About a Place in the Kinki Region p.10: "Rentals" - an article published in the February 2015 issue of a monthly magazine
A-san is a freelance designer living in Kokura, Fukuoka. This is their story.
"I'd always wanted to move to the countryside, having grown up in Tokyo. One of the reasons I'm a freelancer is so I'd have the freedom to move around."
A-san recently quit their job at a large advertising company around six months ago, influenced by the recent trend of urbanites moving out to more rural areas.
"I'd been looking at properties for sale even before I quit. Recently, local governments have been supporting efforts to renovate vacant properties and then rent them out for cheap to single buyers wanting to move there. A lot of them have been really nicely fixed up and I'd spend a lot of my nights searching through what's on the market, imagining what it'd be like to live there. I suppose it was kind of like a hobby."
They originally had their eye on somewhere other than Kokura.
"It's a place called ●●●●●, in the Kinki region. They had quite a few properties in a rural residential district there, all fixed up and available for renters."
A-san was planning to move, but they didn't want to live in an area where your neighbours were all hundreds of metres away—they only wanted to escape the hustle and bustle of Tokyo city and enjoy the clean countryside air. For them, this location was almost perfect.
After they'd singled out the location, they started looking into what's available.
"I'd use a search engine to look through images. If you put in the name of the area alongside terms like 'renovated,' 'rental,' or 'detached house' then you'll get a lot of photos of the exteriors and interiors alongside floor plans. Instead of going through each property one by one to check the specifics, I'd glance over all the options and then go for whichever ones stand out to me."
One day, after getting home from work, A-san got into bed and began searching for properties in ●●●●● on their phone.
"I'm not sure what search terms I used exactly, but I imagine it would've at least been '●●●●●' 'rental' like usual."
As they scrolled through the results, an odd image caught their eye.
"The way it was displayed in the results, it was too small to make out very well, so I tapped the image to look at the page it came from."
It was supposedly an image of a woman standing in the dark.
"It was very dark so it wasn't easy to see, but it was an image of an old, run-down Japanese-style room. Just standing there in the room was a woman with long, messy hair wearing something that looked like a red coat. It was a really creepy picture."
Above the image was a single line of garbled text. There was nothing else on the page, even links, so the page seemed to exist only to display this one image.
"I thought to myself 'why'd I have to see something so creepy right before bed?' but I wasn't really worried about it and went back to the search results to keep scrolling through properties."
After another ten or so minutes of scrolling, they saw it.
"I thought it was just the same image as before, but something about it seemed different."
A-san says they tapped on the image without thinking.
"It looked like it was taken in the same place—that dilapidated room. The woman in the picture was the same person, too, but now she had her hands raised above her head."
There was more garbled text above the image, but it looked to be longer this time.
"Since the text was a different length, that means something else was written there before it was all messed up. I got a really uncomfortable feeling, thinking that whoever uploaded this image was trying to tell the viewer something."
That unpleasant feeling stuck with A-san, and they stopped their search there. From then on, for whatever reason, they would rarely do their usual property searches anymore.
"I wonder how long it was? I'd almost entirely forgotten about what happened, so maybe it was about a month later. My boss at work had told me to copy some papers, I was in the middle of that when it happened."
They were leaning against the copier, absent-mindedly staring at the papers as they were churned out of the machine, waiting for it to finish. Suddenly, they noticed something odd amongst the papers. They stopped the machine and flipped through the top of the pile of papers, and there it was.
"The copier was printing in black & white, so all I had to go on was the contrast, but it printed out an image of that woman from before. She was standing in a room with her hands raised again. The picture wasn't all that was printed on the page, though—there was something handwritten in the space above it. In large, angular letters they'd written out..."
"Thank you for noticing."
A-san was panicked for a moment, but they snatched the paper, crumpled it up, and pocketed it. They then went about their work-day as normal until it was time to head home.
After work was over, they called a close friend they'd known since elementary school and asked them to come to their apartment.
"I was too scared to be alone. I knew I needed to do something about this, but I had no idea what."
A-san explained everything to their friend and then gave them the crumpled up paper. They watched nervously as their friend opened it up—the woman was still there but, now looking closely, the room seemed different.
A-san averted their eyes from the image but their friend was frozen still, staring at the page. They hadn't said a word since opening the paper, so A-san asked what was wrong. Their friend replied, voice trembling.
"Isn't this your old house?"
"It was my childhood room, at my parents' house. My friend would visit all the time when we were children, which must be why they recognised it so easily. You could make out the shape of my old desk and you could see the wall clock—which had a distinctive design. It was definitely my parents' house."
According to A-san, their current residence in Kokura was found through a real estate site rather than search results.
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.