Chapter 6
2. The Man-Eating God
"My grandma was truly a worthless woman..."
Karahara's voice, almost like a mutter, was nearly drowned out by the heavy sound of the sliding glass door opening. Taking advantage of that, Miyaki and I pretended not to hear.
He flicked up the worn bamboo curtain with his fingers and stepped into the house.
From the chilly entranceway, the wooden hallway was visible, cluttered with rolled-up calendars, empty picture fras, cardboard boxes, and the skeletal fras of folding chairs or carts.
"It's a pain to clean up and sell everything, so I co here on my days off to check if bugs are infesting anything. I haven't touched most of it, so it's a ss..."
Stepping on the sticky floorboards, we moved through the dim interior of the house, dodging objects in our path.
The piles of garbage blended into the darkness, losing their outlines, making it feel like we were walking down the esophagus of a monster that had swallowed a human dwelling whole.
"You heard, right? My grandma was the first victim."
Karahara sat us down on chairs in the kitchen and poured barley tea from a kettle.
The white kettle with red flower patterns was probably used by his grandmother.
Karahara, who had absorbed the scent of his deceased grandmother's house, gave off the air of a worn-out old man despite his youth. Over his shoulder, I could see a nursing bed in the living room.
"Calling her a victim is too convenient. Half of it was her own damn fault."
"And the other half?"
Miyaki asked while sipping the barley tea. Karahara didn't answer and turned his back to us, heading toward the living room.
"Did I offend him?"
"Too late now."
Karahara returned holding an old box, probably for gift sweets or sothing similar.
"This is my grandma's keepsake diary."
He flipped to the first page of the notebook he pulled out, then showed us the second page.
In the center of the yellowed paper was a large oval, inside which were overlapping lines resembling brains and intestines.
I turned the page. Similar drawings were on every page. So even had lines protruding from both sides near the top of the oval.
"What is this..."
Miyaki returned the diary with an uncertain smile.
"You thought she was insane, didn't you?"
"Your grandmother was battling an illness, wasn't she? Delirium from dication isn't uncommon..."
Looking at the eerie drawings made with red pencil, I was reminded of a frog's thin belly I saw as a child, with its blood vessels and organs visible through the skin.
"Organs...?"
Karahara's eyes widened at my aningless mutter.
"No, it's nothing. Just talking to myself."
He fell silent, then looked up at with only his eyes after a mont of staring down.
"You might think I'm crazy too..."
Karahara clasped his fingers together on the table.
"When I was a kid, I got hit by a truck. It was pretty bad. I was in a coma for a long ti. During that ti, I had a dream... I saw that thing."
A darker shadow fell over his gloomy expression.
"It was a dream where I was climbing a slope on a dark mountain path, surrounded by forest-like trees. At the top, there was a strange creature. It looked like a dry bundle of straw with horns. It had no eyes, nose, or ears. The center of its straw-like hair was bulging and constantly moving. Where the hair split, I saw faintly translucent red tubes and sothing like plastic bags—I thought they were organs. It didn't have a mouth, yet the organs moved as if digesting sothing it had eaten."
Before finishing his story, Karahara averted his eyes from Miyaki and .
He probably knew he was saying sothing incomprehensible. His downcast eyes seed to say he didn't want any reaction.
"Has anyone else in the village had dreams about such a creature?"
Karahara shook his head.
"Who knows. I've never thought to ask. If rumors spread that you're crazy in a place like this, you can't work. You understand, right?"
"Then, do you have any idea what that creature in your dream was?"
Karahara pulled a heavy glass ashtray toward him, took out a cigarette, and lit it. The drifting smoke crawled across the depths of the silence.
As he exhaled the white smoke, he said,
"The man-eating god."
Miyaki and I exchanged glances.
"It's the local belief. You ca to investigate that, right? I heard the rumors. I'm pretty sure that's what I saw."
"Why do you think that thing appeared in your dream, Karahara?"
In response to Miyaki's question, he gave a self-deprecating smile.
"Because my grandma prayed to it."
Ash fell onto the table, and the remaining embers lted the varnish.
"It was an evil god that ate people to grant wishes. Saying it reford and stopped eating people is a damn lie. Nothing my grandma said was ever true. That thing still eats people. That woman prayed to it—'Save my grandson,' she said."
I could sense a smoldering anger in his low voice.
"So your grandmother prayed to the man-eating god and got your life saved in exchange for being eaten herself?"
"That doesn't make sense."
Miyaki interrupted my words.
"Didn't your grandmother die from illness? And long after you grew up at that. It's not like she was eaten on the spot..."
Miyaki stopped herself mid-sentence and fell silent.
"It doesn't attack and devour people. It only leaves behind the result of being eaten. That's why it's not the man-eating god, but 'the god that has eaten'..."
Karahara nodded silently.
"My grandma stirred up sothing horrible. It would've been better if I had just died back then..."
Karahara crushed his cigarette butt in the ashtray and stood up.
"You shouldn't say things like that. You're fine now, aren't you, Karahara?"
Instead of answering Miyaki's attempt to console him, Karahara reached for his shirt buttons. In front of our stunned gazes, his dry fingers undid them one by one from top to bottom.
"Wait, what are you doing?"
Karahara undid all the buttons and lifted the hem of his black undershirt. We were speechless for a different reason.
"There was a scar on my stomach from the accident. A stitched-up ss of a belly. At first, it was just suture marks. But over ti, it changed."
There was a scar on his thin stomach with protruding ribs. It wasn't the kind of scar that ca from growth or aging.
Countless red-black lines overlapped in layers, forming a sh-like pattern.
It looked like a wound made by the sharp claws of a beast trying to rip through his organs.
"If it were a monster that attacked, we could deal with it. But what do you do against an invisible god that leaves only the evidence of being eaten?"
Karahara gave a twisted smile with lifeless eyes.
"Miyaki, let's go to the mountain. We need to investigate the reality of this thing."
Still stunned, Miyaki turned to and nodded.
"If we're going to the mountain, it's better to do it after dark."
While lowering his undershirt and buttoning up again, Karahara said,
"Then you'll understand just how ssed up this village really is."
The sunset outside the window turned into black darkness on the side that reached into the kitchen, casting deep shadows over the elderly relics crowding the room.
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