Only, the One Who Flees (2)
A day trip to Kyoto—that was the idea, though strictly speaking it was nothing like the Kyoto sightseeing most people had in mind. Say Kyoto, and one meant Kyoto City. If the purpose was tourism, that went double. Their destination this time was merely another town that happened to share Kyoto Prefecture with the city, and nothing more.
Kyoto Prefecture treated the city as its true body, and the gulf between north and south ran deep. The place they were bound for lay in the neglected north of that divide, so the atmosphere was bound to differ sharply from the Kyoto of the usual tour.
"They call it Mount Oe, but it would be more accurate to speak of the Oe range, or the Oe mountains. It's a collective name for several peaks, Senjogatake among them—the highest, a little over eight hundred meters."
A ridgeline showed beyond the van's windows. Hitomi glanced at it as she explained. Had it been only her and Seoyeon, they would have come in that enormous tractor-trailer—but today was not a journey for two. Soon enough she turned her gaze to the Sakuragi sisters in the back seat.
Sakuragi Oka, who streamed as Kitayama Maya of the first generation, and Sakuragi Honoka, who streamed as Masachi Nodoka of the third. The two looked so little alike that blood was hard to credit, and Honoka's sun-browned skin only deepened the impression. Even so, with a lap offered up as a pillow, they seemed closer than most sisters could begin to claim. Of course, Oka was only sprawled that way because she was too tall to sit the drive out like anyone else. Grant the reason, though, and a knee surrendered so readily could still stand as proof of a certain closeness.
"Historically, you can look at Mount Oe from two broad angles. As a sacred mountain where three oni-slaying traditions overlap, and as a mine rich in veins of various metals."
Han Seoyeon and Ninomae Hitomi. Sakuragi Honoka and Sakuragi Oka. Not a combination that spent much time together. The occasion had come of Hitomi spotting a newbie in her obscure major and talking Honoka into a field survey. Since Hitomi was going, Seoyeon decided to come along as well—to drive them, and to take up a matter she had to see to in the region.
That much was plausible enough. Oka's joining them had come as a surprise to all three. Had it been a trip somewhere, there would have been nothing strange in family coming along for the fun of it, but an older sister accompanying her younger sister's academic fieldwork was hardly ordinary. It wasn't as if she clung to her little sister out of sheer fondness, and she hadn't seemed particularly interested in this sort of thing either.
So why, then? None other than Freemason business. From what they had heard, she happened to have an errand with a youkai living on Mount Oe. For a relatively recent recruit she seemed to have quite a lot on her hands—or perhaps, being new, she was simply being loaded with this and that odd job. Oka's own name carried weight enough that the organization was unlikely to treat her poorly... In any case, that was how a slightly peculiar quartet had made its way to Fukuchiyama, in Kyoto Prefecture.
"Of course, people also mention it as a famous spot for seas of clouds, or as one of the Hundred Famous Flower Mountains, or as part of the Tango-Amanohashidate-Oeyama Quasi-National Park, but I won't bother with the aesthetic side."
Some things were far better seen with one's own eyes. A long explanation wouldn't stir much feeling anyway.
"First, the three oni-slaying legends. Prince Hikoimasu, younger brother of Emperor Sujin, and his subjugation of Kugamimi no Mikasa. Prince Taima, younger brother of Prince Shotoku, and his subjugation of Eiko, Karuashi, and Tsuchiguma—known together as the oni of Miuegatake. And the most famous of all: the subjugation of Shuten-doji by Minamoto no Yorimitsu, also called Raiko."
Ordinarily a mountain was lucky to carry even one oni-slaying legend. For three of them to be fixed to a single peak was distinctive indeed—all the more so when one of those tales, that of Shuten-doji, was famous enough that it would have been no surprise had it devoured and absorbed all the rest.
A place one might fairly call the mountain of the oni. That was Mount Oe, set in Kyoto Prefecture. The Church, Professor Senjoji, the Freemasons—it would not have been strange for any of them to count the ground as land of some importance and send a watch now and then.
"To borrow the language of the hidden world, faith in the concept of the oni—known throughout Japan, and to a fair degree around the world as well—passes through this place at least once, nine-tenths of it or more. I would ask you to understand it as being on that order."
Seoyeon, hands on the wheel, added that much. So long as the concept of the oni existed in the world, the place would stand for all eternity, and without shame, as a holy site of demons.
"The oni who are slain are sometimes read as local magnates, or as people who came from overseas. They're also taken as symbols of fear and loathing toward the unfamiliar..."
The provinces, set against the center.
Barbarism, set against civilization.
The far shore, set against this one.
The miner, set against the farmer.
More than a few scholars argued that the image of the oni surviving to this day had its origin in the denigration and dread of that unfamiliar other, cast down as a monster.
"Mount Oe in particular was a mine as well. From copper all the way to nickel... People gathered around it and power took shape, and during the World War they even forcibly conscripted people from other countries and brought them in."
The moment she said other countries, Honoka's gaze flicked toward Seoyeon. Japanese people trading talk like this in front of a Korean—the irony of it struck her hard.
Han Seoyeon, of course, paid it little mind. Had far-right ideology been mixed in, that might have been another matter. This was nothing but a calm recital of fact, and she had no reason to take offense. Even if they had come out and spoken openly distorted claims, she likely would not have grown angry and pressed them over it. Asked, she would answer without hesitation that she was Korean; still, she had been traveling foreign countries since a childhood she barely remembered, and she felt little sense of belonging to any nation.
Seoyeon's indifference did nothing to loosen the stiffness in Honoka's face. She was experiencing, in real time, the feeling of a German who has just raised the Holocaust in front of a Jew.
"Honestly, it feels a little late for that. Even the professor in our major lectures brings up the forced-labor issue as if it were nothing."
In their first year, Hitomi added with a wry smile, the lecture hall would sink into silence the moment Professor Senjoji opened her mouth, and every eye would turn on Seoyeon.
To tell the truth, Hitomi herself had flinched whenever the subject came up, at first. It was the sort of thing people usually hushed at home, and plenty of students had likely known nothing about it at all. Hitomi had always been interested in history, so the knowledge itself was there; even so, by the mood of the country, it remained a story one did not raise carelessly.
Now that she knew Professor Senjoji well, she could say it with certainty. What the world thought of her, how other people looked at her—none of it mattered to the woman in the slightest. Had she cared about such things, she would never have been one of the Seven Great Madmen to begin with.
"I'll introduce you sometime. Even so, it might be better than learning it from an undergraduate."
"Would that be all right...?"
"Tell her you're an aspiring folklorist, and she'll be delighted to teach you all sorts of things."
A field one could not, even in empty flattery, call mainstream. Even by the standards of the hidden world, where the anomalous truly existed, it was no exception. And the authorities of obscure disciplines had a way of lighting up the moment they caught so much as a whiff of newbie.
"Besides, you'll have plenty of reasons to come by—group collabs, using the filming studio, visiting the company building. She's someone you'll probably run into now and then."
"Oh. Ninomae-san's advisor is involved with Anathema?"
"Yes. She consults on the lore around the anomalous. She's a childhood friend of the president."
"The world really is small..."
Watching Honoka murmur it, Hitomi smiled wryly once more. The more she thought about it, the less it seemed that the world was small, and the more it seemed that Anathema Production was simply something like a family-run company.
While they talked of this and that, the car came to a stop before a building. It stood at the foot of Mount Oe, raised on ground where a copper mine had once been, and both ends of it swept up into sharp points, calling an oni's horns to mind. A sign like a pillar bore the name written vertically.
Japan Oni Exchange Museum
Beside it, an enormous roof tile wrought in the shape of an oni held its mouth stretched wide. The place had been built to revive the village by drawing on the many oni legends that remained on Mount Oe, Hitomi added.
It felt strangely worn, and Honoka could not tell how successful that revival had been. Still, there was someone who looked like a foreign tourist—dressed in a yukata, of all things—so the effect was not entirely zero.
While they were here, perhaps she ought to try saying hello. Ah, but if the person spoke neither English nor Japanese, that might only be the ruder thing. Honoka was turning the question over, meaning to put it to the others.
"...Ninomae-san? Shion-san?"
But the faces of the two standing beside her made her tilt her head. Their eyes looked thoroughly thrown.
Her older sister was the same as ever. Whether that one was flustered or not, her expression never changed, so Honoka let her pass.
"What's wrong, everyone?"
"Um, well, the thing is..."
"...Has anyone here, by chance, been a little light on their taxes?"
"What?"
"Or come into a large income lately, one you weren't expecting..."
The world really was small, it seemed. Meeting the eyes of Apostle Matthew—who had been gazing at the oni statue in the museum's front yard before quietly turning this way—Han Seoyeon shaped a stiff smile that looked almost hollow.