The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo

Author:Seishi Yokomizo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2020-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Man in the Shadows

About four kilometers from Nasu on the opposite shore of the lake is a lonely village called Toyohata. Although it had always been poor, it nevertheless prospered considerably for a while when there was a good demand for cocoons. Now that the export of silk was at an all-time low, however, the whole village seemed devoid of life. Of course it was not just Toyohata Village that was affected in this way; the entire region around Lake Nasu now faced this agonizing fate.

At the western edge of the village flowed a stream, and where it emptied into the lake, the earth and sand it deposited formed a delta that grew larger year by year, encroaching upon the lake. The delta was covered with dead reeds that swayed desolately in the wind.

It was among these reeds and into the mouth of the stream that Tomo’s motorboat now glided. He slowed down, and with his darting eyes quickly took in the scene around him, but all he saw were the dead reeds waving forlornly. Not a soul was in the rice paddies or mulberry fields, now that the harvest was over. Only the same lone kite, drawing rings in the sky, observed him from above.

Chuckling to himself at his luck, Tomo began to maneuver the boat upstream between the reeds, hunched over as if hiding himself from sight. Soon, above the reeds before him there appeared a European-style building, a structure that was pitiably dilapidated now but that must have been quite grand in its day.

Why such a building in such a place? Everyone who first discovers it seems to wonder about this, but there is a good reason for its location. Toyohata Village was where the Inugami clan got its start, and this building now visible among the reeds was where Sahei first made his home. Because of the village’s inconvenience, however, Sahei eventually moved his business headquarters to Upper Nasu. He also built a new villa there.

Since that time, this house in Toyohata Village had not been occupied, and was preserved only as a kind of family monument. With the war, however, less and less effort could be devoted to its upkeep, and when its caretaker was drafted, there was nothing else to do but let it go to ruin. Now, after Sahei’s death, there remained no one with any affection for the old house, and it had been left to grow increasingly dilapidated. The villagers had taken to saying it was haunted. It was toward this house that Tomo now seemed to be heading.

No doubt in the old days, this building had looked out directly onto the lake. Now, however, the ever-growing delta separated it far from the water’s edge, and it stood alone, as if forgotten, among the desolate reed beds.

Tomo navigated the boat up the stream and rammed it into a reed bed by the house. This far in, the water was shallow and the mud deep, so maneuvering was not easy. Finally,

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