The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village:Volume4 Chapter 2

Status: Incomplete

2/14 parts completed

   

Chapter 2: Hishigami Enbi // The Present Fluctuates Freely

Part 1

“Takenoko takenoko nyokiki!!”

“First nyoki!!”

“First nyoki!!”

“Nya ha ha! You were taken out right off the bat!”

“It’s a bit of an old game, so I forget how to play it☆”

A group of five men and five women on a group date was having the time of their lives at a table a short distance away. They must have been drinking a fair bit of alcohol because they were roaring with laughter at conversations that did not seem even remotely funny to me. Nevertheless, their laughter reached the table my sister and I were eating and drinking at.

Hmm.

For this twintailed middle school girl of the Hishigami family, a bar with only dim indirect lighting was a new experience. It made me wonder if I should really be there. Still, I hadn’t ordered any alcohol and my adult sister was across the table from me, so no one was going to warn me away or anything.

“There’s nothing on this menu but greasy meat. I don’t think this kind of food is right for a farming race with length to spare in their intestines.”

My sister was a large-breasted woman in her twenties who still wore a tank top and hot pants. She held a glass filled to the brim with spirytus (a harsh drink that could do just fine fueling an alcohol lamp) and frowned as she replied to me.

“They have salads down at the bottom.”

“What kind of salad has ‘plenty of beef tongue’!? The vegetables clearly aren’t the primary part of these dishes! A girl with lots of subcutaneous fat can’t carelessly eat this kind of thing.”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry. You’re in middle school, aren’t you? At your age, your metabolism won’t leave any fat behind. Did an instigator of some kind of health boom scare you on TV or something? And if you’re that worried, just take a run after eating.”

“That may work for you, but you’re a monster that chases after an Italian sports car to drag some villain out of it.”

“I only managed that because it was a winding road on a mountain ridge. I couldn’t do it on a straight city road.”

The fact that she thought that showed she was normal proved just how much of a monster she was. At any rate, she was someone I didn’t want involved in the schedule mysteries that were fun for their logic.

Meanwhile, excited voices were still coming from the other table.

“Huh? You’ve only been ordering oolong tea, haven’t you?”

“No, no. I’m fine. This has shochu in it.”

“You don’t have to say that. If you don’t drink, just say so. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I won’t force you to drink, so don’t worry. Nya ha ha ha ha!!”

While the voices sometimes jumped up in volume and stabbed into my ears, I reached for the large plate of beans.

Munch, munch.

“Ahh, edamame is delicious. I think these have to rank at #1.”

“No, that would be dadachamame. And do you insist on only eating vegetables!? What’s this!? Is my sister actually a girl or something!?”

“Of course I am!! And what’s with that fried beef!? Girls are supposed to think even chicken is too greasy!”

“Sorry, but it’s looking like I have a big job coming up. Once it begins, I don’t know when I’ll next get any proper human food, so I want to fill my head with as many memories of civilization as I can.”

“Oh, is that so? I’ve got a troublesome issue at hand too.”

My sister winked while downing the clear liquid with 90%+ alcohol content as if it were cool water.

“Let’s hope we don’t run into each other.”

“That’s for sure. If two Hishigami women ended up involved in a single incident, it would feel like the end of the world. I’d imagine everything would get resolved, but no one involved would be around to tell the tale.”

“I’ll be right back. I need to go to the bathroom!” said someone from the other table.

“Oh? Guys don’t use some kind of euphemism there?”

“Eh? Do you seriously say you’re off to pick flowers? I thought that was an urban legend.”

A young man in a business suit stood up from that table.

Due to the layout, he approached our table and so I spoke up.

“Detective, what are you doing here?”

The instant I did, the man in the cheap suit froze in place. That detective from Investigation Department 1 of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department slowly turned toward me like a doll needing to be oiled. He was Detective Uchimaku Hayabusa and he was single. An unpleasant sweat covered the expression of a man who had just made the worst mistake of his life.

And he suddenly tried to cry his way out of it.

“Noooooooooooo!! I’m not asking why you two are here! I’m just not!! Let’s keep to ourselves here, okay? I really don’t get a chance like this often!! Pleeeeeeeease!!”

“Detective, your friend Enbi-chan here has the kind heart of the Virgin Mary, so I won’t count this as cheating on me. …But only if you kiss me right here and now.”

“Enough nonsense! Just promise me!! A police detective has a harder time meeting women than a uniformed police officer! Even people who haven’t done anything wrong shut me out because they say I look too scary! But this time is different. There’s a flight attendant who kindly reached out to me!! This is the only paid vacation left, but she went out of her way to schedule this on my day off! If I miss this chance, it’s all over! My days of youth will end and I’ll be a lonely middle-aged man instead!! So please!!”

You’re supposed to be a police detective, so what on earth are you talking about?

Of course, a normal love life was impossible for this man. Even on his day off, he wasn’t drinking. It was probably his way of making sure he was ready if something did happen.

Also…

“Detective, it pains me to say it, but I don’t have to do anything here. It’s already too late.”

“Don’t be so ominous!! Mai, stop your sister’s rampage here!!”

“(Sparkle, sparkle, sparkle.)”

“What’s with that glitter in your eyes!? You want to destroy this group date and cause a commotion just for fun, don’t you!? I won’t let you! I won’t! Defense!! Defense!!”

“Detective, look over here.”

I diverted my future darling’s eyes as he posed like a basketball player for no reason.

“Your cell phone is going to receive an emergency call soon. This fun love comedy part of the night will end without our interference. So let’s go dive headfirst into the serious and bloody suspense part of the night☆”

“Please wait!! Let me recover my energy! I’ll break otherwise. I really, really will!”

“Sure, sure. But the countdown has already begun. Three, two, one.”

Zero.

At that moment, his cell phone produced a normal ring tone.

He brought it to his ear in annoyance and a grim male voice came out.

It was the chief of Department 1.

“You have a case, Uchimaku. You’re back on duty, so get to the scene.”

“………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Me no speak Japanese.”

“I already know you’re just about the biggest idiot out there, so you don’t have to remind me. I’ll send the details in an email.”

The detective then reached for the glass on our table.

More specifically, he grabbed the glass my sister had been using and gulped down the clear liquid inside.

“Ah! My spirytus!”

“Gwaaaaaahhh!? You got an indirect kiss with hiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmm!?”

He completely ignored our shouts.

“Bh!? Spiry-gwah!?” he choked.

He was immediately left unsteady on his feet as he spoke into the cell phone.

“I can’t, chief! I’m out drinking right now!! I’d love to make a dashing entry, but unfortunately, a police officer can’t exactly drink and drive.”

“Take a cab. And no, we won’t reimburse you for the fare.”

The call ended there and the detective remained motionless.

Completely motionless.

Part 2

There was only one kind of case an off-duty police detective would be called to.

Plenty of incidents both large and small occurred in Tokyo on a daily basis, but it was not often they were sent straight to the metropolitan police and had off-duty detectives called in. This clearly had some kind of dangerous circumstances that brought it behind a normal incident.

I lent my shoulder to the detective who was about to collapse from something other than the alcohol and I spoke my thoughts as we waited for a taxi to pass by the nighttime street.

“In Odaiba, the idol group Tarot Girls 22 was having a live broadcast event as guests on an internet radio show, but a man burned himself to death. It may be called net radio, but they tend to have videos these days, so the footage of the human pillar of fire’s death throes was sent all around the world.”

“Why do you know all this?

“I said it was a live broadcast, didn’t I? This isn’t classified police information. The broadcast station has apparently stopped transmitting the footage, but it’s everywhere on the video sharing sites. Every message board I’ve looked at is filled with dangerously titled threads.”

“Ugh…”

“But when I say this was net radio, I don’t mean it was a studio rented out by amateurs. It’s a division and subsidiary of Japan’s most well-known national broadcast station. The top levels of the station were afraid newspapers and TV wouldn’t be necessary in five years’ time, so they bought up a successful netventure to gain the knowhow. It was less a way of gaining actual profits and more preparations for dealing with the new age that would weed them out. Think of it like an investment to learn about the enemy.”

The combination of a drunk man in a suit and a middle school girl must have been a problem because we didn’t seem able to catch a taxi.

“The victim was a twenty-four year old man named Usuta Manabu. He was on the net radio’s sound staff, but he was a freelancer with a bottom-level position. It isn’t known if he left any kind of will behind. From what I’ve seen on the video sites, he dumped a plastic bottle of a flammable liquid over his head and set himself ablaze with a lighter. It might have been an organic solvent for paints that isn’t as flashy as gasoline. Art staff could easily bring some into even a heavily-guarded TV station, so there would probably have been some lying around for Usuta to grab.”

“That’s…hic…sad to hear. He probably regretted his decision as soon as he lit it.”

“Probably. The weak flames from a solvent take a while to kill you. Then again, there wasn’t much hope of saving him once he was entirely engulfed in the flames. If he was going to go that far, he should have prepared some gasoline and died a less painful death. That might have killed him instantly and wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few minutes.”

Incidentally, the detective’s Investigation Department 1 had a section dedicated to fires. It was a bit of a stretch to say a suicide qualified, but the special circumstances of this case kept anyone from immediately labelling it a “mere suicide”.

The spread of the flames to the broadcast station’s equipment and the interrupted live broadcast would likely be treated as more important than the man’s death.

In the worst case, it could be registered as arson against the station rather than suicide.

If that happened, Usuta Manabu would be treated as a perpetrator rather than a victim. Of course, it was a lot the same when a train hit someone. The focus was always more on the delayed schedule and cost of the damage than on the person killed.

It was said that the law prioritized public welfare over the circumstances of individuals, but it was important to remember that was harsher than it sounded.

“Then what are saying?” asked the detective with a suspicious look in his eyes. “Some grotesque footage that violates the broadcast code might bring social unrest, so the well-known Department 1 has to send all its forces out to quickly fix it? Hic.”

“Well, it was a net broadcast, so the codes don’t really apply and I’m not sure if the Broadcast Something-Or-Other Committee will do anything about the scandal. Then again, this was related to a subsidiary of a national broadcast station, so who knows.”

We finally caught a taxi.

I stuffed the detective into the back seat and then sat next to him.

The middle-aged female driver looked displeased when I told her we needed to get to the broadcast station in Odaiba.

“What’s this? Are you trying to get a peek at tonight’s hottest murder scene? Sorry, but I can’t let you do that. If you’re just interested in what doesn’t concern you, I’ll refuse to drive you.”

“He’s a detective from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and I’m a freelancer, so we need to get there ASAP to solve the case.”

“What’s this!? You mean the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department? And what do mean by a freelancer!? Sh-should I be getting your autographs or something!?”

God, how annoying!! You’re the one that’s too interested in what doesn’t concern you!!

The detective who reeked of alcohol was of little use.

“Hic. Anyway…can you get going?”

“Sure, sure. This is when you ask me to follow that car, right!? I’m on it!!”

The woman seemed to be on a high because she drove us quite recklessly from the Shinbashi drinking district to Odaiba.

“Hic. By the way, driver.”

“What is it!? Ask me anything! Do you want to know about any suspicious passengers I’ve had!?”

“You called it a murder scene just now, didn’t you? What do you mean?”

“That’s what everyone’s saying. They say there’s no way it was just a suicide.”

Yes, yes.

Let Enbi-chan handle that one.

“The social unrest you mentioned before might not be too far off. This is going to be more than just dealing with a suicide.”

“What?”

“Every message board out there has a flood of posts coming in, but there’s clear malice mixed in at a pretty good frequency. A lot of people are saying there was nothing wrong with the sound staff member and his suicide was caused by something else.”

“Something else? You mean like someone assisted or instigated the suicide?”

“I told you the guest was Tarot Girls 22, remember? They’re the most popular national idol group right now and it seems the blame is spreading to them. People are saying they’re cursed or that a woman’s cries are mixed in with their latest song.”

“Hee hee hee☆ The mystery voice on the CD, huh?” added the driver.

“Well, it’s a common urban legend.”

The TV industry had a way of gathering occult stories. Some would say everyone related to the production of a certain advertisement was meeting bizarre deaths one after another, some would say they caught a glimpse of a corpse floating in the pond behind the reporter in the instant they switched to the outside camera on the weather forecast, and some would say a porn video was playing after the station’s broadcast time had ended.

One genre of those was the mystery voice on a CD. Those rumors usually said a female screaming or crying was recorded along with the artist’s voice. There were a few famous songs with that rumor.

“So instead of Tarot Girls 22 being caught up in the sound staff member’s suicide, those people think the sound staff member was killed due to the problems surrounding Tarot Girls 22.”

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“It’s hard to say.”

If this was a fictional mystery novel, I would have laughed and said it was obviously some kind of clever trick made to look like the curse had done it, but unfortunately, this world was filled with irregular beings known as Youkai.

Not that this was any time to give a proud snort and say something as obvious as “truth is stranger than fiction”.

“Was it a suicide or something more? Was it done entirely by human hands or was an elusive Youkai involved? And if a Youkai was involved, was it an intentional act of the Youkai’s or was a human using its power via a Package? We have no choice but to investigate every possibility.”

However, I could only glean so much information from the excited message boards and video sharing sites. Without heading to the scene of the crime and investigating myself, I couldn’t even plan what to do next.

The taxi crossed a brightly lit bridge.

“Would it really be that hard to just seal off this bridge?”

“Try learning a thing or two about economics.”

“I bet I could get it immediately sealed off by attaching a kitchen timer to a cylindrical container, duct-taping it to the bottom of the bridge, and calling the police.”

“Hic. Do that and you’re on your own.”

Once we had crossed the bridge, we were on obviously reclaimed land.

There was a large-scale park and shopping mall, but it still looked like a kingdom ruled by a ridiculously huge national TV station. From one end of the rectangular area of reclaimed land to the other, it all looked like an unreal TV set.

I was pretty sure the area had lately had an Edo-style revival campaign. They had tried to raise the water quality of Tokyo Bay to properly bring back the old Edo-style sushi or something like that.

The word “ecological” tended to make people think of being less wasteful, but the introduction of new facilities for the environment had placed industrial complexes all along the bay’s coast. Madoka had likely been delighted with all the money and rights being traded around.

The woman driver then asked a question.

“Where should I stop? Will the shopping mall’s parking lot work?”

“We’ve got an actual police officer with us, so there’s no need to hold back. Pull right up to the front of the TV station like a VIP’s limo.”

“Heh heh. I’ve always wanted to do that.”

I don’t know where she learned how to do it, but the tires screeched as she brought the taxi around the front entrance circle.

Despite how late it was, the area was filled with people.

Irritated security guards were keeping normal people from entering, but they could not keep the media away. And a close glance showed one young man carrying a camera with the TV station’s own logo. I guessed they had been unable to stop the flood of people after the following scenario played out: Their own reporters made their way in → Why does that station get in and no one else? → This isn’t fair! It’s a violation of the freedom of the press!!

The showy arrival of the taxi was met by the bright stroboscopic flashing of the SLR cameras.

They took picture after picture hoping it was a famous celebrity, a station VIP, someone related to the incident, or just anyone they could sell to a sports newspaper later.

But it turned out to be none of those.

Okay!! It’s time for the arrival of the (future) most lovey-dovey couple in the world!!

As for Police Sergeant Uchimaku’s reaction upon getting out of the back seat…

“Yay!! Are you getting some good shots? Hello, everyone! Or should I say good evening? Department 1 is on the scene!! Ugh. Oh, no. Here it comes… Oehhhhhhhhh!?”

Oh, dear.

I hope this shocking footage isn’t released so soon after the suicide by burning.

Part 14

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