Running out of breath at the foot of the mountain, we peered through the
gap in the garbage. A pitch-black tunnel underneath a wooden table led deep
inside.
We turned on our lights and shone them into the hole; the tunnel was less
than a meter tall. The garbage piled on top of it looked stable, but I wasn’t
about to start shaking any of it to find out for sure.
“Hey!” Toriko shouted down the tunnel. “Are you okay? It’s dangerous to
go in there!”
We waited a while, but there was no response.
Toriko looked at me with a frown. “What do we do?”
“Hmm...”
I didn’t know what to do either. Going in after the kid seemed way too
reckless...but, just as I was thinking that, I got startled by something that I
hadn’t expected to see.
I was there—my doppelganger was. Not far away, just standing around
like she was in a daze.
She raised her right hand, pointing towards the tunnel.
Still not looking in my direction.
“Sorawo, what’s up?”
“Uh...nothing.”
When I looked away, the doppelganger vanished.
You want me to go in there? Is that it...?
It reminded me of the time that my doppelganger led me to Toriko. I was
looking for someone else now, but maybe I could still trust her...?
“Sorawo?”
I sighed and crouched down at the entrance. “Oh, fine. I’ll go take a
look.”
“I’ll go too.”
“No. If we’re together and it collapses, that’d be the worst. Hold on for a
bit. I’ll scope it out and then call for you.”
“Okay... Be careful.” Toriko’s voice was full of concern as she placed a
hand on my back.
I resolved myself before entering the tunnel on all-fours. Needing to use
one of my hands to hold the light was cumbersome. I added a headlamp to
my mental shopping list, then proceeded to crawl further into the darkness.
Thankfully, despite all the trash, it didn’t stink.
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I think the tunnel was five meters long, if that, though it sure felt like a lot
more. Then it opened up, becoming tall enough for me to stand. I was careful
not to hit my head as I rose, then shone my light around the area. This was a
sort of semi-cylindrical space that had formed inside the trash heap. It was
maybe nine square meters, if that.
“You okay in there, Sorawo?”
“Just fine. It’s opened up a bit here.”
“Can I join you?”
“Hold on a bit longer. I’ll check it out...”
Drawing my Makarov, I looked around again. There was no sign of the
kid who’d supposedly fled in here. Were there other tunnels, maybe?
As I shone my light on the walls, I caught sight of a human-sized mass
lying on the ground and nearly jumped up into the air. On closer inspection, it
was a sleeping bag. I hesitantly took a peek inside. It was already unzipped
and empty. It looked like someone had deserted it in a hurry. There was a
silver mat laid out on the ground underneath it. The kind used to conserve
heat when camping.
I hadn’t noticed it in all the garbage, but there was a backpack sitting at
the head of the sleeping bag. I approached, and...it stank. Of human body
odor...the kind that a person who hadn’t bathed in a long time tended to have.
As I was wavering between wanting to investigate and not wanting to touch
it, I noticed a single photo inside the sleeping bag.
I turned my light on it, then gulped.
It was a photo of Michiko Abarato.
A picture of his wife—did that mean that Abarato was here...?
That’s when I sensed something behind me and turned around.
The kid, who had apparently been hiding under a blanket, poked her head
out halfway to look at me. When our eyes met, she darted out of her hiding
place with all the speed of a cornered animal, her eyes glinting in the
darkness.
I reflexively focused my right eye on the kid. She cried out and looked
away. It was like she’d been bathed in fire. Before I could turn my gun on
her, she’d turned around and fled down the tunnel.
“Sorawo, what was that?!”
“Heading your way! Be careful!”
“What’s heading my—Whoa!”
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There was shouting and the sounds of a scuffle. I gave chase, hurrying
back down the tunnel.
When I got outside, Toriko had captured the kid. Toriko was holding her
from behind as the child thrashed around trying to escape.
“Ahhh! Gahhh!” The child screamed like a wild animal as Toriko held her
down, making sure she couldn’t get away.
“Shh! It’s okay. It’s okay. Calm down,” Toriko said in a relaxed voice as
she desperately tried to restrain the kid. I couldn’t help but stare in awe. I feel
like she’d calmed me down before that way too. When was it...?
“S-Sorawo! Lend me a hand here!”
That snapped me back to my senses. I rushed over, getting the child’s
flailing arms under control.
“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. We’re not going to do anything to you,
so settle—Ow!” I cried out loud when she kicked me as hard as she could.
“Stop struggling already! Ow! That hurts!”
Between the punching and the hair pulling, the kid gradually wore herself
out and quieted down. Her breathing was ragged, and her eyes wide. She
really was like a captured beast.
Toriko, her hair disheveled, panted. “She’s not a fox or a tanuki, right?!”
she asked.
I took another look at the kid she was holding. It was a girl. Her long,
black hair was uneven, having been allowed to grow freely, and the black
one-piece she wore was dirty and tattered. The one shoe she had still been
wearing had fallen off somewhere, leaving her barefoot. Her whole body was
filthy, and she looked emaciated. She was still young—five or six at the
oldest.
“No doubt about it—she’s human.”
The girl’s eyes followed me closely as I answered. Exhausted as she was,
she was still searching for her chance to get away. I could tell, because I’d
have been doing the same thing in her position.
“Ah...!”
Suddenly, the pieces fell into place for me.
Is that it? Is that why I felt I had to help this girl...?
I looked at the girl in front of me with new eyes.
From the look of her, she must have been through a number of scary
experiences since wandering into the other world. But this kid wasn’t just
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quivering in terror, she was desperately trying to survive.
Just like I’d done.
It was almost as if she’d read my thoughts. The child blinked, then
furrowed her brow. She stopped acting like a cat with its hackles raised. Her
tense arms and legs visibly relaxed.
Even Toriko, who was holding her from behind, could tell. Toriko set her
down gently. The girl stood up on her own and looked up at me. Even
without Toriko restraining her, she didn’t try to escape immediately.
Toriko crouched down, and spoke in a gentle voice. “Sorry for frightening
you. I’m Toriko. And this is Sorawo. Who are you?”
The child said nothing.
“Were you alone all this time? You must have been scared. But it’s going
to be okay now. You can go home.”
The kid looked at Toriko, bewildered. She seemed not to understand what
was being said.
“Oh! Maybe you’re not Japanese. Hello? Bonjour? Ni hao?
Annyeonghaseyo?”
None of those greetings got a response. As Toriko and I looked at one
another, the child slowly opened her mouth and said, “In short, this may be
Sorawo’s ‘cognitive interface’ in physical form.”
“...?!”
“Something like the skin that forms over milk if you—”
The kid stopped mid-word, surprised by the looks of shock on our faces.
“What’d you just say?” I asked, but the kid seemed scared, and said no
more.
Then, it came back to me. That had been a fragment of a conversation
we’d had with Kozakura.
I think something similar to this had happened before. When beings from
the Otherside tried to make contact with us, they imitated our words...
Driven by some implacable feeling of concern, I asked, “Hey, kid, where
did you come from...?”
The girl looked away as if she hadn’t heard me, gazing in the direction of
the evening sun that wouldn’t set. When we turned to look too, there was a
resonating noise, like that of a bell tolling somewhere.
Dong... Before that heavy tone had completely faded, the scene before us
turned blue as we watched.
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The world that had been dyed red until moments before was painted blue
in the blink of an eye. The massive sun was now an ultrablue disc.
No, that was no sun—it was a massive hole in the sky. We were
illuminated by the light that shone from the Otherside’s abyss.
Dong... The bell tolled once more, shaking the air.
“Sorawo, that thing... Was that there before?”
I looked to see what Toriko was talking about, and there was a black, steel
tower that looked like Tokyo Tower towering over the streets on the other
side of the field.
The top of the tower seemed to have faded streamers clinging to it,
blowing in the wind. The moment I saw them, for some reason, I imagined
long, black hair—a woman’s black hair, stubbornly wrapped around my
fingers...
“Hasshaku-sama?” The name slipped from my lips without conscious
thought.
“That’s her? How do you figure?” Toriko said keeping her voice low, her
brow furrowed. “It looks more like it’s eight hundred feet tall than eight...”
I stared up at the tower vacantly, unable to reply, until suddenly there was
a tug on my hand. I looked down and there was a girl holding my hand and
frowning.
“What...?” I asked.
The girl turned her back on me, like she was irritated by my vague
question. She started walking towards the evening sun quickly, still holding
onto my arm.
“Wh-Whoa, hold on,” I called after her, but she didn’t turn to look back at
me, just kept walking urgently.
“Don’t you think she’s trying to tell us to come with her...?” Toriko
sounded a little out of it too.
It looked like her guess was right, though. The girl glanced at my other
hand, entwined with Toriko’s and hurried her pace.
For a moment, I thought I saw a flash of silver phosphorescence, and then
we were in a long hallway.
Toriko raised her voice in surprise.
“Something touched my hand just now.”
The hallway had wood flooring that creaked under our shoes. There were
latticed windows along either side, and nothing but blue light on the other
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side of them. It was a deep blue reminiscent of the sea, and the moment I
thought I had caught sight of something there was another silver flash that
changed the scene.
This time, we were outside. On the roof. There were similar blocky
buildings all around us, concrete bridges running from one to the next. The
sky was completely blue, reminding me of the sky we’d seen on the beach at
the end of the world. Just as I crossed the building and put my foot on one of
the bridges, my vision went silver again.
We were in a wasteland. There wasn’t so much as a blade of grass in the
ashen landscape that stretched out to the horizon. Nothing but round boulders
and thorny, dead trees obstructed our line of sight. Up ahead, I could see a
black tower much like the one from before. There were others of the same
shape all over the wasteland. The tips of them shone, as if they had noticed
us, and then released blue waves. It was a bizarre sight, like paint floating in
midair.
Just before rapidly spreading waves could reach us, the scene changed
again. It was a gloomy forest, and I could sense massive creatures crawling
around above the treetops. I could spot bright blue scales through the thick
foliage...
Each time we walked forward, the scenery changed. I’d had a similar
experience at the rotating observational platform where we’d encountered the
Yamanoke and with the Time-space Man, but this was my first time we were
so vividly aware of it. Toriko and I were both dumbfounded. I don’t know
how she did it, but the girl holding my hand seemed to be moving through
aspects of the other world.
In every one of them, something blue was waiting for us. Was it gradually
closing in? Or getting further away? I couldn’t tell right away. But as we
traveled through a phantasmagoria of disjointed scenes, the pressure I felt
from the ultrablue gradually shrank.
Simultaneously, the shifting scenes got more similar to the real world that
I knew. A classroom with a blue chalkboard, a rice paddy with a blue
scarecrow, a pachinko parlor in the countryside with a blue neon sign. The
deserted scenes gradually got louder, until I started catching glimpses of
vague figures of people, like they were on the other side of frosted glass. The
signs were getting more legible too.
“Wait, are we getting further from the Otherside?”
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“You think so too, Toriko?”
“Yeah. If this keeps up, we’re going to end up somewhere in the surface
world...”
Toriko and I looked at one another, sudden realization on our faces.
“Sorawo... Isn’t that bad?”
“Wh-What should we do? We’re heading back!”
It would be absolutely terrible if we got tossed out into a place full of
people while we were toting guns. The girl kept on going, paying no mind to
us as we panicked.
“Can’t you control where we emerge?” Toriko asked.
“How?!”
“Can you use your eye to see where we’re going?!”
I looked around with my right eye like she suggested, but the whole area
was wrapped in silver fog. With fog in all directions, I couldn’t tell which
way we should go. Occasionally, the fog thinned, and I could see the other
side. Whenever I did, the girl went that way.
If I could find a place that seemed devoid of people, I might be able to
guide her there. I stared into the fog. As I did, the figures we passed by grew
more distinct. There were even indications of them moving to avoid us, on
turning to look once we passed. As my eyes darted around, I started to notice
familiar places out of the corners of my eyes.
Suzuran Street in Jinbouchou, the park in front of the Alta in Shinjuku, the
front of the Junkudo in Ikebukuro... Was I seeing where my mind was
directing us? Well, these were all no good. There were too many people. I
needed somewhere less populated, somewhere it would be okay for us to
have guns...
“Oh, I know!” I shouted without meaning to, and the little girl looked up
at me reproachfully. Not caring much about appearances now, I pointed in
the direction I wanted to go.
“Let’s go this way! This way!”
The girl gave me a dubious look, but changed course. The fog cleared,
and a familiar scene spread out before our eyes. My relief lasted only a
moment. The girl made no attempt to stop, so I hurriedly said, “Toriko, open
the gate!”
“O-On it!”
The moment after Toriko’s left hand swept away the space in front of us,
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we were abruptly thrown out into the surface world.
We were standing in front of Kozakura’s front door.
Just as the girl stopped, dumbstruck, the door in front of us opened, and
Kozakura came out of the house wearing blue clogs. Her eyes bugged out
when she saw us on her doorstep.
Looking from me, to Toriko, to the filthy girl, Kozakura furrowed her
brow. “Did you kidnap her...?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Uh, then...” Seemingly unsatisfied with my answer, Kozakura looked the
girl up and down again. The girl backed away, obviously wary, and hid
behind us.
“Did you give birth?”
Yeah, right.
6
“What do you think that was, ultimately?”
It was a few days later. We’d chosen to meet up at Mickey D’s, and were
picking away at a box of chicken nuggets while idly talking about what had
happened.
When we got back, the unidentified girl had been given a thorough
washing in Kozakura’s bathroom before being taken to DS Research. We
went along and tried to communicate with her, but it ultimately proved
fruitless. It was decided that DS Research would look after her while they
were checking missing persons reports.
“Think the girl could be Abarato’s daughter?” Toriko asked.
“I’m gonna guess no... I mean, Abarato only ever talked about his wife,
and the wife never said anything about a missing child.”
“Abarato had camped out in the mountain of trash, right?”
“It’s not like I had the chance to thoroughly investigate, but that was the
impression I got.”
“Was it a coincidence she was there, you think?”
“I wonder.”
“If something about the Otherside lured us in...and then Hasshaku-sama
sent us to an even deeper place...maybe they wanted us to do something
there? Did they just want us to find Abarato’s camp?” Toriko asked.
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“If we’re going with the hypothesis that they were acting with some
purpose...maybe they wanted us to find that girl?”
“What for?”
“Dunno...”
I licked the mustard sauce from my fingers and reached for my Coke. As I
put the straw in my mouth and leaned back in my chair, my eyes met with
Toriko’s, which were fixated on me.
“Hm?”
“No, it’s nothing.” Toriko shook her head, leaning back in her chair too as
she let out a sigh. “We never did figure out what happened to Abarato... What
should we tell his wife?”
“Yeah, about that... I don’t think we need to say anything.”
“Huh?”
I pulled a single postcard out of my bag and laid it on the table. It was
addressed to me. No sender.
“Found it in my mailbox when I was heading out today.”
“Can I look?”
When Toriko turned the postcard over she got a dubious look on her face.
“What is this?” she asked.
The back of the postcard had a photo on it. Under the words, “We got
married,” in a cheap-looking font was a print of a photo that looked like it
had been taken with a dirty camera lens. In the front of the picture was
Michiko Abarato, her lipstick an aggressively deep red. Behind her was a
white building at an odd angle. There was a man in the second floor window,
and he was facing the camera, but the image was compressed, making him
look like a figure made out of gray clay. The black trees behind the house
might have actually been steel towers in the distance.
“Can you think of any reason to send a photo like this?” I asked, and
Toriko shook her head silently.
“It makes no sense, right?” I continued. “I thought she was sane at first,
but no, she really was nuts. That probably wasn’t the real Michiko Abarato.”
“Who was it, then? An impostor?”
“Nobody, I guess. An MIB, like the three middle-aged ladies...”
“She looked human, but was part of a phenomenon?”
“Yeah. So we’re better off not contacting her again, and there’s no point
in trying. If you want the postcard, it’s all yours.”
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“I don’t.”
“Yeah, me neither. Let’s junk it.”
We grabbed our trays and stood up. I opened the lid to the garbage, tilted
the tray into it...then, just before it fell in, I changed my mind and rescued the
postcard.
“You’re not gonna throw it out?”
“Nah... On second thought, we should sell it to DS Research.”
Toriko’s eyes widened with exasperation. “You think they’ll buy it?”
“We need to head out there anyway, and it doesn’t hurt to ask.”
“I haven’t been to their building in ages.”
“Yeah, you haven’t. Last time I went would’ve been...was it because
Runa Urumi woke up? No, I guess not. It was to discuss doing construction
on the Farm.”
“Huh? What? Runa Urumi? She got better?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” I asked.
“This is the first I’m hearing of it.”
Waving the creepy postcard around as I went outside, we headed down to
the subway station.
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Works Referenced
This work uses many preexisting true ghost stories and pieces of net lore
as its motifs. In particular, this section will note those which have been used
directly. This will touch on the content of the main book, so if you are
concerned about spoilers, please tread carefully.
■File 16: Hotel Pontianak
The depiction of the thing that Akari and Natsumi encounter, which
Sorawo suggests might have been a Pontianak, is based on the story
“Pontianak.” This was posted to the 2channel message board’s
Occult/Paranormal Phenomena Board in “Honnori to Kowai Hanashi Sure
Sono 94” [Slightly Scary Stories Thread #94], posts 922-951 (6/22/2013).
The storyteller, a person from Singapore, is at a training camp after being
drafted into the military. While on a two-man patrol at night, they encounter a
“female monster,” which causes the teller’s partner to go crazy and commit
suicide. It is especially detailed for a military ghost story, and the fact that it
was written by a foreign teller in Japanese is unusual.
The Pontianak is a supernatural phenomenon spoken widely across
southeast Asia, but primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia. It can be the ghost
of a woman who died while pregnant, or a severed head with dangling
organs. The way the Pontianak acts and looks varies regionally, and in this
work it’s all forgotten in a drunken haze without us ever learning what
exactly it was.
■File 17: Looking at the Past in the
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Diagonal Mirror
The depiction of Sorawo using the mirrors of the interstitial space to tune
her vision comes from “Shashi” [Strabismus] which was posted to the
2channel message board’s Occult/Paranormal Phenomena Board in “Honnori
to Kowai Hanashi Sure Sono 76” [Slightly Scary Stories Thread #76], posts
685-690 (24/8/2011). It is an account where the storyteller, a person who is
experiencing strabismus due to an accident in their youth, looks at a mirror
with their lazy eye and notices their mirror image acting differently from
them.
The woman with long, mantis-like hands appeared in “4F no Joshi Toire”
[The Ladies’ Toilet on the Fourth Floor] which was posted to the 2channel
message board’s Married Women Board in the “[Kyoufu] Tsuyu ga Kite mo
Kowai Hanashi [Shinrei] 11” [[Terror] Scary Stories Even in the Rainy
Season [Ghost] 11] thread, posts 932 and 934 (7/8/2006). She appears in the
mirror of the fourth floor women’s restroom of an amusement complex near a
train station. When the staff approach her because of the bizarre foot-
dragging way she walks, she tries to hug them.
Incidentally, while I was in the middle of writing File 17, I reread one of
Takeshobo Horror Bunko’s true ghost stories collections and ran into a story
about a woman who appeared in the mirror at a shopping mall, or a
department store, or some sort of commercial establishment. I hadn’t paid
attention when reading it before, but this time I saw several points it shared in
common with “4F no Joshi Toire.” I meant to include it in this Works
Referenced list, but had completely forgotten which volume it was in a few
days later. If anyone knows and can tell me, it would be appreciated. I don’t
think it was a recent book, but I’m not sure. It may have all been a dream.
■File 18: Alone Together in a Mayoiga
As touched on in the main text, “Mayoiga” (or “Mayohiga”) is a widely
known story from Kunio Yanagita’s Tono Monogatari (Legends of Tono). It
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is a folktale that was passed down from the Tohoku Region to the Kanto
Region and can easily be found in books about folklore. Variations of it are
rare online, but one example would be “Mayohiga” [Lost House] which was
posted to the 2channel message board’s Occult/Paranormal Phenomena
Board in the “^^ Yama ni Matsuwaru Kowai Fushigi na Hanashi Part 44^^”
[Scary/Strange Stories Involving the Mountains Part 44], post 72 (11/6/2009).
The building which the reporter’s female friend’s grandmother encountered
was a “little castle that looked like you might find it in Germany or
Lichtenstein,” and what drifted down the river was not a bowl, but a beautiful
comb. The depiction in this work doesn’t take any specific story as its motif,
but I incorporated the general feeling of it by using a building that was a
compromise between Western and Japanese designs.
■File 19: Hasshaku-sama Revival
In regards to Hasshaku-sama, I would like to refer you to the reference
section for File 2 in the first volume.
The story that Sorawo touches on in this file—where, when they step out
of the elevator, the sky is bright red—is “Ikai e no Tobira” [The Door to
Another World] which was already mentioned in the explanation for File 1.
However, another similar story, “Erebeta no Soto” [Outside the Elevator] was
posted to the 2channel message board’s Occult/Paranormal Phenomena
Board in “Fukakai na Taiken, Nazo no Hanashi ~enigma~ Part 59”
[Incomprehensible Experiences, Mysterious Stories ~enigma~ Part 59], posts
553 and 554 (13/1/2010). This is another experiential report of someone
stepping out of an elevator to find that the sky is bright red even though it
should still be afternoon. That the town below is dark and silent is another
point the stories share in common.
“Ojii-san to Basu” [The Old Man and the Bus], which was posted in
“Fukakai na Taiken, Nazo no Hanashi ~enigma~ Part 48” [Incomprehensible
Experiences, Mysterious Stories ~enigma~ Part 59], posts 467-467
(24/11/2008), is an account of meeting an old man on the bus to Kichijoji,
and being sent to an empty town lit with bright red light. We could also say
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this is a variation of ”Jikkuu no Ossan” [The Time-space Man].
There are a number of such accounts of wandering into impossible towns
lit by the setting sun from time to time, but the specific motif for this work is
“Mayooikonda Machi no Koto” [About the Town I Wandered Into] contained
in Ayakashi Tsuushin Kyuuya de Okuru Kowai Hanashi [Ayakashi News —
Scary Stories on the Ninth Night] (Osako Junichi, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha,
1991). The bizarre scene the author claims to have encountered as a child of
“five-story wooden houses connected by skywalks” left a strong impression
on me from the first time I read it. It is one of the original sources of
Otherside Picnic.
Ayakashi Tsuushin, which was published in 1991, shares a number of
stories with Shinmimibukuro Anata no Kowai Hanashi [Shinmimibukuro —
Your Scary Stories] (Hirokatsu Kihara/Ichirou Nakayama, Fusosha
Publishing, 1990) which was composed of interviews with people who
experienced supernatural events and gave rise to a boom in “true ghost
stories.” It is an important entry in the history of the genre. The first edition is
difficult to obtain now, but it was republished in 2002 by Haruki Horror
Bunko under the title Akayashi Stuushin “Kai” [Ayakashi News “Strange”].
This edition is likewise out of print, but may be somewhat easier to locate.
Incidentally, the other long-running series from Keibunsha ”Chou”
Kowai Hanashi [“Super” Scary Stories] also began publication in 1991. (If
we look for a hit before this, some might suggest the writings of Junji
Inagawa from the ’80s, but if you ask me, those are better interpreted as
examples of ghost stories as literature.) If we look back at the way the trend
of true ghost stories has continued uninterrupted for decades since then, it’s
actually quite surprising. It means that there are an incredible number of
people in our world (how many tens of thousands?) who have had frightening
or mysterious experiences. And those are only the ones who committed them
to text. There are already hundreds (maybe a thousand?) of such books piled
up, and the number keeps growing. Is that not a somewhat unsettling fact?
I know I always say this, but I would like to give my thanks to the people
who reported the many other true ghost stories and net lore from which I
have taken direct or indirect influence.
Thank you for your continued enjoyment and for being frightened. I hope
this book can repay my gratitude in some small way.
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Copyright
Otherside Picnic: Volume 5
by Iori Miyazawa
Illustrations by shirakaba
Translated by Sean McCann
Edited by Krys Loh
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is
coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 Iori Miyazawa
All rights reserved.
First published in Japan in 2020 by Hayakawa Publishing Corporation
The book is published by arrangement with Hayakawa Publishing
Corporation
English translation © 2021 J-Novel Club LLC
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976,
the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book
without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the
author’s intellectual property.
J-Novel Club LLC
j-novel.club
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not
owned by the publisher.
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Ebook edition 1.0: August 2021
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