Found Footage

Chapter 1

Chapter 1Showa 57 / Koenji, Tokyo

“They say there’s a tape out there, and if you listen to it, you go mad. They say that someone recorded it from a radio station back in the Taisho period, that’s what they say, but no one’s ever been able to work out what kind of a station would broadcast something like that!”

She was a slender girl, long dark hair, the bluntest of fringes, her pallor blue as she stood before the proffered microphone within the screen of the television, an occasional sideways glance at her friends, who stood a short distance behind her, eager to be involved, yet remarkably more cautious.

“Have I heard it?” she asked, eyes widening, her hand on her chest, fingers splayed. Hastily, she shook her head. “No, I haven’t heard it.”

She bit her lip. Indecision, uncertainty perhaps, that feeling that wells up in all of us when we don’t know whether we should proceed, when we don’t know whether it is prudent to continue. Overcoming this hesitation, however, she did continue.

“There was a girl though, my friend’s friend, I think she went to school in Shimokitazawa maybe, and she heard it, and apparently, well—”

She stopped, looked away as if suddenly bashful, coy regarding the details she wished to relate, perhaps aware that what she spoke of was little more than hearsay and conjecture, a story about a story.

“No one has heard from her,” she continued, “at least, that’s what I was told.”

From behind the microphone, the reporter seemed to ask a question, and there was a moment of further hesitation on the girl’s face. Again, she shook her head.

“No, I definitely haven’t heard it myself.”

Another pause, another question, and this time her eyes seemed to pop open with incredulity, her face taking on the expression of someone who has just been asked something so absurd, so incredulous, that she cannot possibly think how to phrase an appropriate response.

“Would I like to hear it? No, of course not.”

In that brief instant, she was confrontational, all the energy of youth driven into what amounted to a forceful defense of everything important to her, as if she was under attack, as if her very being was in real danger.

“No, I’d never listen to anything like that, that would be crazy,” she said, redoubling on her rejection of such an idea. It seemed also as if a note of anger entered her voice, as if now that she had been called upon to reject the idea behind that of which she spoke, she must also defend herself not only against an idea, but those who perpetuated such a concept. “Why would anyone broadcast that kind of thing anyway? What a horrible thing to do.”

The anger, once burning so bright, seemed to fade, and the reporter asked something, and she just shook her head. Yet she seemed colder, shivering in her heavy coat and her red muffler, and she seemed younger, like a child trying to grasp a concept far bigger than life had truly prepared her for.

“What do I listen to? Music. Why would I want to listen to someone talking on the radio?” She stopped, and a strange expression filled her face, something haunted, something scared. “But even I had the choice, even if my life depended on it, I’d never listen to something like that tape. Never, never. Not in a million years.”

The camera held her gaze for a moment, its single eye fixated on her expression, and then abruptly, the screen darkened, her image dispelled as Ishikawa Miki switched the dial on the set, yawned, and stretched, the broom still in her hand, the solemn, careful after hours’ silence of her family’s restaurant around her.