About a Place in the Kinki Region p.8: "About a Place in the Kinki Region" 2
One month after our last meeting, Ozawa sent me an e-mail.
"I have something to discuss with you regarding 〇〇〇〇 Special Edition. Would it be possible for us to meet sometime soon? It'll be a work meeting this time."
It so happened that I would be in the area for a different reason in a few days, so we organised a meeting at a café near his company building in Jinbōchō.
We met in front of the café and headed inside. He ordered a latte, and I a black coffee. Ozawa then laid out a small collection of articles he had photocopied.
While I read over them, he watched me impatiently.
"So, I'd like for you to provide some writing for this special edition. First of all, though, let me explain."
He started speaking practically the moment I finished reading.
Ozawa had spent a lot of his time since our last meeting scouring his company's archives, searching through a ton of old documents. The parts of the archives containing the back issues he was interested in were very disorganised—they weren't filed in chronological order, and some issues seemed to be missing entirely. Additionally, materials like interview transcripts and letters from readers had been stuffed into cardboard boxes haphazardly.
He first tried to read through the issues in chronological order but soon gave up and simply read them as he found them. He reasoned that, as he would be going through everything eventually, it hardly mattered the order and he could just make a note of relevant articles to organise later on.
As he was doing this, he uncovered something.
There are supposedly around five-hundred so-called haunted locations in Japan of varying notoriety, but only a small number are significant enough to be featured in the media—these include such famous examples as Tama Cemetery or the Ikoma Mountain Tunnel. There are some quite well-known haunted locations out in Hokkaido and Okinawa as well, of course, but editors are interested in keeping costs low, so they avoid places that would be expensive to travel to. As a result, they tend to feature locations that their writers can reach without much travel, which leads them to be concentrated near major cities like Osaka, Tokyo, or Fukuoka. The number of ghost stories about a given location also rises proportionally to how many people visit it, which is why the most famous places to 'test one's courage' end up being those within easy travel distance of a lot of people.
"At first I would keep seeing it mentioned repeatedly and think to myself 'oh, this place again.' When I was a child, I went to a campsite near there with my family, so I suppose that's why I noticed it."
Ozawa was referring to a part of the Kinki region with several haunted places: a tunnel, a dam, and an abandoned building. It was quite well-known, so I recognised it. Those three haunted places were all within a roughly three kilometre area—when the paranormal was very trendy, people would often make an event of visiting all three to test their courage. It made me a little nostalgic. They were all fairly standard haunted places—a severed head would jump out if you do this and that in the tunnel, you'd see the ghosts of those who took their own life at the dam, or the ghost of a woman would show up in the basement of the abandoned building. I hadn't considered them especially interesting. While they were still somewhat popular as places to test your courage these days, you barely ever saw them in the media anymore. To me, they felt outdated.
Despite our generational differences, it seemed Ozawa shared my opinion. As he continued to read the articles, he grew tired of how repetitive and generic the ghost stories were.
"Eventually I started to wonder if all the stories about those three places might've had a shared inspiration."
He pointed to the document I was holding.
"'True Story! New Information About the Missing Girl from Nara Prefecture!', 'The Truth Behind the School Trip Mass Hysteria Incident', 'Strange Comments'. Those three articles are from completely different points in time, but I'd seen it in so many articles at that point that I noticed they all mentioned the same place. Yeah. ●●●●●, like we just talked about. But the thing is, none of those articles were themed around haunted places. They just happened to involve ●●●●●. In 'The Truth Behind the School Trip Mass Hysteria Incident', the building wasn't even abandoned yet so I wouldn't expect it to have been known as a haunted spot. Still, ●●●●● shows up in each article—not only that, they all mention the mountains. Don't you think that's odd?"
The other articles, which involved the three haunted places directly, were all fairly generic and divorced from each other, so this connection he'd spotted really stuck out to him.
"Once it caught my curiosity, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I put down the back issues and looked online. The first thing I did was check a maps site to see if the torii gate in 'Strange Comments' really exists. When I went into street view I saw the run-down torii gate and the stairs, east of the dam. Therefore the 'mountains' mentioned was likely the mountains east of the dam, which covered the area with the dam, the abandoned building, and the tunnel. Next I searched for other stories that featured Mt. ●●●●●. Here's what I found."
He then handed me printouts of webpages all found by searching '●●●●●' and 'mountains,' alongside a combination of terms like 'ghost stories,' 'scary,' and 'haunted.' The results were quite surprising.
"I found a recording of something happening during a YouTube livestream, reports about suspicious individuals totally unrelated to any ghost stories, and even a potential double murder. All of them have something to do with 'mountains.'"
At this point I had to admit it couldn't just be a coincidence. While I sat there in stunned silence, he handed me a couple more things. One was a letter inside of an envelope, and the other was a copy of an article from a back issue. He gave me time to read over them both, and then continued talking.
"I was making my way through all the interview materials and letters as I was reading the back issues. I was mostly skimming them at first but, after I noticed this connection with ●●●●● and mountains, I gave them another look. The mountains are featured in this reader letter too, although not mentioned directly. What stuck out to me was that the woman who sent in the letter was visiting haunted spots first, and then had to drive through the mountains to get to the dam. If you think of the mountains as the 'centre,' then our three earlier haunted places are on the west. The mountains stretch far to the north and south so, if we exclude those directions, then the haunted places the reader was visiting must have been to the east. That would mean there's more haunted places around the mountains besides the dam, the abandoned building, and the tunnel. Two of those 'suspicious individual' reports were on the east side, too. The apartment complex featured in 'Masshiro-san'—known as the 'haunted condominium' nowadays—is also to the east."
While he explained this, he showed me an online map with a number of pins marking haunted places centred on the mountains. He used his finger to trace a circle around all of them.
I was aware of the places he'd pointed out to the east. All of them were near the foot of the mountains, and indeed include the haunted condominium and haunted house mentioned in the letter. None of them were as well-known as the three in the west, though, and they were only occasionally featured in magazines like the old monthly version of 〇〇〇〇. They were also divided by the mountains, with the east and west side being in separate prefectures, so the places on each side were never grouped together. Considering Ozawa's findings, it did seem as if all five formed an area around the mountains like he'd outlined.
After I went over what I knew, it seemed he had come to an understanding.
"I suppose ghosts and haunts don't care about manmade divisions like prefectures, huh...? Hearing your opinion has made me even more sure. The special edition will centre on the theory that all of the haunted locations in this area have some kind of connection to the mountains. I'm going to try and gather together anything I can find about this from the archives. As a brand new editor, I'm looking forward to providing our readers with a brand new perspective."
I was impressed with Ozawa's passion, but I couldn't help but feel a sense of trepidation.
"Let's finally get to the point of this meeting. I want you to write a story about this 'area.' I'm not particular about the format or the word count. In return, I'd like to ask you to keep going through the articles I collect, and also check if there's possibly anything you've worked on in the past that might be related—maybe even if there's anybody you know who could have useful information. Please write about what you uncover."
The commission offer wasn't worth the effort involved, but I accepted due to Ozawa's passion and, above all, my own interest as a horror enthusiast.
"I'll keep digging through the company archives. It seems like there's a lot fewer articles about the east so I'll gather together anything I can find about that side, even if it seems unrelated. The only actual article we've got about the east side is 'Masshiro-san', and that one has nothing to do with mountains... Hopefully the connection will become clearer if we can find more information. Should also keep an eye out for articles related to mountains in that general area, particularly mountain shrines."
Thus I began researching ●●●●●. My first order of business was to get in contact with a certain someone...
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.