Ma En slid the VHS tape into the player and adjusted the TV to the right input channel. He expected the program to start immediately. Instead, the screen filled with static snow for several seconds, then stuttered through a few seconds of vertical-strip flickers, and what came first was not image but sound. A host's voice, delivering an opening monologue — but the picture didn't follow. Ma En hit pause, rewound, played it again. Same result. He took the tape out, examined it, found nothing obviously wrong with it.

—A problem with the original recording?

He reinserted it and tried fast-forwarding. Still no image; the host's voice shrieked upward into a thin whine under the acceleration. Ma En wasn't sure whether he was being too sensitive, but the sound of fast-forwarded audio had never bothered him before — something about this one felt different, set a faint discomfort going in him that he couldn't quite locate. Still, the content came through clearly enough. After the opening monologue, the host described Sanchoumoku Park's everyday charms, then pivoted — as expected — to the neighborhood folklore, building toward the main event: "the haunted spot deep in the grove."

He smacked the side of the player, then the TV. Neither helped. The audio continued.

The production crew had entered through a side gate, positioning themselves at some distance from the main visitor paths — though the camera still caught the occasional figure wandering across a slanted walkway in the background. The host affected a mounting sense of dread, darting out to interview a few passersby, asking whether they knew about the haunted spot deeper in the park. Eight or nine out of ten knew about it; two or three pivoted the conversation toward the Room 4 Ghost Story, their voices bright with excitement, though to Ma En's ear there was something slightly performed about them.

The host redirected these tangents with a diplomatic hand, steering the topic back toward the haunted spot and the range of popular opinion on it. The interviewed passersby were, on the whole, surprisingly well-informed — their commentary arrived with the precision of a textbook. They cited religious studies, parapsychology, folklore, and demonology; they wove in scientific hypotheses; they narrated personal encounters with the solemn authority of firsthand witnesses, each account drawing fresh gasps from the host and audible crowd noise from somewhere off-camera.

Ma En listened and began parsing. Of all the vocabulary that surfaced, two clusters dominated: "energy" and "qi" — both subdivided into positive and negative, or yin and yang. At the secondary level came "particles" and "waves," similarly split into positive/negative and peak/trough. Most speakers treated positive energy, positive particles, positive qi, and yang as near synonyms; negative energy, antiparticles, malign qi, and yin as another set. The haunted spot's peculiarity, in the consensus view, resided squarely in the "negative energy" cluster.

"I walked in and immediately felt something wrong. Goosebumps, instantly. Turns out it used to be a cemetery — honestly, that would scare anyone."

"That night, near that area, I saw a ghost. White clothes. A woman — I'm certain. A woman who'd lost someone she loved and taken her own life."

"These ghosts came after me with hoes and sickles, I ran and ran, tripped and fell, blacked out — woke up the next day and found a handprint on my ankle. Like this. Right here. It went away eventually, never saw them again."

"I've tested it with a magnetometer. The geomagnetism there isn't normal. You know those ghost-hunters in foreign countries who have a device that beeps when spirits get close? Buy one and bring it here — it'll definitely go off."

"Filming at the haunted spot? No, no, no — don't disturb the slumber of the dead. That's very bad. Very bad."

"A spirit-master? Wouldn't help. But look — I have a protective talisman here, from XX temple, five thousand yen, very effective. You should buy one too. I know the monk there — I can get you ten percent off."

...

In the flickering, snow-filled screen, Ma En listened to all of this — conversation that would strike most people as ridiculous farce — without concluding that the speakers were fools. The show itself looked foolish, but that was intentional; its foolishness was the mechanism. The viewer's pleasure came from the criticism, from the sensation of watching others say obviously stupid things and realizing: these people aren't as smart as me. It didn't matter if it was clichéd. It didn't matter if the guests were performing intelligence they didn't have. What the show needed was exactly that: the viewer to think look at this person lying badly, I can see right through it.

But no one — however thoroughly they performed, however much they fabricated — could sustain a lie built on nothing. There was always some grain of reality underneath. That was Ma En's working assumption: even in a field of nonsense and exaggeration, find the fragments that had once been true. He cross-referenced what he heard against what he already knew, trying to extract those fragments.

Someone said "turns out it used to be a cemetery" — the word "used to" snagged at him.

Three things snagged:

—Used to be?

—Geomagnetism?

—The slumber of the dead?

Several of these terms could be connected, even loosely, to what he knew. The speakers had almost certainly not witnessed anything firsthand — they were repeating things they'd heard, which had been distorted through cycles of retelling and embellishment, the truth compressed and warped with each pass. And yet, in Ma En's experience, a residue of truth was almost always recoverable from such chains.

He listened with patience. He noted the moments that snagged. He sketched a rough moving picture in his mind from audio alone — no image to anchor it. And truthfully, the useful content was sparse. Drawing something real from this kind of hearsay was probabilistically about the same as winning a lottery.

He knew that. The odds of any of this mattering were probably one in a hundred. And yet —

He kept listening. Methodically. Turning over every phrase, sifting the waste heap carefully. He had no intention of missing even the smallest thing he might actually use. Even if the final verdict was that this had all been worthless.

He did feel some regret that the recording had no picture. He didn't know whether Asuka had tested the tape before handing it over. But for a program broadcast once and never repeated, checking the recording afterward would have been useless anyway.

The host completed the street-interview segment and led the crew deeper into the grove. The shouting that followed was operatic — the host described the park's natural preserve as "dense and oppressive, like it's ready to kill you at any moment," cataloguing insects, snakes, toxic plants, and even swamps, the tone suggesting they'd plunged into the Amazonian interior. They were in a city park.

They finally reached the destination. Ma En checked the time: twenty minutes had already passed. He couldn't help wondering whether this was really a paranormal program.

The host launched into a breathless explanation of how difficult the shoot had been, and how that difficulty itself proved the haunted spot was real. The co-host played along beside him, building the atmosphere. Ma En briefly wondered how other paranormal programs handled this kind of material.

The image snapped on.

"Bap" — like someone had struck the screen. Ma En straightened slightly. The host was standing on a patch of bare, withered earth. Dry soil. Sparse, yellowed weeds. The colors were familiar — the same dead-earth clearing he'd seen last night with the neighbor.

He sat forward and looked more carefully.

The camera tilted, panned, cut. The host's body shrank in frame as the landscape widened — an aerial drift, the world opening like a scroll. The tree line, dense and green, formed a border around the clearing, which sat embedded like a wound. Special lighting and color-grading deepened the effect — the open ground looked as though years of misfortune had settled into it — and Ma En thought: most viewers will find this breathtaking.

But it was midday filming, or early afternoon at the latest. Everything genuinely strange was hidden in the dark. What viewers were experiencing was the conversation between their own senses and their own imagination.

Ma En had actually encountered the uncanny here. The visual effect didn't move him.

What did stop him was something else entirely:

—And yet…

He stood up from the sofa. No tombstones. The terrain was recognizable — the same ground, the same clearing — but the graves he'd seen last night had vanished. No grave mounds. No stones. No sacred-rope rock. Only the old shrine remained, faintly centered by the camera as though hinting at something. The desolate earth was scattered with broken stones and dry branches, a small dust devil picking up and spinning momentarily before collapsing. The host had his arms wide, performing rapture with the natural scenery, when a dried-up leaf blew into his face.

The host's expression collapsed into exaggerated anguish. He flailed his arms, spent several seconds thrashing before seizing the leaf and flinging it aside. The crowd roared.

"I'm warning everyone — do not come here alone. You will be cursed." The host addressed the camera with theatrical gravity, pointing at his own face. "I'm convinced I've already been cursed. But we came prepared. For today's program, we've invited distinguished guests from across the industry — people who know the haunted spots of the world by heart, who walk through disaster sites as if strolling through their own front garden. These are not folk exorcists or spirit mediums. They are: a professor, a model, an actor, a singer, and an independent author —" He turned to the crew and waved them on urgently. "Hurry — hurry, get the guests' stage set up, otherwise they'll be furious, and none of you are escaping this land's curse today either."

Another wave of crowd laughter. The crew rushed into frame with armfuls of supplies and assembled a simple table and chairs with a sun umbrella beside the old shrine. A quick-cut fast-forward later, the host stood before the guest arrangement, the shrine barely five metres away, and a crowd of over a hundred people had gathered around the perimeter, all talking at once.

The host beamed — the satisfied smile of a star — waved at the crowd, received a healthy round of booing, and kept beaming. He announced the program's theme with the energy of someone beginning a whole new show. Ma En checked the time: thirty-something minutes had passed. He thought: what is happening. How long is this program?

Then came the guest entrance, five minutes of it. The professor, the model, the actor, the singer, the author — a number of Japan's recognizable public figures, including two that even Ma En knew. The crowd parted; the guests walked a spontaneous receiving line through the applause and whistles. When they sat, each reached out and flipped over the nameplate on the table in front of them.

"Welcome — a warm welcome — a thunderous welcome: Professor Mitarai Sanshirou, Miss Terahana, model XXX, actor XXX, and independent author Miss Hirota Masami. These five are today's guests."

—?

Ma En's eyes went wide. He checked again. Then again. The woman sitting at the end of the guest row — the one with the composed posture, the fashionable clothes, the unmistakable poise — was Hirota Masami. His Hirota-san.

He was still trying to pull his attention toward the other guests when the image cut back to the host. He caught a glimpse of "Miss Terahana, a generation's matchless beauty" and "Professor Mitarai Sanshirou, who lacks any obvious fame" before the camera moved on. He hadn't yet formed any clear impression of either when a knock came at the door.