About this book
One hundred hauntings from the nights of a single year in late-1970s Japan — the eraser that wears away only on the face where a name was written, the four pinholes left by a torn-down poster that open their eyes after dark, the paper fans in a concert hall that all send the same single gust, the postbox that yawns in front of a house where no letter ever comes. Nothing transforms whole. Some part its owner left behind simply begins to act on its own, for the length of one night.
At the center is Suzune, the girl with a small red bell at her throat — and here there are two of her. One walks the unwatched side of the night in a delinquent's long pleated skirt: the national road at midnight, the stairwell landing, the roof fence, the incinerator behind the school. The other walks the watched side as an idol: the dressing room, the wings of the stage, the relay van, the red lamp of a camera that is not recording. Same face, same bell — and they do not meet until the end. On the ninety-ninth plate a folding mirror counts one girl too many. On the hundredth, at the dawn of a farewell concert, two girls stand side by side wearing two bells, and only one note sounds. Which of them was the real one is written nowhere in this book.
All one hundred yōkai are original creations — not one is borrowed from classical lore. Each was born from a real object or custom of the decade: a flexi-disc bound into a magazine, a student handbook, a piped-in request at a coffee shop, a bromide portrait, an incinerator, a schoolyard weather box
For personal enjoyment only.
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