Chapter 13 Hearsay

What a stroke of luck — he'd barely stepped out and already found a new source of information. Ma En's mood lifted.

Asuka had told him the rumors about Room 4 on the thirteenth floor were quite well-known around here, and with the rumored date approaching, anyone looking for gossip just had to visit the local public spaces. She'd recommended the fountain plaza in the commercial district. The area had clubs of all kinds — catering to the elderly, to middle-aged crowds, to married women. New mothers and expectant ones gathered there regularly too. And beyond that, the commercial district was packed with shops, from major brands to small independent labels.

Regulars filed out of Ichiraku as new customers streamed in — the place rarely had a quiet moment. Ma En finished his noodles and left, having arranged to come back tomorrow. Japanese-style ramen wasn't quite to his taste, but if he was going to live here, he'd have to get used to it. No point complaining about something so small. He headed in the direction Asuka had pointed.

About twenty minutes of walking through several more streets, and the commercial atmosphere thickened. Pedestrian chatter, vehicle noise, music bleeding from open-front shops — all of it mashed together into a lively clamor. Ma En strolled along with his black umbrella, pausing here and there. His destination was the fountain plaza, but everything about this unfamiliar country still felt fresh enough that he saw no reason to rush.

Most people around him walked fast. Someone as leisurely as Ma En stood out. In this district, he noticed, fewer people stared at his oversized umbrella — everyone radiated a too-busy-for-strangers urgency. But not all of them were in a hurry. Roadside benches and little entertainment corners tucked into buildings were just as packed, not an empty seat in sight. Plenty of people rode bicycles, and most of the bikes weren't any trendier than the ones back home — women's frames with front baskets, ridden by men and women alike.

The people, the buildings, the facilities, the tools — all of it gave Ma En a feeling that was both familiar and foreign. Familiar because China had equivalents for nearly everything. Foreign because the attitudes were different — how people used these things, how they related to them. He felt the disorientation of being in another country, but also a pull, as though the local atmosphere were drawing him in. Walking, watching, absorbing — he began to think he could settle into life here quickly enough.

As for whether the atmosphere here was good — Ma En thought it was, actually. Quite nice.

He ducked into shops along the way, comparing them to what he knew from home. He wasn't planning to buy anything, just looking, exchanging a few words with shopkeepers. But when they learned it was his first time in Japan, several insisted on giving him small gifts — a trinket here, a snack there — which made him feel guilty about not buying something in return. He wondered: was their warmth genuine kindness, or sharp business sense? Probably both. Either way, he ended up with several shopping bags of things he wasn't sure he'd ever use.

Carrying those bags and his black umbrella, he finally reached the fountain plaza Asuka had described. Piano music drifted from the corner of a nearby shop. He followed the sound and saw a small crowd standing near a well-worn street piano — its finish faded, its body plastered with colorful stickers and flyers — though the instrument was perfectly in tune. Someone was maintaining it.

The first pianist was a young man with stiff fingers. Nobody complained. He finished and stepped away, and a girl with long hair immediately took his place — a college student, judging by her look. Her skill was a different thing entirely. From the first passage, the gap was enormous, obvious even to someone who'd never listened to piano music in their life. People applauded after one section. Ma En didn't recognize the piece. Someone near him said it was the theme from XX Love Story.

Ma En asked what XX Love Story was, and the person — along with their companions — stared at him like he'd arrived from another planet. As though the question itself was an offense against common sense. They answered anyway: it was a hit TV drama adapted from a manga, with an anime already in production. In Japan, not knowing XX Love Story was roughly equivalent to having just landed from outer space.

Ma En hadn't come from outer space, just from another country. Once he explained this, their curiosity flared — the more outgoing ones immediately peppered him with questions about China. All mundane stuff, everyday life. Ma En chatted briefly, then excused himself.

He circled the fountain plaza once. Just as Asuka had said, there were plenty of attractive women — married and unmarried — along with older folks and young men, though everyone had mostly sorted into clusters. Women with women, men with men; mixed groups were the exception. The fountain suddenly erupted in a tall spray, scattering water over the people sitting near the pool's edge, and a burst of laughter momentarily drowned everything else out.

What a prosperous, peaceful place.

Ma En thought this as he sat down on an empty spot by the pool. People surrounded him on all sides, but not one mentioned the apartment ghost story. Somewhat different from what Asuka had suggested, or perhaps he'd misunderstood her. Still, he didn't feel like the time was wasted. Listening, absorbing — what he was gaining here went beyond information.

Before long, a woman in her sixties or seventies settled onto the bench beside him. Then a man of similar age, leaning on a cane, sat down on his other side. The two sandwiched Ma En between them. He assumed they were strangers, but to his surprise, they started chatting across him like old acquaintances. Caught in the middle, Ma En felt awkward. When he made to stand, both of them waved him down: "It's fine, it's fine, you sit right there." He had no idea how to respond to that.

This was a first for him. Before he could invent an excuse to leave, the grandmother asked with easy familiarity: "Young man, what do you do for work?"

"...I'm planning to do administrative work at a school." Ma En paused, then settled back down and answered warmly.

"Oh, fresh out of school and job hunting?" the grandfather asked.

"No — I arrived in Japan just yesterday. First time abroad. I was doing administrative work at a post office back in China."

"Ah, a foreigner then." The grandmother looked him up and down properly before speaking. "Are you planning to work as a foreign language instructor?"

"I'm not sure yet. It depends on the interview."

"Teaching Chinese would be good. Chinese is very in demand these days," the grandfather cut in. "My grandson's barely five or six and his parents are already making him study Chinese — the boy can't even speak proper Japanese yet." He sounded deeply aggrieved.

"Knowing Chinese makes it easier to find good work, easier to travel abroad," the grandmother mused. "If I weren't so old, I'd have learned it ages ago."

"What do you mean? You know Chinese. Back in our day, who didn't know a phrase or two?" The grandfather said this and immediately rattled off several sentences in Chinese. Ma En blinked — the man's pronunciation was more natural than his own.

The two fell into bickering. No real heat to it, but Ma En, caught between them, couldn't find a gap to speak. He just sat and listened.

"Say, young man — are you married?" the grandmother asked, cutting through her own argument without preamble.

"Ah — no," Ma En said quickly.

"No girlfriend either?"

"No."

"Not looking for one? Let me introduce you to my youngest daughter. Only twenty-five, very pretty." She delivered this with the unmistakable cadence of a sales pitch.

"Ha ha." Ma En could only smile.

"It's true — Yoshiko is one stubborn woman. But her youngest daughter didn't inherit a shred of it. Very agreeable. Maybe too gentle, though — the kind people walk all over." The grandfather glanced sideways. "Must be because she was born when Yoshiko was already up there in years. You really were something, Yoshiko, wanting another child at that age."

So they did know each other. Ma En finally had his confirmation.

"I wanted one. What would an old man like you know? Two boys and two girls — that's perfection." The grandmother fired back instantly.

"Ha ha." Ma En still could only smile. He couldn't help thinking: did Japan also have elderly people who grabbed strangers off the street to play matchmaker?

The grandmother went on at great length about her daughter's virtues. Gradually, Ma En realized this wasn't really matchmaking — it was bragging. Pure and simple. Between the two of them, sandwiching Ma En in their crossfire, they managed to convey that the grandmother's youngest daughter was gentle and considerate, generous by nature, beautiful, with a lovely figure — yet her actual face, her exact age, her occupation, any meaningful detail at all? Not a word.

Ma En sat with them by the fountain for half an hour before finding a gap to steer the conversation toward the ghost story of Room 4 on the thirteenth floor. To his surprise, both of them knew about it. Asuka had mentioned that people in the area's public spaces would be informed — but the reality was different from what Ma En had pictured. Even so, these two strangers, with their easy familiarity and their casual warmth, left him with a peculiar feeling.

In his twenty-four years of life, he'd never encountered anything truly bizarre. But after he'd obtained the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records, his life had tripped some invisible switch. One thing after another kept happening. Coincidence after coincidence — and yet the feeling persisted that some thread was pulling at all of it. Why else would he arrive in Japan and immediately move into a room with a ghost story? Why would he meet informed locals the very next morning? As if that thread were tugging him, at a quickening pace, into a life utterly unlike his old one.

Then again — to say his life had already become entirely different would be an overstatement. He'd been in this country barely a day. A country that sounded familiar but turned out to be profoundly foreign. Even if the ghost story was casting a strange new tint over everything, the truth was that none of the bizarreness had any real evidence. The deaths might be coincidence. Meeting people who knew about it might simply mean the story had been circulating long enough. Everything hinted that something extraordinary was about to happen — but nothing actually had.

Ma En couldn't pin down how much of what he was feeling came from the unease and excitement of a foreign country, how much from the thrill of starting a new life, and how much genuinely belonged to the encounters themselves.

"How unexpected," he said. "Someone mentioned this rumor to me before, and now I keep running into people who know about it."

"Nothing unexpected about that." The grandmother's tone rose slightly, and she looked to the grandfather for support. "Young people might not remember much about that room, but for us old-timers, it's a ghost story right on our doorstep. I remember when the first person died — it made the news. But back then, everyone just thought it was a regular murder, right?"

"Murder? That's not how I remember it." The grandfather shook his head. "Accidental death, I thought. It only made the papers because it was that high-end apartment. Gossip column stuff." He paused. "But then more people died, one after another. Nobody connected the dots at first. Then some report — I don't remember which one — laid out all the coincidences, and suddenly people realized these weren't normal deaths."

"That's right, that's right — nobody paid attention at first. By the time they did, several were already dead." The grandmother clicked her tongue. "When deaths are that coincidental, it puts you on edge."

"Young man, you really should move out sooner rather than later," she said, her tone shifting to something earnest. "Maybe you don't believe in it. Maybe you're not afraid. But there's no sense tempting fate — real or not, keeping your distance is the smart thing to do."

"I understand, grandmother." Ma En smiled. "But I have a friend who writes about ghost stories, and he's asked me to gather material. If you know anything more, I'd be grateful to hear it."

"A ghost story writer?" The grandmother's expression turned complicated. She went quiet for a moment, as if something had surfaced in her memory, then looked at the grandfather while addressing Ma En: "Having a friend like that is its own kind of misfortune."

Ma En wasn't sure what to say to that. The "writer friend" was Asuka, of course, and Asuka wasn't really a writer — aside from this girl he'd just met, he genuinely had no friends with any interest in ghost stories.

"Everyone who died, died on August twenty-fourth." The grandfather spoke flatly, no particular emotion behind it. "The first body sat in the room for a month. Stank before anyone found it. The later ones were discovered in two or three days — people in the building were on alert by then. They knew that room was bad luck, so they kept an eye on it." He went on: "The room got renovated after each death, kept getting upgraded without anyone really planning it. Look at that building — still looks brand new, and it's only gotten more upscale. Whoever runs it has a sharp head for business. Turns corpses into capital. The owner must be rolling in money. I hear they've been abroad traveling for over half a year."

Most of this was already in Kamishima Kousuke's files, and in far greater detail — complete with newspaper clippings from each death and photographic records of the room's condition after every renovation. Kamishima had apparently pulled strings with contacts in the police and the press, digging up material that had been buried in archives. His reach was greater than Ma En had initially guessed. That efficiency, that foresight — it almost made Ma En feel as though he'd been sent to this country specifically to deal with this.

Back to that same thought: his life was taking on a strange new color.

But Ma En wanted more. Specifics or rumors, it didn't matter — anything that wasn't already in the files. Then the grandmother mentioned: "I've heard — mind you, it's just what I've heard — that the people who died would visit Sanchoumoku Park before they died. Going to a park is perfectly normal, of course, but the timing always seemed a bit too neat."

Ma En leaned forward. "How so?"

"At first they said the person would go the day before dying. Then the rumor shifted — that they'd go frequently, throughout the entire month before." The grandmother thought back. "Ghost stories always drag in cemeteries and strange behavior. I don't know whether those people normally visited that park, but the park was built on a demolished cemetery. So people started saying — maybe it's retribution."

"Ah — retribution. Yes, I remember now." The grandfather seemed to unlock a new memory. "Supposedly, when the bodies were found, the victims' hair had been tied up with grass from that park, braided into rope." He paused. "One of the victims was bald. So the grass rope was just wrapped around his neck."

"So one of the victims was strangled?" Ma En asked, already knowing the answer.

"All of them were strangled. But only the bald one was strangled by the grass rope."

The grandmother confirmed the grandfather's account. It matched what Ma En already had — every victim had died of asphyxiation, autopsy results consistent with strangulation. But the grass rope was new. None of the materials mentioned it. More than that — none of the materials identified a murder weapon at all. The cases hadn't been classified as murders.

"Strange indeed," Ma En said, nodding.

"There's more that's strange, but I can't pull it all up at once — memory's no good when you're old." The grandmother sighed, then added: "My youngest daughter might know more. Want me to arrange a meeting?" She caught herself. "Actually — wait until you've moved out of that room first."