Chapter 3.7

Seishin looked up at the community warmed by the sun's rays from the shade of the fir trees.

The resonance of the cicadas' chirps echoed along the slope of the mountain. Two-toned colored cars were stopped here and there on the street by the Murasako family home. Like on TV or a movie, Seishin thought. The sight of those cars and the investigators was dreadful, enough to disconnect from one's sense of reality.

The first to rush on scene was the resident officer, Takami, and as he explained the situation to Takami, pointing out the various calamities, the prefectural police arrived. He did the same with them, going back over the incident and story, leading along the paths he took and giving the explanations again but once that was over, there was nothing left for him to do. He couldn't get used to it---feeling constrained with so many people flowing into the place, though he had no particular destination, he walked the roads of Yamairi. Just maybe, he thought, he had the feeling, that this could be for the last time.

Even in the abandoned houses near the Murasako household, there was the sight of officers looking at the porches and in the houses themselves. So he trudged down the road to Yamairi's entrance, sitting at the three-pronged road, watching over the neighborhood's manner of demise. Recognizing that Yamairi was dead, the clamor before his eyes would seem contrary but it bore resemblance to the service for Shuuji that he had just been at. ---Evidently, this was what a funeral service for a neighborhood looked like.

The road up from the village, from where Seishin was sitting just then, turned left to enter the neighborhood of Yamairi. To the right was a rather wide, empty space, and deep into that emptiness the village road continued on to the right. It was a mountain road that was pushing it to be as wide as even one truck but two lines of track marks continuing on the earth showed that the village road was still just barely alive.

The distinct tread-marks on the earth discolored by the blazing sun contrasted the summer grass, for an all the more summer like complexion. There must have been a spring in the far corner of the vacant lot as before a small hokora were muddied tracks in every direction, brightly colored butterflies gathered about seeking water. The hokora was so small it was merely an enclosure with a roof, storing a stone pillar and a sacred Jizo, but the latter was toppled, broken with the Jizo's head having rolled aside the mud tracks. Its red apron was last year's (and it was probably Mieko who had put it on him) or so. It was a lonely, faded color. The injured and exposed Jizo's head was surrounded by dragon flies, their wings gleaming like glass.

A neighborhood that had died out and the clamor of living beings, the voices of the cicadas and the birds, the vivid colors of summer and its vitality, intermingled there with death and ruin. Yamairi now could be thought of as being over-saturated in things until it would snap apart.

Becoming unable to bear looking at it, he sighed and rose. He climbed the hill being warmed by the sun and its reflections, walking without purpose along the road towards Gigorou's house. ---He'd thought about how he'd lost his head, if he did say so himself.

He lowered himself onto the stone steps down from the Ohkawa house's estates, sitting facing straight ahead to the Murasako house, idly seeing the patrol car stopped at the Murasako household, and beside it Fuki and two investigators talking.

"----Yo."

A voice called out to him from behind; he turned as Toshio came down the steps towards him. He looked towards the Murasako house with eyes narrowed against the glare, holding onto the railing of the steps and stopping in the shadow of a fig tree to light a cigarette.

"What a catastrophe, huh?"

Seishin subconsciously pursed his lips. From Gigorou's house, he immediately contacted Toshio. Per instructions, he'd searched for Gigorou but, without thinking he found himself wanting to blame Toshio for the state he found the old man in.

"I see Fuki-san is here. ...Is she all right?"

"With what?"

"The body... she identified it, right?" Seishin started to say, with a gurgling noise in the back of his throat. Unfortunately, he had nothing left to puke up.

Toshio shrugged.

"If it's that, I already took care of it. Old lady Murasako aside, the two old guys don't look like anything besides two old bodies. They'll probably have to be positively IDed by dental records."

Seishin nodded.

"It's this hot weather," Toshio said, looking up at the radiantly clear sky. "I don't know how long they've been dead but they were left like that in this heat wave. Well, it was a hell of a sight-seeing. Thanks to that, I still can't smell anything else."

Seishin nodded to that too. He was the same from only peering in through the doorway. There was probably no comparison to Toshio who had stood in during the autopsy.

"Why.... did that..."

"Don't ask me the cause of death. They brought in a crew to do the autopsy, you know," Toshio said with a wry smile around the cigarette still in his mouth. "But then, with a parts deficit like that, I wonder if they'll really be able to tell."

"Deficit?" Seishin asked, to which Toshio responded bluntly.

"I tried counting their parts but there's not enough."

Revived in his mind were Gigorou's remains scattered around the room. Since the bedroom had been similar to the way things were in the Murasako house's kitchen, he had thought that they were more animal remains.

"That's..."

"By the time they could round up all the wild dogs and dissect them, it'd probably be long digested."

"Then, what did that to Gigorou-san was..."

"Probably wild dogs. At least we know they weren't cut apart with anything bladed. Old lady Murasako at least didn't have any external injuries. They're saying it might have been a natural death."

That's good, Seishin murmured without thinking. Toshio turned to look at Seishin.

"That's good? That it's not a case?"

"Yeah, well. ...That was imprudent of me, wasn't it. Sorry."

"I wonder about saying that to me. S'nothing even a little good about it, though."

"It was a natural death right? At the least, for Mieko-san."

"That's just it," Toshio said throwing away his cigarette. "The two old guys died a few days ago. At the very least we know they didn't die just yesterday. Mieko-san on the other hand probably died right around yesterday precisely."

"That's..."

Seishin started to say, then closed his mouth. "Yesterday....?"

"Right," Toshio said with an ironic smile. "Isn't that interesting? Old lady Mieko was here, who knows how many days, living with a corpse, in other words."