Chapter Seventeen: Even Exorcism Must Keep Pace with the Times
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At Osaka’s Suminoe Police Station, Toshifuku Asuka rubbed his aching brow.
“Grant Little Akutagawa and Tetsu Tano one month of administrative leave each. Tell everyone to keep their mouths shut.”
“Yes, sir!”
After issuing the order, Toshifuku let out a heavy sigh. He rose, put on his coat, and drove a police car to the intersection that had caused Little Akutagawa and Tetsu Tano to suffer mental breakdowns.
The intersection had long since been sealed off with police tape. The officers nearby repeatedly saluted when Toshifuku arrived.
“Chief.”
“Mm…”
He nodded absently and walked to the very center of the cordoned-off area, staring at the patch of ground where the faint outline of a human face seemed to be emerging.
Though he had already seen the photographs and prepared himself mentally, observing it in person still made the old policeman’s eyelids twitch uncontrollably.
“Have you contacted Tennoji?”
“We have. The abbot of Tennoji is already on his way.”
Toshifuku nodded. He ordered the office workers and students who had gathered to watch dispersed, then went alone to the café beside the intersection.
An evil spirit?
The strange yet familiar term surfaced in his mind. As a police officer, Toshifuku had naturally sneered at the notion in his younger years.
But as he grew older and gained more experience, after encountering certain incidents, his firm denial of the existence of spirits and gods gradually became—
a question awaiting confirmation.
Toshifuku wanted very much to tell the world, righteously and unequivocally, that there were no spirits or gods. Yet some things simply could not be explained by the means available to them.
He had never told anyone that he himself had once encountered a supernatural incident.
It had happened when he was still an assistant inspector. He had been involved in an especially heinous dismemberment murder case, and the crime scene had caused many of the young officers to vomit.
Toshifuku had been one of them. The greatest shock came when the forensic examiner discovered the hearts of the woman of the house and her daughter inside the stomach of the murderer—the man of the house.
Yet what made the case so unforgettable was not the horrific crime scene.
It was what they had found in the bedroom.
At the center of a strange formation lay the woman’s severed head, its face frozen in an eerie smile.
During the investigation, one of his seniors had suggested that they go to Tennoji to dispel the bad luck clinging to them. Everyone else had gone.
Toshifuku alone had refused.
He had considered it humiliating for a police officer to believe in such ghostly nonsense, and had even offended that senior because of it.
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Afterward, Toshifuku began encountering all sorts of strange occurrences.
Curtains that seemed to conceal someone behind them, only to reveal nothing when pulled aside. Unexplained noises that continued for hours in the living room. The sound of ceramic bowls shattering for no apparent reason.
At first, Toshifuku assumed that rats had gotten into the house.
That was until his former girlfriend tried to strangle him, and the front door refused to open no matter how hard he kicked it.
Then, not long afterward, his former girlfriend smiled just like that eerie severed head and slit his throat inside his own home.
Only then did Toshifuku truly come to understand, for the first time, the other side of the world—one that science could not explain.
“Chief Toshifuku.”
“Ah? Abbot Chongming, please, sit down.”
Snapped out of his memories by Abbot Chongming, Toshifuku hurriedly invited the stiff-backed abbot of Tennoji to take a seat.
The abbot did not sit. Instead, he gave a slight shake of his head and looked out the window toward the intersection cut off by police tape.
“This is troublesome indeed… Let us go and have a look.”
Toshifuku rose at once and led Abbot Chongming to the edge of the scene.
When the abbot saw the eerie human face on the ground, his brows drew tightly together. His eyes, narrowed slightly with age, widened as well.
Toshifuku noticed the change in his expression and felt a surge of nervousness.
The terrifying supernatural incident he himself had once endured had been nothing more than a simple ritual in this man’s eyes.
“Is it really that troublesome?”
Abbot Chongming did not answer immediately. He removed the string of Buddhist beads from his wrist, took a jade disk from inside his coat, and clasped it in his hand. Then he began chanting an exorcistic incantation.
“I solemnly call upon all gods and perfected beings! Bind the ghosts and subdue the evil! Let a hundred ghosts be destroyed! Swiftly, swiftly, in accordance with the edict!”
Crack.
The instant the incantation ended, the sound of breaking jade came from the abbot’s hand. Toshifuku instinctively turned to look.
Abbot Chongming struggled to maintain his composure for a moment, his expression contorted with pain. Then, trembling, he released the jade disk.
Toshifuku’s gaze was drawn helplessly toward where it had fallen. At the broken edge of what should have been a flawless white disk, a layer of pitch-blackness had spread, as though capable of devouring everything.
“Abbot Chongming!”
The abbot raised a hand to indicate that he was fine. His expression grave, he stared at the smiling face on the ground, which had grown clearer and more malevolent as the exorcism proceeded. Soon, its features would be fully visible.
Abbot Chongming drew a deep breath, then turned to his assistant.
“Nagasaki, bring the things over.”
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“Yes, sir!”
The assistant hurried back to the vehicle and carried over a bag filled with items used for warding off evil.
The stiff, formal air Abbot Chongming had displayed at first vanished. His movements became solemn and deliberate as he took out a sacred rope and a miniature torii gate that had been blessed and ritually worshiped, holding them in his hands.
“Toshifuku, have the officers secure the surrounding area. And contact the nearest construction crew.”
Toshifuku stared at him blankly.
“A construction crew?”
As Abbot Chongming and his assistant stretched the sacred rope into place, the abbot explained:
“Sometimes, even we cannot drive an evil entity away. All we can do is imprison it here, preventing it from entering the present world. But every prison will eventually be broken. So we must adapt with the times and have a construction crew build a statue over this place, lest someone else become contaminated by it.”
“But I… don’t have the authority to interfere with the Roads Bureau…”
“Do not worry. I will explain everything to the Metropolitan Police Department and the Roads Bureau.”
Toshifuku nodded. Having understood the severity of the situation, he immediately began making arrangements.
In less than half an hour, the construction crew arrived. Under Abbot Chongming’s direction, they began casting a statue of the Three Wise Monkeys in the middle of the road to suppress the entity.
Just as everything proceeded in orderly fashion, one of Toshifuku’s subordinates suddenly approached him, panic written across his face.
“Chief, something terrible has happened at Shiraishi Mountain!”
The subordinate quickly described the situation at the site. Abbot Chongming, who had overheard him, suddenly went pale.
“Lead the way!”
Seeing that the subordinate remained frozen in place, Toshifuku immediately roared:
“Didn’t you hear me?!”
A little over ten minutes later, Toshifuku and the others arrived at Shiraishi Mountain, the site where the Aoshi Group had held its street-racing event the previous night.
The moment they arrived, Abbot Chongming saw the darkness surrounding and devouring the entire van—something even an ordinary person could clearly perceive—as well as hair spread throughout the area like lichen.
At the sight of it, the abbot froze completely. Even his voice trembled despite himself.
“Call Kyoto…”
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