Blossoming Fissure | Tanjirou Kamado

33. Aoi, the side character

There's a story that goes that a ghost has taken root in the Ogimoto House.

Aoi is a little bit too eccentric to believe it.

She's been living in the house for a while now, taking care of laundry or doing lunch or whatever the madam tells her to do. She's never been picky or disobedient and she never will be, so she works hard at her new job just like she would have in the Butterfly Estate and stays out of trouble. This way, she hopes she can catch ear of where Uzui's wife is, if not because they're working together, but because the poor woman is probably in trouble.

She catches ear of the Mokumokuren instead.

It's not a very popular yokai, by any means, and most stories that have the Mokumokuren in them are ridiculous, poor attempts to scare children, maybe, so they don't go into abandoned houses where the chances of getting killed by some falling beam or a broken shoji door were pretty high.

The Mokumokuren, specifically, was one of the many yokais in Japan's folklore that took a liking to living on torn tatami floors or shoji doors. If someone slept in a house inhabited by a Mokumokuren, their eyes would be plucked out and nowhere to be seen the next day. It was an unfortunate fate, as a poor attempt at a ghost story as it was.

That's the popular story anyways, but in the Ogimoto House it goes beyond that.

Many customers stopped coming to the House because they swear they've heard the Mokumokuren on the walls. The rumors quickly spread around the entire district, bringing with the Ogimoto name cold sweats and shaky attempts to avoid the other's eye. It could be said that the House had been on a losing streak ever since.

Of course, Aoi thought at first, this has to be a rival's attempt to ruin the House's reputation. It might be collective hysteria, she reasoned, until she heard the girls from the house swear having heard the Mokumokuren as well.

"I was alone in the laundry room when I heard these sharp, high-pitched sounds coming from the walls." Both of them were taking care of the dishes in silence until she started talking. "It was so scary! I ran out of the room as fast as I could, but I was so close to having my eyes taken away!"

She tells this to Aoi in complete confidence despite the fact that they didn't even know each other's names. So it was natural that Aoi'd be wary at first.

"Did you see it? What did it look like?" She didn't point out that the Mokumokuren's eyes showed up on the walls if it started living there, or that it only took the eyes of people who slept where it inhabited.

"I couldn't look, I don't think my heart could have handled it"

And that was about it.

A bunch of other girls swore the same too, usually with the same structure as the first one. They'd be alone in some room, late at night, when they heard some creature on the walls or the floors. Not a single one could say she had seen it, though.

"It was too dark!"

"How can you expect me to turn around to look at that ugly creature while I run for my life!?"

"I didn't want to encounter it! So scary!"

With this information, it was hard to rely on such a rumour expecting it to be some demon, or to be anything at all, especially because there was a fervent group of girls who denied the existence of the creature at all costs.

"That's a dirty lie the oiran Warabihime came up with to make us lose clients! Don't go around spreading it to the newbies too!"

"I've been working here for a long time and I've never heard anything on the walls."