never looked at the video again.
A month or so after that, A-san was deep into writing his thesis—he was working on it day-in and day-out at the university. His own apartment was a fair distance from campus so he'd often stay at a friend's place that was closer by.
Around that time, he received a sudden phone call from an unknown number. It was the police. Supposedly they'd received a report from one of A-san's neighbours the night prior. They'd seen a woman on his balcony.
The neighbour lived in a house opposite A-san's apartment building, so they could see the balconies from their front room window. They reported they were looking out their window at 9PM for no particular reason when they happened to see a woman in some kind of red coat at a balcony on the fifth floor—the one attached to A-san's apartment—who had her arms raised in the air like she was cheering. She was facing into the apartment, jumping up and down regularly. The neighbour initially thought it was some domestic dispute, and she'd been locked outside on the balcony, so they decided to pay it no mind and went to bed. They'd woken up at around 3AM to use the bathroom, when they glanced out of their window again—the woman was still on the balcony. Just like before, she was jumping up and down while facing A-san's apartment. The neighbour was shocked, so they watched for a little while. That's when they noticed something strange.
With each jump, the woman's neck would slump at sharp angles, like a newborn baby that can't support the weight of their head. The momentum was swinging her head in all directions.
The police visited the apartment after the report, but the woman was no longer on the balcony. They knocked on A-san's door but seeing as he wasn't staying there at the time, they asked his property management company for his contact information.
A few days after that, A-san received another call—this time, from the property management company. They informed him that they'd received a complaint from the person living in the apartment directly below his. At night, they said, a loud 'thud, thud' noise kept coming from the his room and they wanted him to keep it down. A-san told me that the property management company warned him that they would evict him if anything else happened, likely because the police had gotten involved.
He rarely ever went back to his apartment after all of that. It's understandable he wouldn't want to stay there, not after this woman had found his apartment and even gotten inside of it. The property management company called him several more times to warn him about noise complaints but, when A-san explained he was hardly ever there, they gave up.
A-san had been planning to move in April for his new job, and he was terrified at the idea that the woman might follow him there. He knew someone who wrote for paranormal magazines and the like, and begged them to help. That was F-san, the writer who introduced us. F-san asked for my advice and I recommended A-san to a temple for an exorcism. He did the interview in exchange for that recommendation.
So what do you think? Heh. I can tell you're not satisfied. I'm right, aren't I? No mention of ●●●●●, is there?
But there's actually more to the story. Surely you're curious about the video? Yeah, of course. I looked it up immediately.
The way A-san described it, he'd picked the video for the experiment at random. He was likely unaware, but that video is pretty well-known. Well, to the degree that people on online message boards were talking about it, at least.
There was a thread that linked the video while saying something like 'if you watch this video, you'll be cursed for real.' It blew up at the time because a lot of people who watched it claimed it made them feel sick or caused them to become haunted. As you'd expect for the internet, people started dissecting the content.
They pointed out that one scene was from some American movie, or that another was taken from a popular scary .gif file they'd seen in the past. It's pretty incredible how people are able to recognise things like this.
They weren't able to identify one scene in the video, though. Or maybe it was two different scenes spliced together? It was hard to tell. For about five seconds, a bit of black-and-white footage played. It seemed like something shot by an amateur rather than a clip from a professional film. The footage wasn't particularly scary but it still stood out for how incomprehensible it was.
First it showed a building with a plaque that had the number 5 on it—like how you'd number each building in an apartment complex. The camera was angled looking up at the building. Then it cut to a close-up of a woman's face. It was hard to tell if she was smiling, crying, or angry. Her mouth was wide open, her teeth clearly visible. Her face was repeatedly moving closer to the camera and then back. Her face took up most the screen so you had to look closely to notice it, but I think she was jumping towards the camera. It was filmed at a downwards angle, meaning the woman was looking up at it. You could kind of make out her hands in front of her head—as if she was reaching to try and grab the camera.
Right, exactly. Similar to the woman A-san described. But who knows if it was the same woman. He never actually saw her himself.
Again, as you'd expect from the internet, they investigated. The first shot was of Building 5, one of the apartment buildings at the so-called ●●●●● Haunted Condominium. The building's exterior and the mountain visible in the background were a match.
The woman, though, they never figured out who she was. Unsurprising, since all you could make out was her face and hands. Aside from that, the only thing visible in the video was the gravel beneath her. People on the internet went back and forth over it for a while, but they never found her or identified where the video was taken.
There sure are a lot of urban legends about that Haunted Condominium, huh? People online decided that the curse on the video might've come from there.
Well, that's all I've got.
Why did we scrap the article? Rejected, by the editor-in-chief. It was too weak. Basically, I hadn't managed to get to the truth. That's just how he was. I agree, though—it's incomplete. Messy, even. As a story, it ends with no answers and too much room for speculation. If the goal is to find out the truth, it falls flat. A shame, honestly.
It never saw publication, so you're free to make it into an article under your name. It'd be in good hands. You can finally put this story to rest. No, no, don't be so polite. You were always a great help. And besides, talking to you like this was fun. It really brings me back.
I'll go ahead and ask O if they have anything about ●●●●● that was never archived. We haven't talked in a long time, so it's a good opportunity for me to get in contact.
Translation Notes 9-16
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.