Old Testament: Ninomae's Lament (2)
Inari. Inari no Kami was one of the most famous deities in Japan.
The shrine treated as the head of that faith was Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, famous for the Senbon Torii — the tunnel of torii gates — and when people spoke of an Inari shrine, this was generally the one they meant. Historically, too, it had made its name to the point of being ranked great among the great, the middle, and the small, and upper among the upper, the middle, and the lower.
…It was not, however, where they were bound.
"There's an Inari shrine out in a place like this, too."
"Yes. I didn't know of it myself until not long ago."
It was an Inari shrine in Kyoto, administratively speaking, but the location sat a little apart from the famous one. Onitake Inari Shrine, on Mount Oe in Oe-cho, Fukuchiyama, Kyoto Prefecture. That was their destination.
Ninomae looked up at Mount Oe and let out a sigh.
"The correlation between oni and vampires… that's a pretty complicated subject, isn't it?"
"Rather a lot to assign a first-year."
Han Seoyeon murmured it, and nodded.
Choose a foreign yokai, research it, and in the end set it beside a traditional Japanese one and write the comparison up. That was the assignment this course had given its students. Then, with the lecture schedule about halfway done, Professor Senjoji had abruptly tacked on a special assignment. It was optional, strictly speaking — but the moment extra credit entered the picture, it stopped being optional for Ninomae, who had her eye on a merit scholarship. They were to visit a site the professor had designated to fit each group's topic, and work the visit into the final report. Quality was irrelevant. The mere fact of having gone promised a tidy score, and so the two of them had come.
"…Honestly, wasn't choosing vampires a difficult selection to begin with?"
"…I really can't deny that."
Man-eating yokai, one might expect to find in any region. Yokai that did nothing but drink blood were, surprisingly, few, and unless a person was already quite interested in the subject, almost no one could have named anything but a vampire. For the record, the Ninomae–Han Seoyeon group's first proposal had been the yuki-onna. Looked at that way, the oni — rather well known, at least, for their man-eating lore — might actually have shared more with the subject.
"You think the professor was correcting our direction, in her own way?"
Ninomae said it with her head tipped, puzzled.
Thinking it over again now, she had to admit it. Even granting that some regions attached blood-drinking lore to the snow woman, yuki-onna and vampire had felt badly out of alignment. They had tried to catch the professor's eye with an unusual choice of topic, and simply gone too far.
"It remains mere theory, mind you, but to my eye the Inari of Mount Oe is a peculiar thing! Go and have a look, and bring me word!"
…I think she just sent us because she was curious herself.
Honestly, Ninomae couldn't quite shake the sense that she had been hauled along on Professor Senjoji's personal errand as a bonus for sharing a group with Han Seoyeon. Still, a substantial score had been guaranteed, so it might not be an entirely bad thing for her either…
And it wasn't as if she failed to understand the professor's feelings.
Senjoji Chihaya was congenitally insensitive to the anomalous. Whether one's spiritual sense ran strong or weak was, in the end, a matter of constitution, but in her case it was so extreme it bordered on a disability. What made that a problem was that anomalies were her greatest interest. She was a contradiction on the order of a cat lover allergic to cat hair. That she had made her name as a world authority even under conditions like those was reason enough for her to have been called one of the Seven Madmen.
At any rate, it was for those reasons that Ninomae and Han Seoyeon had set out to climb Mount Oe—
"Hahh… huff…"
"…Are you all right?"
…It did not take very long before Ninomae was down for the count.
Mountain though it was, the path was decently kept. But even had the road been paved in asphalt, a climb that never let up would drop the weak of stamina in short order. Ninomae dragged in a rough breath and made a firm resolution to take her exercise more seriously from now on.
Han Seoyeon, well out ahead, turned and regarded her with a blank, unblinking stare. Then she dropped down against a tree trunk, apparently content to wait until Ninomae caught up to where she was.
…At that pace, it would be a while. So judging, Seoyeon let her gaze move on. The summer sun was beating down out of the sky.
It was blinding, and that was precisely why it was good. Only inside vision washed out by the light did something faint begin, at last, to show itself. It took a shape like a heat shimmer. A boundary, in other words — a ward.
They had come out surveying for the sake of oni research or some such, and the name was Onitake Inari, but the shrine here was not, in fact, a place that enshrined oni in particular. It had been given the name all the same because Mount Oe, where it stood, was said to have been the stronghold of an oni band headed by Shuten-doji and Ibaraki-doji. That was the explanation current in the surface world.
In truth, Onitake Inari Shrine was a sealing ground, where the Inari deity had split off a fragment of her own spirit and bound the remnants of ancient evil spirits. The ideal, then, was for the shrine's authority to press the unholy things down and grind them flat — and so, in practice, it had.
Yes. It had.
The boundary Han Seoyeon confirmed with her own eyes, now that she was here, was a little different.
At this rate, it's practically a stalemate.
The god's domain and the spirits' domain were shoving each other back at nearly equal strength. The former was perhaps a little stronger, and so it was still holding down the baleful force trying to burst free, but…
A seal had no business being kept in a form this precarious. There was no telling what variable might arise later, so one was supposed to spend strength on the binding and still have a deep reserve left over. A situation that could be maintained only by spending everything was no good at all.
What in the world had the shrine's chief priest been doing? Had he failed to report it, or been unable to? She would have to meet him herself and see.
"Hah… Miss Shion. Let's… let's go. Again."
"…Yes. Let's."
While she had been thinking it, the distance to Ninomae had already closed considerably. Seoyeon nodded at her words and rose. Ninomae looked thoroughly spent, but if she herself insisted on going on without a rest, there was nothing to say to it. Out of some unaccountable pride in the girl, Seoyeon only offered a prayer in secret, for the sake of those two legs.
"Haaaaah…"
The first thing Ninomae did upon conquering the climb was flop onto her back across the stone steps.
"Miss Ninomae. This is a shrine in which a deity resides. Please observe the proper courtesies."
"Huff— yes, yes. J-just a second. Just one actual second, pleeease…"
That the rebuke ended as nothing but words, without so much as a frown, was because it was painfully obvious Ninomae was face-down and utterly drained. Well. At that level, surely even a god would forgive a moment's discourtesy.
I doubt there's even any spare attention left for something like this in the first place.
Coming this far made it all the more certain. The divine power felt within the shrine grounds was far too thin. Unless the data in the materials she had seen before was wrong from end to end, it ought to have been several times this. Short of a god having its place stolen by some creature far beneath its own power, it meant divine power had been draining away somewhere else.
Where it had gone was obvious. The Inari of this place must have been throwing every last measure of her power into holding down the restless stirring of the evil spirits.
"When we go down, let's be sure to rest as we move."
Han Seoyeon, sighing inwardly at what was plainly an abnormal state of affairs, turned to Ninomae and said it.
"It seems there have been frequent falls lately, among people coming down from here."
"Okay. I'll be careful."
At that, Ninomae clutched her own shoulders as if a chill had walked down her spine.
In fact, those same accidents were, at root, why the two of them had come to this shrine at all. Fortunately no one had died, and layered over that was the judgment that if a problem of this kind had been an anomaly's doing, the shrine would have noticed long ago — so the situation had originally been taken for nothing more than chance. Senjoji Chihaya's view, however, differed. Her constitution kept her from finding solid proof that it was an anomaly's handiwork, and yet her judgment was that something about it felt wrong all the same. That was why she had asked Han Seoyeon to survey the place and report back.
And judging by the way things were turning out… the professor's instinct had been right again this time, it seemed.
"More importantly, we're at a shrine, so let's pay our respects first."
"Yes. That would be best."
Ninomae, her breathing even again by then, made the suggestion, and Han Seoyeon accepted it. When you entered someone else's house, the first thing you did was greet the owner. That was simply how it was done.
…Setting aside whether the other party was in any state to receive a greeting.
Even apart from etiquette, worship and prayer alone could yield a meaningful measure of faith, and so it would be of some small help now, while the god was locked in a shoving match with the evil spirits.
Perhaps because it was still morning, the two stepped into grounds empty of any human presence. They bowed once before the torii, rinsed hands and mouth clean with water, and only then advanced to the worship hall. They called the god with the bell, tossed coins into the offering box, and pressed their palms together. Greeting done, they looked around.
"So… what should we do now?"
"Wouldn't it be better to ask the chief priest?"
It was time to begin the investigation in earnest, but the problem was that Ninomae was still nothing more than an undergraduate. Running her eyes over a shrine would not tell her when it had been founded, or how Inari worship had shifted with the current of history. Han Seoyeon, for her part, had experience turning any number of shrines inside out, but that was strictly in the line of her duties as an Apostle — closer to a search and seizure by police and prosecutors than to the work of a researcher. And it was not a face she could show in front of Ninomae, a resident of the surface world.
The proper method, then, was to ask the shrine's other owner and investigate that way. In this case, it would be easier to think of him as the legal owner of the grounds.
"Are you visitors, come to worship?"
And that very person appeared, right on cue. He had probably come at the sound of the bell, or at the sound of the two of them talking — so Han Seoyeon thought. A middle-aged man in priestly vestments approached at an easy pace. She had seen that face before, if only in a photograph.
The shrine's one and only chief priest. The priest, in short, who served and enshrined the Inari no Kami of Mount Oe. She had seen him in the materials on Onitake Inari Shrine that the professor had passed along.
Han Seoyeon and Ninomae dipped their heads to him.
"Yes. Though it isn't only that. We've come on a field survey, for an assignment in a university folklore course."
"Ah, is that so? How unusual."
Did universities hand out assignments like that these days? He reacted as if genuinely astonished, then offered a good-natured smile.
Han Seoyeon ran her eyes over him in one quick pass.
He looks awfully calm.
An Apostle had appeared out of nowhere, and yet he was holding his composure remarkably well. Was he acting on purpose? But for that, he had shown a faint reaction to Han Seoyeon's face itself. It was a reaction common among people of the surface rather than the hidden side. They did not know Seoyeon was an Apostle, but that grim cast of her face sent a chill through them all the same, if only for a moment.
Someone who brushes the anomalous, yet doesn't know the hidden world?
So Han Seoyeon judged, a moment later. Not a man who had entered the society of the hidden world, but one who possessed only the knowledge that anomalies existed, and who had a grasp of only some of the anomalies in the local region. In a house that inherited the priest's vocation generation after generation, such cases were not rare.
"An investigation into Lady Inari no Kami, is it? I hesitate to say so myself, but if that's the case, might it not be better to visit the shrine at Fushimi rather than here?"
"Ah. It isn't that. To be precise, it's an investigation into the tradition of the Inari no Kami who seals evil spirits."
"Ah. I see. Then you've come to the right place."
At Han Seoyeon's words, the man nodded.
"Since you're here, would you care to look inside the main hall as well? If you took photographs and the like, would that be of help?"
"Huh? Is it really all right to go into a place like that?"
"Of course it is. Lady Inari is merciful. She'll forgive a fuss of this degree."
At the kindness that followed, Ninomae looked flustered. In truth, Han Seoyeon was a little flustered herself.
By nature, most things to do with a shrine were closed against outsiders. Opening a hidden space to researchers did happen often enough, depending on the shrine, but… This chief priest's charge was the upkeep of the seal. He ought, by rights, to have shut outsiders out even more strictly than other shrines. Unless he had recognized that Han Seoyeon was an Apostle, it sat wrong for him to so readily let into the main hall a pair who had simply shown up claiming to be university students on a field survey.
No — I can investigate more easily this way, so it's to my benefit, but…
He was offering to show them the place where the god dwelt. For Han Seoyeon, who had come investigating precisely because the Inari deity's present condition was suspect, there was no reason to refuse.
"If you would truly allow it, I would be grateful. Might we look over the other places outside first, though?"
"Of course. Look about as you please, and tell me when you're finished."
And so the two of them looked the shrine over from one end to the other, and they did not forget, here and there, to question the chief priest and set down the traditions that had been handed down there.
"Mr. Sanjo. I'd like to see the main hall now."
"Ah, I see. Shall we go straight there, then?"
At length, judging there was nothing more to see, Han Seoyeon called the chief priest — Sanjo Yusuke.
"Miss Ninomae. I'll go look at the main hall for a moment."
"Ah, okay. I'll just take a few more photos."
Leaving Ninomae near the worship hall, the two made for the main hall at the rear of the building.
A crude beast of stone caught the eye. A komainu — a guardian statue of the sort that, in Korea, would be a haetae. Or, this being an Inari shrine, was it a fox rather than a dog? It was not a particularly fine piece of carving, so the question stayed open. While Han Seoyeon turned it over, Yusuke rapped on the door of the main hall.
"Inari no Kami. Inari no Kami. Might you permit us to enter?"
Silence followed. No answer came back.
But Yusuke turned, looked at Han Seoyeon again, and smiled.
"There we are. Please, come in."
"…? Wait."
"Yes? What was it you just said?"
With a creak, the door opened under the chief priest's hand. Han Seoyeon had said something with her brow knit tight, but he seemed not to have heard it.
The god he serves, and he walks in without even waiting for an answer?
But the question vanished almost at once. Not because it had been answered — quite the opposite. Something several times more bewildering had happened, and she could not stay caught on that thought alone.
The inside of the main hall was empty.
Not empty of everything, of course. It was appointed after a fashion. But the most important thing was missing.
— There was no god here.
Divine power could still be felt at the shrine, however faintly, so she had probably not departed for good. And stepping away for a time was something that could happen at any shrine. But if that were so, then why in the world had Sanjo Yusuke tried to get the god's leave to enter? What had that knock, a moment ago, been for?
"Please, look around to your heart's content."
"…Ha. Of course."
And then Han Seoyeon's expression crumpled. Late — but she had understood the reason for all of it.
She had taken Yusuke for a man who knew of anomalies and simply did not know the hidden world. That had been a mistake. He was a human of the surface, perfectly so: a man who did not, in the first place, know that anomalies existed at all.
The sole chief priest of Onitake Inari Shrine did not believe in his own god. And the divine spirit of Mount Oe, granted no faith, was withering away toward death.
— The seal on Mount Oe had cracked because the god meant to hold them down had starved.
