The Wisteria Ryokan

The bus let them out at the last stop before the road closed for winter, and even then the driver looked at them like they were idiots.

"You sure about this?" he asked, breath fogging the window he'd cranked open. "Snow's coming in tonight. Big one."

"We'll be inside by dark," said Haruki Amagai, hitching his duffel bag higher on his shoulder. "It's only two kilometers."

"Two kilometers uphill," the driver said. He shook his head, closed the window, and the bus groaned away down the switchbacks, its taillights smearing red through the low cloud. Then there was nothing but the sound of water running somewhere under the snowpack, and the wind moving through cedars so tall they seemed to be holding up the sky.

"Okay," said Mizuki Tachibana, adjusting her knit cap with both hands. "That was ominous. That was objectively ominous, right? I'm not being dramatic."

"You're always being dramatic," said Kenta Ozaki, who had somehow already opened a can of hot coffee from the vending machine at the bus shelter and was drinking it like a man at a funeral. He was the biggest of them by a head, a former judo club member who had quit because, in his words, he'd gotten tired of falling down on purpose. "But yeah. That was ominous."

The fourth of them said nothing. Sora Ikeda stood a little apart, looking up the road where it disappeared into the trees, her hands buried in the sleeves of a coat two sizes too large. She had a camera around her neck, an old film Pentax she'd inherited from her grandfather and refused to replace. She was the sort of person who noticed things three minutes before everyone else and then didn't mention them.

"There's smoke," she said.

Haruki turned. "What?"

"Up there. Through the trees. There's a chimney with smoke."

They all looked. There was, in fact, a thin gray thread rising above the cedars, hardly distinguishable from the mist.

"That's impossible," Haruki said. "Nobody's lived there in sixty years. The lawyer said—"

"Maybe the lawyer lied," said Kenta.

"Lawyers don't lie about smoke."

"Lawyers lie about everything," said Kenta comfortably, and started walking.

---

The Fujinami-kan had been in Haruki's family since the Kansei era. That was the phrase in the documents — since the Kansei era — and it had struck Haruki, when he read it in the fluorescent-lit office of a Nagano estate attorney six weeks after his grandfather's funeral, as the kind of phrase that belonged to other people's families. His family lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Kawaguchi. His father sold industrial adhesives. There was nothing about the Amagai household that suggested the Kansei era.

But there it was: a ryokan, thirteen rooms, a bathhouse fed by a natural hot spring, four hectares of mountain, and a name that meant "wisteria wave." Haruki's grandfather had inherited it from his own father and had never once, in Haruki's memory, mentioned it. The inn had closed in 1961. The property taxes had been paid every year for six decades out of a dedicated account, like a debt being serviced, and now the account and the inn and the mountain all belonged to a seventeen-year-old boy who had never held a hammer.

"You could sell it," the lawyer had said. "There's interest. Someone always wants a hot spring."

"Is it in good condition?"

The lawyer had folded his hands. "I've never been there."

So Haruki had proposed a trip. He'd meant it as a lark — a winter break adventure, a haunted house without ghosts, four friends and some cleaning supplies. Mizuki had said yes immediately because Mizuki said yes to everything that might make a story. Kenta had said yes because his mother had signed him up for winter cram school and this was cheaper than running away. Sora had said yes last, quietly, three days later, in a text with no punctuation: *ill come if theres electricity for the water heater*

There was, allegedly, electricity. The dedicated account had paid for that too.

---

The road up was worse than two kilometers of anything had a right to be. Snow lay in gray banks along the shoulders, old snow, crusted and refrozen, and the asphalt beneath was slick in patches. Cedar boughs hung heavy overhead. Twice they passed stone markers by the roadside, moss-eaten and leaning, and Sora photographed both of them without comment.

Then the trees opened, and there it was.

The Fujinami-kan sat in a shallow bowl of the mountain with its back to a cliff face, and it was enormous. Not tall — nothing was tall — but long, sprawling, a low complex of tiled roofs stepping down the slope in tiers, connected by covered walkways, wrapped in weathered wood the color of wet ash. Snow lay along the ridgelines. Some of the roof tiles had slid; there was a raw gap over the western wing like a missing tooth. And over the main entrance, up the whole face of the two-story front block, grew a wisteria vine so old and so vast that its trunk had split the stone of the foundation. In winter it was a nest of black cables, thick as a man's arm at the base, strangling the pillars, running up under the eaves and out along the roofline. Bare. Dead-looking. Enormous.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Okay," Mizuki said at last, in a small voice. "That's not a house. That's a *place*."

"There's no smoke," said Kenta.

Sora was already looking. She turned in a slow circle, found the chimney — a squat brick stack over what must have been the kitchen — and lowered her camera.

"No," she said. "There isn't."

---

The key was iron and as long as Haruki's hand, and it worked, which was somehow the most unsettling thing so far. The front door slid on a rail that had been greased within living memory. Inside was a genkan floored in packed earth and river stone, a step up to polished wood, and a smell Haruki would remember for the rest of his life: cold cedar, cold ash, old tatami, and under it, very faintly, the mineral sweetness of the hot spring, breathing up through the floors.

"Hello!" Mizuki shouted into the dark.

"Don't," said Sora.

"Why?"

"Because if something answers, we all have to deal with it."

Mizuki laughed and then stopped laughing.

They found the breaker panel where the lawyer's notes said it would be, in a closet off the kitchen, and after a moment of Kenta squinting at labels written in prewar characters and Haruki holding a phone flashlight, the lights came on. Not all of them. But enough. Bare bulbs in the corridors, orange and low, humming. The building seemed to exhale.

"Right," said Haruki, and heard his own voice go steady, which surprised him. "Sora, can you go around and photograph structural damage? Roof gaps, floor rot, anything that looks like it's about to kill someone. Kenta, help me get the kitchen usable and check the water. Mizuki—"

"I'm going to explore," said Mizuki.

"Mizuki, I need you to—"

"I'm going to explore," Mizuki repeated, already three steps down the corridor, "and then I'm going to come back and tell you what needs doing, which is a form of helping, and you can't stop me because you love me." Her footsteps receded, then stopped. "Haruki. There's a *guest ledger*."

There was. It lay open on the front desk, a slab of unfinished keyaki wood, and the last entry was dated the eleventh of February, 1961: a party of two from Toyama. Below that, nothing. The pen was still in the tray, dried to a black scab.

Haruki closed the ledger, and a fine drift of dust rose and hung in the light.

---

The water ran hot. That was the first small miracle. There was a boiler, but there was also the spring — a pipe of bamboo and iron running down from a source somewhere behind the inn, feeding the great cypress bath in the eastern wing, and when Kenta wrenched the valve open, water came out steaming and smelling of iron and eggs and spilled into the tub with a noise like applause.

"We are going to be fine," Kenta announced, arms spread. "We have a bath. Civilization is a bath."

They chose rooms on the second floor of the front block, four in a row, because Mizuki refused to sleep alone at either end of anything. The rooms were sixteen-mat suites with alcoves and hanging scrolls gone brown as tea. Futons were stacked in the closets, wrapped in oiled paper, and though they smelled of mothballs and decades, they were dry.

They ate instant noodles at a lacquered table in the dining hall, under a ceiling of coffered wood, and the wind picked up outside, and Mizuki produced a bottle of plum wine she had absolutely not been permitted to buy and poured four thimblefuls into teacups.

"To Haruki," she said, "landlord of the mountain."

"To not dying," said Kenta.

"To the roof," said Sora, and drank.

At around eleven, Haruki went to fetch a spare blanket, and found the wet footprints.

---

They were in the corridor outside the bath — which explained nothing, because the bath had been drained and closed since dinner and none of them had been in it. They started in the middle of the passage, as if someone had risen there out of the floor, and went twelve paces toward the stairs, and stopped again. Bare feet. Small. A woman's, or a young man's. The tatami had drunk the water into dark, spreading blooms, and each print was ringed in a faint pale crust, like salt.

Haruki stood looking at them for a long time. Then he went and got the others.

"One of you," he said, "went in the bath."

"With bare feet?" said Kenta. "In this building? I wouldn't walk barefoot in here if you paid me. I've seen a nail come out of a beam like a tooth."

"I was reading," said Mizuki. "In my room. Since dinner. You could hear me, I was reading out loud, it's how I remember things."

"You were," Kenta agreed. "It was awful."

Sora had crouched at the nearest print. She touched the mat, brought her fingertips to her nose, and frowned. "It's not spring water."

"How can you tell?"

"Spring water smells like sulfur. All the way down the corridor smells like sulfur." She wiped her hand on her knee. "This smells like a well."

Nobody had an answer for that. They stood in the humming orange light and looked at twelve wet footprints in a house where the only water they'd touched came out of a pipe that smelled of eggs.

"Could be condensation," said Kenta, without conviction. "Could be a leak."

"Twelve times, in a line, foot-shaped," said Mizuki.

"I'm aware of the flaws in my theory."

They mopped the prints with a rag and went to bed, and Haruki lay awake in the dark listening to the wisteria vine scratching along the eaves, and thought about the salt.

---

The sound came the next night, and it came from above.

They had spent the day working, honestly working, and it had been good. There is a particular joy in restoring order to a large, patient, ruined thing. Kenta had cleared the kitchen chimney and got a proper fire going in the great iron range. Sora had photographed forty-one areas of damage and made a list in tiny neat handwriting, and it turned out she knew what a sill plate was because her father was a carpenter, and the news was better than they'd feared: the west wing was gone, essentially, snow-crushed and rotted, but the main block and the bath wing had been built by people who took joists personally, and they were sound. Mizuki had discovered the storeroom.

The storeroom was the best thing in the house. It ran the length of the north wall behind the kitchen and it was full of a century and a half of a family's professional life: stacked lacquer trays, iron kettles, a crate of sake cups packed in straw, a mounted boar's head with one glass eye, forty folded yukata sorted by size, a brass cash box, sandals, lanterns, three abacuses, a cracked stone mortar the size of a bathtub, and — Mizuki's find of finds — a hip-high wooden chest of documents.

"Receipts," she said, dazzled, kneeling in the dust with a ledger open on her lap. "Haruki, this is *receipts*. From 1889. Somebody bought eleven bales of charcoal and complained about the price in the margin. Your ancestors were petty. I love them."

"That's ninety years after they built the place," Haruki said. "Is there anything older?"

"Down in the bottom. It's all rice paper and it's stuck together and I'll need better light and a knife I don't have. Give me a week."

"We have five days."

"Give me five days."

They ate well. Kenta could cook, which he claimed came from being the eldest of four, and he made rice in an iron pot over a wood fire and grilled the fish they'd carried up frozen from town, and they ate in the dining hall in their coats with their breath visible, and Haruki felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight since his grandfather's funeral.

Then, at eleven fifty at night, the shamisen began.

It came down through the ceiling of the second-floor corridor, and it was so faint at first that Haruki thought it was the wind in the vine. Three notes, plucked slow. A pause. The same three, a tone lower. Then a little run, and a bend, and a note held so long it went sour and dissolved.

Mizuki came out of her room with her hair on end. Kenta came out of his with a flashlight he held like a club. Sora was already in the corridor, standing motionless, head tilted back.

"Someone's playing music," Mizuki whispered.

"Someone is playing music above us," said Sora.

"There's nothing above us." Haruki's mouth had gone dry. "It's a single-story roof structure over this section. I saw the plans."

Sora pointed. Above them, in the ceiling of the corridor, half-hidden by a decorative beam, was the outline of a hatch. It had been papered over — old brown paper, brittle, painted the same tone as the surrounding wood — but the seam was there, a rectangle a meter by seventy centimeters, and driven through the paper into the frame all along its edge were nails. Not two or three. Dozens. Great square-headed nails hammered in so close they nearly touched, a border of iron teeth all the way around.

The shamisen played its three notes again, directly above the hatch, and then something scraped, very softly, like a knee shifting on a board.

"Nope," said Kenta.

"We should—" Mizuki began.

"Nope. Absolutely not. That is a sealed attic with a *nail pattern*, that is somebody's great-grandfather saying *do not*, and I am a guest in this house and I respect the wishes of the dead."

The music stopped. The silence afterward was much worse.

They went downstairs, all four of them, and sat in the kitchen with the fire built up high and the kettle on, and did not talk about going to bed until the sky started to gray.

---

The next day it snowed.

It began at ten in the morning with fat, lazy flakes that Mizuki tried to catch on her tongue. By noon it was coming sideways. By two, the bowl of the mountain had filled with white noise, and the cedars had gone from black to gray to invisible, and the wind was making the roof tiles chatter like teeth. Haruki's phone had one bar and then no bars. The radio in the kitchen, an ancient Bakelite thing that Kenta had coaxed into life, said the words *heavy snow warning* and *Nagano prefecture* and *do not attempt* before dissolving into static.

"How much?" Haruki asked.

Sora had gone out to the front step and come back with snow to her calf. "Fifty centimeters by tonight. Maybe more. And it's drifting." She stamped her boots. "The road's gone. Not blocked. Gone. You can't even see where it was."

"So we wait it out."

"We wait it out," she agreed. "Three days. Maybe four. We have food."

"We have a *bath*," said Kenta, but he said it without heart.

Mizuki went to the storeroom and did not come out until dinner, and when she came out she was holding something with both hands like it might bite.

It was a wooden ledger board, a *kanban* — a signboard, black lacquer, gold characters, the kind an inn hung by its gate. Not the inn's name. A price list. And below the prices, in smaller gold, a line of text.

"Read it," said Mizuki.

Haruki read it. The old characters swam and then resolved.

*Fujinami-kan. Post station lodging. By appointment of the Domain: attendance at the Winter Retreat.*

"So?"

"So I found the appointment papers underneath it." She laid three sheets of stiff, foxed paper on the table, weighted their corners with teacups. "It's a warrant. From the domain office. 1794. It grants your family the right to operate as a licensed post station on this road, exclusive, no competitors within four ri, in exchange for one duty."

"Which is?"

"Hosting the *kanjo* — the retreat party. Every winter, the domain sent officials up here to inspect the mountain passes and the timber, and they stayed at the Fujinami-kan for three weeks in the deep snow, and your family fed them and warmed them and entertained them." Mizuki tapped the third sheet. "And here's the entertainment budget. Musicians. Two, contracted from a house in the castle town, brought up before the first snow and taken back down after the thaw."

Kenta had gone very still. "Brought up before the snow."

"And taken down after."

"So for three months," said Sora, "they couldn't leave."

Mizuki nodded slowly. "For three months," she said, "they couldn't leave."

---

The shamisen played again that night, and this time it did not stop after four bars. It went on for twenty minutes, playing a piece none of them knew, over and over, always breaking down in the same place — a phrase that climbed and then faltered, climbed and faltered, as if the player could not remember what came next and could not bear to stop trying.

Haruki lay under three futons with his eyes open and listened to a woman upstairs failing at a song for twenty minutes, and when it stopped, he heard her weeping.

It was not loud. It was not theatrical. It was the sound a person makes when they have been crying for a very long time and have gotten efficient at it — a thin, patient sobbing, low in the throat, with long gaps where she breathed. It went on and on above his head, and then it began to move. Along the attic. Toward the far end of the corridor, above the stairwell. And then, impossibly, *down*.

He heard her come down the stairs.

He heard bare wet feet on the wooden treads, twelve of them, and then the soft slur of feet crossing tatami, and then a shoji screen at the end of the corridor slid open, and stopped, and slid closed.

Then his own door slid open.

Haruki could not move. Not from fear — or not only from fear. There was a weight on his chest like a person sitting on him and his arms had gone to water and his jaw was locked, and this, he thought with a strange clinical calm, is what *kanashibari* means, this is the thing my grandmother used to call being bound by the dead, and it is happening to me right now.

The cold that came into the room was not the cold of the outside. It was heavier. It smelled of stone and standing water and a faint, sweetish rot, like flowers left in a vase too long.

Something came and stood by his futon.

He could not turn his head. He could see, at the very corner of his vision, the hem of something white. Not the white of new cloth. The white of paper, of bone, of a thing washed too many times. The hem was wet, and where it touched the mat, the mat darkened.

*Aa,* said a voice, very softly, right above his face. Not a word. Just a breath with a shape in it. *Aa. Aa.*

Then a hand — he did not see it, he *felt* it, cold and thin and wrong, five points of pressure on his sternum like the tines of a rake — pressed down.

He tried to scream. It came out as a hiss of air.

The hand pressed. His ribs creaked. Somewhere very far away, a door slammed.

And then, in the corridor, Kenta Ozaki shouted, "HARUKI!" and every shoji screen on the second floor of the Fujinami-kan slammed shut at once.

The sound was like a rifle volley. Twelve, fifteen screens, in their tracks, all the way down the hall, going off in a single crack that shook dust out of the ceiling. And the weight came off Haruki's chest and the cold went out of the room like water down a drain, and he rolled off the futon and vomited plum wine onto a hundred-year-old tatami mat.

---

They spent the rest of that night in the kitchen with the fire roaring, all four in a huddle on cushions with their backs to the range, and Haruki showed them the marks.

Five bruises on his sternum, spaced like fingers, already going the yellow-purple of a week-old injury.

Nobody suggested a rational explanation. That was the thing Haruki noticed and was grateful for. Kenta didn't say *sleep paralysis*, Mizuki didn't say *pareidolia*, Sora didn't say *carbon monoxide*, though all three of them had said such things about the footprints two days ago. Something had come down the stairs and put its hand on him and they had all heard the screens.

"Why didn't she—" Haruki stopped. "Why did she stop?"

"I yelled," said Kenta.

"You yelled and every door in the building shut."

"Maybe she doesn't like noise," said Mizuki.

"Or maybe," said Sora, quietly, "she doesn't want us to see her."

They looked at her.

"The screens shut," Sora said. "All at once. Between her and Kenta, and between her and the rest of the hall. Think about what a shut screen is. It's a wall you can hear through." She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "She hid."

"She was *strangling* me."

"I know. I'm not saying she's kind." Sora looked at the fire. "I'm saying she's ashamed."

The wind screamed under the eaves. Snow hissed against the shutters. Above them, at some point in the small hours, the shamisen began again, and this time none of them jumped.

"Okay," said Haruki, when he could speak steadily. "Mizuki. The bottom of that chest. Whatever's stuck together in there. We open it tomorrow."

"It'll tear."

"Tear it."

---

They worked all the next day in the storeroom with the door propped and every lamp they could find, and Sora — whose father's carpentry had apparently included furniture restoration — separated the rice paper sheets with a kettle of steam, a palette knife, and a patience that made Haruki want to weep. Kenta hauled fuel and kept the stove going and cooked and, every hour, walked the whole corridor of the second floor with a hammer in his belt for no reason he was willing to articulate. Mizuki read.

It came out in pieces, over eleven hours, and it went like this.

The Fujinami-kan opened in the third year of Kansei — 1791 — built by one Amagai Rihei, a rice broker's second son with a license, a hot spring, and no scruples worth naming. For thirty years the appointment was the making of the family. The domain officials came in the eleventh month and left in the second, and Rihei's sons fed them mountain vegetables and river fish and hot sake and kept them warm and, above all, kept them entertained, because a bored official is a dangerous animal.

The musicians came up from the castle town. The house that contracted them was called the Yanagiya, and Mizuki found nine years of its invoices. Two players a season, sometimes three. Their names were listed, because the invoices were itemized: a woman named Kuni, a woman named Setsu, a woman named Ohana, a woman named Toki. And, for four consecutive winters from 1817 to 1820, a woman named **Kokin**.

"Kokin," Mizuki said. "It's a stage name. It means 'little koto.' She played shamisen and sang, and she was the expensive one. She cost twice what the others cost."

"Why?"

"Because she was good." Mizuki turned a sheet. "There's a note here from the head of the retreat party. He wrote to the inn to request her specifically. *The woman Kokin's* — I can't read this character — *is worth the snow.*"

The winter of 1820 was the last winter of the appointment.

That was in the ledgers, plainly: after 1820 the retreat did not come. The Fujinami-kan carried on as an ordinary hot spring inn, prosperous enough, for a hundred and forty more years. But something happened in the second month of 1821, and whatever it was, it ended the domain's business with the Amagai family, and the family had gone to considerable trouble to write it down and then to hide what they had written.

They found it in the bottom of the chest, in a wooden document box within a lacquered sleeve within an oilcloth wrapping, and it was not a ledger. It was a letter, and it was signed by Amagai Rihei the Third, and it was addressed to his own sons, to be opened after his death.

Mizuki read it aloud in the storeroom with the wind shaking the shutters, and she read it slowly, because the hand was bad and the man had clearly been drunk or ill or both.

*To my sons.*

*In the second month of the fourth year of Bunsei, the retreat party of the Domain departed this house in anger, and our appointment was withdrawn, and you have asked me the reason, and I have told you it was a dispute over timber. That was a lie and I will not carry it further. Read this and burn it if you like but read it.*

*The woman called Kokin came up to us for the fourth winter. She was thirty-one years old and her true name was Nao, of the village of Kitasawa on the Chikuma. She had bought out her own contract from the Yanagiya two years before and came to us as a free player, at her own price, which she set high, and which I paid, because the officials liked her and because when she played the whole house went quiet, even the kitchen, even the men in the bath.*

*In the twelfth month she asked to be released from the winter early. Her elder brother in Kitasawa was ill and she wished to go down before the passes closed. I told her the passes were already closed. This was not true; the Kubo route was open for eleven more days, and I knew it, and I did not tell her, because Inspector Fuwa had asked for her particularly and I could not replace her with the snow coming.*

*She asked again in the first month, and I told her again, and she did not believe me the second time. I saw that she did not believe me. She went out on the third day of the first month to try the road on her own and my son Kihachi followed her and brought her back, and she did not speak to any of us for six days, and then she began to play again, because she was a professional.*

*The thing that I did, I did on the nineteenth day of the second month.*

Mizuki stopped. She put the sheet down on her knees.

"Keep going," said Haruki.

*Inspector Fuwa's seal-case went missing from the eastern rooms. It was a lacquered case with the domain seal in it and it was worth a man's life. Fuwa was in a rage and said the house would answer for it and that he would report the Amagai to the magistrate, and if he had done so we would have lost the license and the inn and likely more than that.*

*The seal-case was taken by Fuwa's own attendant, a man named Sakuma, who had gambling debts in the castle town. I knew this because Kihachi had seen him with it and told me. And I stood in this room with my son and I weighed my house against a hired woman, and I told Fuwa that I had found the case in the musicians' quarters, under the woman Kokin's floor mat, and I produced it, and I let him believe it.*

*She was thirty-one years old and she said one thing when they took her, which was, "You know the Kubo road was open."*

*Fuwa was a proud man and did not want a magistrate to learn that his party had been robbed under his own eye, so there was no magistrate. There was no trial. There was the well.*

*They put her in the north storeroom for two days and on the second night she was taken out to the old well behind the bath house and it was done there. I did not go out. Kihachi went out. Fuwa's men did it and Kihachi held the lantern, and my son was nineteen years old, and he has not been the same man since and he never will be.*

*She went down alive. That is the part I am writing so that you will know it. Fuwa's man struck her once with the flat of his sword and she was stunned and not dead and they put her over and she went down alive, and the well is nineteen ken deep and there is water in the bottom and it took a long while. Kihachi heard her calling. He came in at dawn and he was gray as a fish and he said, Father, she is still calling, and I said, in the morning she will not be.*

*In the morning she was not.*

*We sealed the well with the great stone mortar and the men filled it over with earth and river rock. Fuwa's party went down out of the mountain three days later and the appointment was withdrawn in the following autumn without explanation, and I believe he was ashamed, as a man is ashamed of a thing he cannot undo, and did not wish to see this house again.*

*Her shamisen was left in the musicians' room. Kihachi could not bring himself to burn it. He put it in the roof space above the west corridor, and he nailed the hatch, and he has not gone up there in eleven years, and neither have I, and neither will you.*

*In the sixth month of that year Kihachi's wife saw a woman in the bath corridor in a white kimono with her hair down and the woman was weeping and left wet marks on the mats, and Kihachi's wife lost her mind by degrees over four years and drowned in the bath in the winter of Bunsei nine. In the eighth year my second son Sakuji went out to look at the filled well at night and did not come back and we found him in the morning with his face in the snow, and the doctor said his heart, and he was twenty-four years old.*

*I have burned incense. I have paid for sutras at three temples. I have had the priest from Zenkoji come up and stand in the corridor and read for two days. I have paid for a stone marker with her death-name on it, which is a fine thing to do for a woman whose real name I could not remember for six years and had to look up in an invoice.*

*None of it has done anything, and I have come to understand why, and it is this: she does not want prayers. She does not want a stone. She was not killed by a spirit or a curse or a mischance. She was killed by a lie that came out of my mouth, and everyone who heard the lie is dead or has agreed to forget it, and there is no one left alive who knows she did not steal, except the men of this family, and we will not say it.*

*She is not asking to be forgiven. She is asking to be believed.*

*I cannot do it. If I write it out and put my seal to it and send it to the domain office, they will not thank me; they will destroy this house and my sons will be beggars. So I am doing this instead, which is nothing, and I am telling you so that you will know what you are living in and be careful in the corridors at night.*

*Do not go up into the roof.*

*Do not dig at the well.*

*Do not speak her name in this house, because she comes when she is called, and she has nothing to say to us, and we have nothing to say to her.*

*— Amagai Rihei, the eleventh month of Tenpo two.*

The storeroom was very quiet. The stove ticked. Somewhere a long way off, the wind found a gap in the west wing and made a sound like a hand drawn across the mouth of a bottle.

"Nao," said Mizuki, "of Kitasawa."

Every lamp in the storeroom went out.