The Enigmatic Tale of the Mysterious Electric Meter

The story is set in Japan, where a frugal elderly lady moves into a traditional Japanese house. She is extremely thrifty and meticulously scrutinizes every expense. However, what troubles her in her new home is the reading on her electric meter. The old lady believes she is conserving electricity, but her electricity bills are consistently higher than expected.

One day, she decides to turn off all the electrical sources in her home and temporarily stays with her son for a week to observe the electric meter's behavior. Upon returning home after the week, she discovers that the electric meter still shows an increase in usage. Perplexed, she initiates a series of meticulous investigations into her home's electrical circuitry but fails to find any anomalies.

In her disappointment, the elderly lady stumbles upon an unfamiliar wire beside her telephone table. She hastily moves the table and is astonished to find that the wire leads underground. Witnessing this peculiar situation, coupled with the old lady's inquisitive nature, she hires laborers to dig into the ground and trace the path of the wire.

With dedication, they dig deeper and, at approximately one meter in depth, they encounter something hard. Continuing to dig, they unveil a buried refrigerator. Upon opening it, the workers are horrified to find a female corpse inside. The woman's neck displays a faint purplish ligature mark, her tongue protrudes, and her eyes are wide open, gazing upward as if pleading for the refrigerator's door to be opened. Although inside the refrigerator, the body had not fully decomposed due to inadequate cooling, and it contained nauseating putrid fluids.

Subsequent investigations reveal that the room was previously occupied by a married couple of physicians. However, when the elderly lady took ownership of the house, the physician's wife had already disappeared. The lingering mystery is why the doctor resorted to such an enigmatic method to conceal the body.