“What? Wasn’t Princess Go the heroine of this series? The sister in the middle is Chacha, right?” The woman on the right side had short hair, meaning she was mostly likely Hatsu, who became a Buddhist nun after her husband’s death and took the name Joko-in. Via the process of elimination, Saito had apparently concluded that the woman on the left was Go.

  “I mean, you can even look at the chibi version of Princess Go. She’s wearing a red headband!” She held up a pamphlet she’d received inside a nearby building with a picture of the princess on it, then pointed back to the stand-in panel.

  “But, uh...” Sure enough, there were three chibi figures drawn in at the bottom of the board, and the one on the left did look quite similar to Saito’s picture of Princess Go—yet I wasn’t convinced. “I still think the heroine would normally stand in the middle.”

  “Really? Did I get it wrong? Was I in the supporting actor’s spot?!”

  Then, suddenly, another voice piped up.

  “It’s written right here, Ryoko.” Mitsurugi was there in front of the panel, crouching and pointing. The names of the sisters were indeed written there in tiny characters next to each chibi portrait.

  “Oh nooo! Am I suffering from the supporting actor’s curse?”

  It’s nothing of the sort. It’s called being a ditz.

  “You were pretty much a heroine in your movie, weren’t you?” I pointed out.

  “Not really. It had a male lead, honestly.”

  “Hmm? What’s up with the face-in-the-hole board?” Miyoshi asked, having finally come out of the washroom to see what all the hubbub was about.

  “Face-in-the-hole?” I replied, blinking.

  “Isn’t that what they’re usually called? A face-in-the-hole board, or just a face-in-hole?” Miyoshi did a quick search and pulled up the Wikipedia entry to show me.

  “Sheesh, so there are actually proper names for these things? Though, uh...”

  “What is it?”

  “I mean... I’m just saying, any name that talks about ‘faces in holes’ sounds kinda”—I hesitated for a moment—“well, you know, awkward, right?”

  Saito gave me a look.

  “Wow. I never thought I’d hear something like that come out of your mouth, Yoshimura.”

  “Oh, believe me, Kei’s chock-full of lewd jokes,” Miyoshi said, eyeing me. “He’s already reaching that ‘dirty old man’ age, after all.”

  Saito gasped.

  “Really?!”

  Doing my best to ignore Miyoshi’s unhelpful commentary, I finished my thought.

  “Anyway, that’s why they’ll always be ‘photo stand-in’ panels to me, okay?”

  “You do you, Kei. Though as childish as they may be, I’m honestly surprised at how much everyone seems to love these things.”

  “Yeah, and they’re not always pictures of people and animals either—there’s even one out there that lets you pretend you’re a giant pudding.”

  Miyoshi blinked. “Why would anyone want to be a pudding?”

  “Well, so you can tell people how delicious you are, and ask them to eat you right u— Oof!”

  As she retracted the elbow that she had embedded into my side, Miyoshi looked over to Saito and Mitsurugi and gave them her best I-told-you-so grin.

  “Ugh. You really need to learn to pull your punches a bit...” I said between coughs.

  As midday drew closer, the intensity of summer continued to increase, further fanning the flames of freedom within us all.

  ***

  After departing the service area, we made our way from the Tsuruga Junction onto the Maizuru-Wakasa Expressway, then got off at the Obama Interchange. From there, we hopped onto National Route 162, which was a seaside road. Miyoshi and the others took in the scenery without a word, transfixed for a while.

  “Check it out, Kei! That police substation looks like someone’s house!”

  I glanced to the left side of the road and saw the Fukutani Police Substation. Just as she said, it looked like a regular house, through and through. The roof tiles had what seemed to be an array of strange stud-looking things arranged across them in a mostly regular pattern.

  “I wonder if those things on the roof are to keep people from slipping when they run across it?” Miyoshi mused.

  “I seriously doubt they get many roof-runners out here.”

  “They kind of look like scales too,” Mitsurugi added, glancing at the building.

  “Scales?”

  “Oh yeah! Wakasa is famous for its tilefish, after all. Freshly flame-cooked tilefish scales are so crispy and delicious!” Miyoshi interjected, using her hand to wipe away the drool she had conjured up by thinking about food on an empty stomach.

  Tilefish prepared in the Matsukasa style was a classic dish. In Japanese cuisine it was deep-fried, but in French cuisine they pan-fried it. First you heated up a large amount of olive oil to an extremely high temperature and started cooking the fish skin-side down, meaning you were basically deep-frying the skin. The trick to getting the scales to stand up so beautifully was to let the scale-side retain some moisture as you started cooking it.

  “There’s no way they’re supposed to be tilefish scales,” I responded in a deadpan voice.

  Mitsurugi laughed as she listened to our exchange.

  “Actually, I hear Obama is famous for some kind of mermaid folklore,” she revealed.

  “Really? I thought all it had going for it was its moment in the spotlight while Obama was the US President,” Saito said, flipping rapidly through the guidebook Mitsurugi had pulled out.

  “Well, I only read a tiny bit about it before we got here,” Mitsurugi admitted.

  “Whoa! We just passed the Wakasa Chopstick Museum! Apparently they have the world’s largest pair of chopsticks there!” Saito squealed.

  “The world’s largest...pair of chopsticks?”

  “Yup! Let’s see, it says here they’re 8.4 meters in length... Huh?”

  “I wonder how anyone is supposed to use chopsticks that big?” Miyoshi asked incredulously. “At that point, they’re just pieces of lumber made into Wakasa lacquerware.”

  “They were probably made for Daidarabotchi to use,” I suggested.

  “Daidarabotchi? The giants?”

  “Yeah. According to one legend, a Daidarabotchi monk who crossed the Sea of Japan ended up being an instructor to Rennyo and his monks at the temple Hongan-ji. Supposedly they spread his teachings across the country via boats sent out from Wakasa Bay and the Kohoku area of Shiga. Extrapolating from that, it wouldn’t be too odd for there to be some leftover signs of that in the Wakasa area.”

  “Why are you trying to make it sound plausible? Besides, that’s implying they’ve even been around five hundred years— Oh, take a left here after Uchitomi Elementary!”

  The entrance to that rather narrow street had a sign indicating we were headed toward the Angel Line. It also had a warning written in red letters: “Road closed during nighttime hours.”

  “No entry between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.?” I would’ve understood roads being closed seasonally due to excessive snowfall or something, but what reason could they possibly have had for closing it all night long?

  “I wonder if it’s haunted by evil spirits or something? We’re getting into Professor Hieda territory, here!” Miyoshi clenched her fist in excitement as she referenced the manga Yokai Hunter.

  A lonely, remote village...mysterious rules...all we need now are some locals who don’t take kindly to strangers, and all the spooky elements will be in place.

  “Nah, it’s a lot more likely the road just doesn’t have any streetlights or guardrails or something.”

  “What? But there are roads like that all across Japan! And you can take those at night!”

  At your own risk, sure.

  “Whoa! The ocean!”

  Saito’s sudden exclamation was an accurate representation of the extraordinary sight on the road in front of us. Rice paddies extended far out to our right, the ocean stretched out to the horizon on our left, and both of them appeared to be at roughly the same elevation as the road. The waters looked as though they were ready to overtake us at any moment. Our car was quite literally riding the border between land and sea.

  After enjoying that view for a while, we saw a sign for a store along the side of the road. On this lonely placard next to a rice paddy in the middle of nowhere, a strange phrase was written: Turn left 500 meters back.

  “Back...?” I took a quick peek in the rearview mirror, and saw Saito and Mitsurugi turned around looking out the back window.

  “I don’t see anything but rice paddies!” Saito whined.

  “Do they want us to just stop right here and back up five hundred meters?” Miyoshi pondered.

  I see signs about things that are however many meters ahead all the time. Why the hell would anything say five hundred meters back, though?

  “It’s almost like they don’t want us going past this point...” Mitsurugi spoke in a murmur, but it resonated strangely loudly within the car.

  After continuing on for a while longer, the white dotted center stripe changed to a solid yellow line, and it felt like the road narrowed ever so slightly. That line began to fade almost immediately, the guardrail on the ocean side suddenly vanished, and the only separating marker down the center of the road was a split in the asphalt.

  “I’m not sure how much longer we’ll have a left lane.” The grass was growing into the shoulder of the road, making the line for the lane’s edge almost impossible to see.

  Feeling more and more on edge, we proceeded further still, until suddenly, we saw a huge wire mesh cage on the shoulder of the road ahead of us. It was roughly the size of a twenty-foot shipping container, and it almost looked like it was meant to hold some kind of animal.

  “What is that...?”

  “The local roadside falconer?” I quipped.

  When we got closer, it turned out to be a trash disposal area. Yet there were no signs of life within a hundred meters, nor signs of anything at all besides rice paddies and ocean. Who the hell would want to bring their trash way the heck out here?

  “Maybe this is where the mermaids of Wakasa Bay throw away their garbage?”

  I chuckled loudly in an effort to counter the rather unsettling mental image I got from Miyoshi’s joke, but the laughter came out a bit forced.

  Once we had passed a few more tiny communities, the road narrowed even further, to the point where we weren’t even sure whether two vehicles could pass each other.

  “To think we could get this far off the beaten path just a few hours out from Tokyo...” I said, slowing down to survey the area.

  “This is just too weird, Kei.”

  “I guess, but it’s exactly where the GPS is telling us to go. You’re sure you have the correct address, right?” I asked.

  “This is the address they gave me...but maybe we should ask someone around here anyway.”

  I took us back to a slightly better section of road and stopped on the shoulder by the seaside, then got out of the car and took a look around. Nearby, I spotted a strange, small building in the shape of a boat. A sign beneath a huge gate had the words “Tomari Disposal Facility” written on it, and nothing else. Next to that stood a utility pole with a yellow warning light flashing at the top of it, as if something were about to happen. What on earth is this place?

  “I wonder what they dispose of here?” Miyoshi asked, narrowing her eyes as she looked up at the yellow light dubiously.

  “The hell if I know... What I do know is there’s not a single shop around here to ask directions.” No matter where we looked, there wasn’t a soul in sight.

  “There is a Shinto shrine really close by, apparently,” Miyoshi said, poring over the map on her phone. Our signal, while far from rock solid, still seemed to be up and running.

  “Maybe we’ll find someone at the shrine office. Wait here for a sec.” Following the directions I had seen on the map, I headed toward the shrine.

  As I approached the path, there was a sign at about ankle height with a red arrow pointing in one direction. I had no idea what the arrow was supposed to signify, but I followed it onto the narrow pathway nonetheless. I continued on, passing by several dilapidated buildings surrounded by fig trees. The entire place was enveloped in a strange stillness, as if humanity had gone extinct. A longhorn beetle crawled along a fig branch, and as its squeaky chirps echoed out into the void, I felt like I could almost hear its voice bemoaning its status as the Earth’s sole survivor.

  After walking maybe another thirty or forty meters, I finally saw the shrine on the left side of the path. There were no signs of any people on the shrine grounds, nor on the surrounding paths. The entryway to the tiny building that was apparently used as a shrine office had a layer of dust on it, as if nobody had stopped by in quite a while.

  “Well, so much for that. Guess I’ll try calling.”

  I went to the Association of Shinto Shrines website, but even though the shrine was listed, both the email address and the phone number entries were blank, and nothing was written in the Shrine History section either.

  “What the hell?” I reluctantly put away my cell phone and decided to take another look around the area. “Man, what a pain in the ass.”

  As I was wandering the grounds, I came across some sort of flowerbed with three smooth, round stones lined up in a row on the ground. The deities enshrined here were apparently Hikohohodemi-no-Mikoto (also known as Yamasachihiko), and Toyotamahime-no-Mikoto (Yamasachihiko’s wife), so perhaps two of the stones were supposed to be the magical tide-flowing jewel and tide-ebbing jewel? In the illustrations I had seen at the upper Wakasahiko Shrine, they had looked less like jewels and more like poisonous cone snail shells stood up on end, though. At the time, I had thought, I guess every rose has its thorns, huh? but people did generally associate jewels with a more spherical shape.

  Still, there were three stones on the ground, not two. Wondering what on earth the last one was supposed to symbolize, I reached out to touch it, when suddenly...

  “Whatchyalldointhere, feller?”

  “Wha—?” I turned around and was greeted by what seemed to be a local man who was roughly in his forties. With deep wrinkles covering his copper-colored skin that had been weathered by the salty ocean breeze, he looked like a true man of the sea.

  “Ah, excuse me. I’m a bit lost, and I was looking for someone to ask for directions.”

  Once he realized I was a tourist, he switched from full Wakasa dialect to mostly standard Japanese. “Oh, you’re city folk. Here for the fishin’?”

  “Not exactly... Oh, do you happen to know a place called ‘Sukusu’?”

  As soon as I asked that, the atmosphere took a drastic turn.

  “S-Suku—” He started to repeat, but stopped before finishing the full word. It was as if he couldn’t believe I had actually said it—like it was taboo merely to speak the name.

  “Yeah. There’s supposed to be a place by that name somewhere around here—”

  I cut myself off mid-thought. The man’s face had gone pale, and he started backing away, eyes wide with shock, as if he had just encountered a ghost on some dark street at night.

  “Um, sir?” I took a small step forward, and the man matched it with a step backward of his own, as if I were some kind of plague-ridden rat that he was trying to keep his distance from.

  “J-Just keep goin’ straight down that there road, and you’ll get to the gate eventually,” he said, pointing quickly in the direction I had just come from. That was exactly where Miyoshi’s GPS had been pointing us—right down the narrow road we were feeling so uneasy about. But something was odd...

  “Gate?”

  Hearing that single word, the man somehow went even more pale. Is he having some kind of medical episode?

  “Excuse me, are you okay?”

  “F-Fitasafiddle!” the man blurted out, then turned and ran off.

  “What on earth was his problem...?” Tilting my head in confusion, I headed back toward the car.

  Miyoshi greeted me upon my return.

  “Oh, there you are, Kei! How’d it go?”

  I thought about the man’s bizarre reaction; it seemed like he had been frightened of something.

  “Question.” I turned to Saito, knowing full well she probably wouldn’t know the answer. “Is Sukusu some kind of forbidden zone or something?”

  “I know a lot of people come to this area to fish,” she said. “I don’t think forbidden zones are even a thing nowadays. And if it was something along those lines, how could they have built a hotel there in the first place?”

  She had a point. The tiny community we were in didn’t even have a single general store, yet there were apparently three different places that offered ferry rides. One had to assume most tourists that visited were coming to reel in a few catches.

  “I just Goggled ‘Sukusu’ and didn’t get any hits,” Miyoshi added.

  “None at all?”

  “It did bring up a place on the Nakasendo called Suharajuku...but Goggle has this thing where even if you ask for an exact match, it still shows hits even when there are symbols between the characters. It picked up ‘Agematsujuku→Suharajuku’ because the kanji for ‘juku’ in the first word and the kanji for ‘su’ in the second word read ‘Sukusu’ when they’re put together. It just completely ignored the fact that there is an arrow between the two.”

  “Sheesh. Sure would be nice if an ‘exact match’ were actually exact, huh?”

  “I’m with you on that one! Anyway, I found exactly zero hits relevant to our interests.”

  A location name with no internet footprint whatsoever? In this day and age? Something feels kinda wrong about all this...

  I cleared my throat. “Well, at least we had the right directions, apparently. Let’s get back on track. I’m starting to get hungry.”

  Upon proceeding further down the narrow road, all we found were ruins, ruins, and more ruins. There were a number of shipping containers strewn about the grass and the shoulders, some labeled as being from Yamazaki Baking, and others from Daiei with the Fukuoka Hawks logo printed on them. It almost seemed as though people had been living in them at some point in the past. If they had, I couldn’t imagine what kind of life it would’ve been, cooped up inside a windowless container like that all the time. Not to mention some of the containers even had massive dents and deformations in them, as if some giant thing had tried to smash them in.