“Mister, did you come back?”
“Yeah.” The sun was already beginning to set.
“My bike was gone.”
“Your bike, big brother?”
“Yeah. Do any of you know anything about it?” They all shook their heads. Even if they did know, I doubted they’d tell me the truth.
Knowing it was probably useless, I asked anyway, “Is there a phone around here? A public phone, or a regular landline in one of the houses?”
“Nope.” Just as I thought. If there had been one, I would have called the police for help.
“Could you lend me a spot under the eaves tonight? I need a place to stay. I’ll leave first thing tomorrow morning. I won’t be a nuisance.” The children exchanged glances. The boy who seemed to be the oldest spoke up.
“Stay at the shrine.”
“Is that alright?”
“As long as you don’t cause any trouble. If you go inside, you’ll be cursed. Absolutely do not go in. Don’t even peek inside. You’ll go blind. There are mosquitoes, but if you stay on the veranda under the eaves, you won’t get wet from the night dew.”
“I see.”
“Mister, you must be hungry. We have some steamed sweet potatoes.” I wasn’t particularly hungry, but thinking about crossing the mountain tomorrow, I figured I should eat whatever food I could get.
“Thank you. I’ll take them. I’ll pay you.”
The children laughed. “We don’t need any money.” A girl handed me a sweet potato wrapped in bamboo sheath and some tea in a bamboo tube.
I climbed the stone steps, and found a tiny shrine building sitting snugly within a precinct overgrown with ferns and kuma-zasa bamboo grass. I generously fished out a 1,000-yen bill and shoved it through a gap in the lattice of the offering box. In that fleeting moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of something like a humanoid idol inside, but I forced myself to pretend I hadn’t seen it. Closing my eyes, I prayed for my safety.
“Please allow me to borrow the shelter under your eaves for the night,” I entreated, and then lay down on the veranda.
The tea the girl had given me turned out to be chameleon plant (dokudami) tea. After forcing the sweet potato down my throat with the tea to fill my stomach, an intense, overwhelming drowsiness suddenly struck me, and I fell into a deep sleep.