Welcome to the Alien Village

Stories

## Illustrations

## Part One: Flesh-Eating N-ko and the Vampire

Scans: uiop031

Translator: Yunyingyi

The first time I saw a human corpse was in the summer I turned sixteen.

Summer sunlight scorched the back of my neck. After the hot wind passed over the wheat field, the ears of grain rustled. The cicadas' chorus had vanished completely.

I gripped the sickle in my hand and looked down at the body.

The man wore a farmers' cooperative jacket. On his head was a yellow cap that must have been a gift from a pesticide dealer, printed with the product name "BCB13." His face was pale and deeply wrinkled, with blackish spots rising all over it. There was not a trace of moisture in his skin, and his eye sockets had sunk far back. His mouth hung slightly open, and a tongue gone purple stuck out as if begging for water.

A drop of sweat slid from my forehead to my cheek, then fell onto the corpse's palm and was absorbed.

None of it felt real.

All at once, a dream I had had in kindergarten rose in my mind.

I was walking down a street when I bumped into an adult. I apologized and looked up. Caterpillars hung on that adult's face, but there was no face. Hands, head, body—everything was covered in caterpillars. I screamed and ran. When I came back to myself, every adult around me was covered in caterpillars, their movements ruled by them. The caterpillar-people shuffled toward me like zombies. The caterpillar-people tried to grab me. Caterpillars crawled from their hands onto my body. In the end I became a caterpillar-person too, and began to search…

## Part Two: The Folk Dance and the Headless Corpse

I stared, stunned, at the monthly exam rankings posted on the bulletin board.

After school, the corridor outside the faculty office was packed with students. Beside me, a girl with a cute three-strand braid was pointing at the ranking sheet and hopping with joy. Next to her, a boy in glasses threw his head back and yelled. He had fallen out of the top ten in the grade, and he looked as if he deeply regretted it. 【Tōko-senpai: Konoha, look!】

Someone tapped my shoulder. I turned and found it was my homeroom teacher, Sangen Nanae, watching me with the pitiful eyes of a twenty-nine-year-old who was still single. 【Shizuka-sensei: I want to be left alone.】

"Kamuro, you don't have to take it so hard. It's only the summer of your first year! Try a little harder and you'll catch up with everyone in no time. After all, the blood of the Kamuro family runs in you. Still, your math is a bit too weak. Ordinary differential equations—do they feel difficult?"

"Difficult, you say? What even are ordinary differential equations? I never heard of them in class. No—whatever else, back in Tokyo I had already studied up to university-entrance-exam level."

And among all two hundred and twenty first-years, my rank was tenth from the bottom.

The corner of Ms. Sangen's mouth twitched as she spoke.

"In this village, what is taught in class is not quite on the same level as outside. Everyone has a very strong thirst for knowledge, so the real studying is done alone at home…"

## Part Three: The Tongue-Cut Sparrow and Time Standing Still

【The Tongue-Cut Sparrow: from a Japanese folktale. The story also appears in Dazai Osamu's retelling in Otogizōshi; anyone interested can look it up. In brief: a bad-tempered old woman is doing laundry when a sparrow kept by the neighbors flies over and eats the starch she uses for washing. In a rage she cuts out the sparrow's tongue and drives it off. The old man and old woman next door are heartbroken and set out to find the sparrow. They eventually reach its home and are warmly received by the sparrows. As a small gift, the sparrow offers them two wicker baskets of different sizes. The unselfish old couple take the smaller basket and go home, and gold, silver, and treasure appear inside it. The kind old man and old woman grow rich and live happily ever after. Jealous of their good fortune, the bad-tempered old woman also visits the sparrow's house and brings back a large basket. Too impatient to wait until she is home, she opens it halfway along the road. When she lifts the lid, a swarm of demons bursts out and frightens her so badly that she collapses, her soul nearly scared from her body.】

"So boring," Miss Yōko said, sprawled across the piled case files.

On the floor of the detective club's activity room, case files handed down through the generations were stacked nearly a meter high with no gap between them. In front, you could not even see the floor. The only place without files was a space in the center of the room no bigger than four tatami mats. In the middle of that tatami area, I…

## Part Four: Heart Shapes and Equal Human Beings

When I met Kurihara Rin, she was a breath away from dying.

It was a day of high wind. The trees in the school garden creaked in pain, and the clouds swirled as if a typhoon were coming. I leaned on my spade and caught my breath. I was in one corner of the campus garden, tilling the vegetable plot that belonged to the detective club. It was not the same field as the one where the blood-sucking wheat murder had happened last time. This was a small experimental plot near the school building.

Beside me, Miss Yōko was sweating at the forehead and yanking weeds with everything she had. She worked as nimbly as a boxer throwing jabs.

She glanced this way.

"Member Kamuro. Don't stop, don't stop. If we don't till in the daylight and get the seeds in, we'll miss the timely rain."

"Timely rain?"

Miss Yōko pointed at the sky. The swirl of cloud was slowly widening.

"That. In this village, once a month, rain falls that is full of nutrients. Miss it, and you have to wait another month. If that happens, we won't make the next radish festival. Lately I've sacrificed the crops I was going to exhibit, all for you. This time we have to win, so hurry up and turn the soil."

"The radish festival—wasn't that held at the school festival before summer break? Is there another one?" I swung the spade. The blade bit hard into the rich soil.

"That one, how should I put it. Outside, a school festival…"

## Part Five: The Vegetable and Massacre Cooking

Ennu's fist slammed into the wall. 【Original: エンヌ. The only thing I could find was リセエンヌ (French lycéenne), a high-school girl or vocational-school girl, but here it should be a man's name.】

With the heavy sound, bone cracked. Fire surged through his palm. It was as if a lighter had been set inside the flesh and was burning there. But he had not left so much as a dent in the wall. This dungeon was terrifyingly solid. He and five companions had been imprisoned here for five days. He had tried every means of escape and made no progress at all.

The cell was about five meters each way. Walls, ceiling, and floor were all poured from thick concrete. In front of the entrance, iron bars about three centimeters thick were set in a crisscross at ten-centimeter intervals. Being underground, the damp was heavy, and there was a smell of mold. Now and then a drop of water fell from the ceiling.

Even on the first day, when all seven of them were still there, he had not felt despair like this in the terribly narrow cell. Now only he remained, and his daughter Urushi. 【Original: ウルシ, which can be written 漆, lacquer.】

"Those people" came every day at half past one in the morning. And they came as a group of four. Two set up hunting rifles outside the barred window, and the other two entered the cell with stun batons. Then they shocked the others and dragged them away. The moment anyone showed a sign of resisting, the two outside would…

## Afterword

Shinomura is based on a story I once heard from my father. In the mountains of Kaga City, Ishikawa Prefecture, the hometown where I was born, there remains a legend of fugitives from the Taira clan. In the early Shōwa period, in the river that ran through the innermost village, things like chopsticks were said to have come floating down from upstream. Farther in than that innermost village, there was a village no one had ever found. After they organized an expedition and went upstream, they discovered houses already rotten through. But there was no sign of any inhabitants….

For a very long time, I had actually forgotten this story.

What brought it back was the release of The Village of Eight Graves. 【The Village of Eight Graves: a story in Seishi Yokomizo's Kindaichi case collection.】

I like movies a great deal, but I almost never watch Japanese films, toward which I have always been prejudiced. That is because, in middle school, I went with my parents to see The Castle of Sand, and came away with the experience of deciding in the first thirty minutes whether to give up on a film. My parents had both said, "This is the most interesting movie in Japan," so I was looking forward to it a great deal. But no matter how long I waited, no gunfight ever broke out. There was only endless, boring detective work….

After that I had given up on Japanese films entirely, but in a manga I happened to read there was a scene with a line like "This is retribution." So I found myself wanting to try The Village of Eight Graves, and it turned out to be remarkably interesting….