Tokyo: Proving one's position from behind the scenes

Domyouji's family lives in a danchi-style house on the edge of Nerima Ward.

When Yuto Huzhang arrived there, the sky was already beginning to darken in the west.

He held the note Abe had written to him, which had Domyouji's address on it. The handwriting was messy, but the house number was clearly written.

Danchi-ro (group housing) are apartment buildings constructed during the Showa era, representing the glory of the middle class at that time. With Japan's "lost two decades," this type of architecture and the people it represents have taken on a different meaning in certain films and television works.

The Domyouji family's apartment building has a gray-white exterior wall, and the texture of the concrete takes on a dim, warm yellow hue under the setting sun. Several quilts and shirts are hanging on the railings, billowing in the wind.

Yuto Itadori found the building on the note, walked to the door of the room marked on the note, and stopped.

A dark brown steel security door with a nameplate hanging above the door frame and a small sticker on it.

The sticker features an open eye, with another eye nested within its pupil, layer upon layer, extending to the edge of the sticker.

Yuto Itadori knocked on the door, but no one answered. He knocked again, this time with more force, his knuckles striking the steel plate with a dull thud, but still no one answered.

He stood at the door for a while, and the wind in the corridor blew through the railings. He knocked a third time.

It seemed that because of his knocking, the sound of a door opening came from the other end of the corridor.

Yuuto Itadori turned his head and saw that the door to the next room was open a crack, revealing the face of a middle-aged woman with her hair pinned up behind her head and a few strands of gray hair falling out from behind her ears.

Her eyes peered at him through the crack in the door, a wary look in her gaze.

"Um, hello, I'm Domyouji's classmate." Itadori Yuuto walked over and bowed slightly. "She hasn't been to school for almost a month, and our school is a little worried, so we asked me to come and check on her."

The middle-aged woman looked at him for a while, then opened the door a crack. She was wearing a dark gray loungewear, holding a rag in her hand, her fingers still wet.

"The Domyouji family's daughter." Her voice was very low, as if she were saying something she didn't want others to hear. "I haven't seen anyone from their family much lately. I used to run into her mother in the hallway every morning and we would greet each other, but lately I haven't seen even her mother much."

"Do you know what happened to their family?"

The middle-aged woman tightened her grip on the rag for a moment, her gaze passing over Yuuto Itadori, glancing at the security door of Domyouji's house at the end of the corridor, before returning to her own.

"It's hard to say," she said.

Yuto Itadori paused for a moment, recalling a word he had mentioned during his conversation with the members of the Paranormal Society, and tentatively asked a question about it.

"Excuse me, do you know what religion they follow?"

The middle-aged woman pursed her lips into a thin line, her fingers gripping the rag, and remained silent for a while.

"I have converted to the Truth Church," she said.

When she uttered those four words, her voice was even lower than before, so low that Itadori Yuuto had to lean forward slightly to hear her. After she finished speaking, she glanced at the security door at the end of the corridor, then took half a step back, as if to close the door.

"I don't know anything," she said. "I just live next door."

The door closed, and the latch slid into the latch with a soft click.

Yuto Itadori stood in the corridor, looking at the closed door. He turned around, glanced at the security door with stickers on it, then put his hands in his pockets and walked out of the building.

The next day after school, in the paranormal club's activity room.

A few people were gathered around the folding table, each with a drink or snack in hand, but the atmosphere was much quieter than usual. The tarot deck on the table was still open, but no one touched it. The corner of the map of the haunted location on the wall was sticking up from the thumbtack, swaying gently in the breeze blowing in from the window.

"A cult," Abe said slowly. "No wonder her family used their religious beliefs to help her get leave from school."

"But Domyouji-senpai isn't the kind of person who would believe in that kind of thing," said the second-year girl, still clutching her phone, the screen showing Domyouji Chinatsu's social media account, which hadn't been updated in two weeks.

"So it wasn't her who joined," another member said. "It was her family who joined; she got dragged into it."

The activity room fell silent. The word "cult" is not an unfamiliar topic in Japan; most of those present had heard some news about it.

A religious group carried out a terrorist attack in a subway station, and a former prime minister with ties to the group was assassinated.

The name "Converted to Truth Church" has appeared several times in television news reports, all about people being dispersed after handing out flyers in shopping malls and train stations.

"What should we do?" a second-grade girl asked.

"What can we do, call the police?" one member said. "What reason could we use? An adult being taken to a religious church by family members? Unless we can prove that Domyouji-senpai was not there willingly."

"Looking for a teacher?"

"What can the teacher do? Her family helped her get leave on the grounds of religious belief. The procedures were legal, so the school can't do anything about it."

The air in the activity room grew increasingly stuffy. Yuto Itadori sat in a corner seat, leaning against an old magazine on the bookshelf, holding a half-empty can of soda in his hand.

He looked out the window at the sun beginning to set in the west, its rays fragmented into patches of golden light by the branches and leaves of the trees lining the edge of the playground.

He thought of the evergreen plant on the windowsill that was about to wither, the faint smell of ointment in the air, and the old man's cloudy eyes.

"You should die surrounded by a crowd, not like me."

He placed the soda can on the corner of the table and stood up.

"I'll go," he said.

Everyone in the activity room turned to look at him.

"I'll go check out that church," Yuto Itadori said. "I'll just pretend to be interested in the doctrines, go in for a look around, see if I can run into my senior, and make sure she's safe."

"Are you serious?" Abe asked.

"Seriously."

Abe was silent for a few seconds, then took out his phone from his bag, swiped it a few times, and turned the screen towards Yuto Itadori.

"They've converted to the Truth Church. Their headquarters are in Chiyoda Ward, in a three-story office building. They hold public mission sessions every Wednesday and Saturday evening; people hand out flyers at the entrance, and anyone can go in and listen. The leader is called Hiroaki Akiyama, who supposedly recently took over. It's rumored that when he took over, he used a strange power to render the previous leader into a vegetable. That church used to believe in extraterrestrials from the center of the universe, but after he took over, he switched to believing in some kind of 'Dharma Transmission Celestial Venerable.'"

Yuto Itadori looked at the description for a few seconds, then nodded.

"It sounds like a setting from a comic book."

"That's why we're worried," Abe said.

"It's nothing." Yuto Itadori put his hands in his pockets and walked towards the door of the activity room. "I'll just go check it out, and run if anything seems wrong."

Twenty minutes later.

In Chiyoda Ward, across the street from the three-story office building housing the headquarters of the Shingon Church, Yuuto Itadori stood for a moment. The building's exterior was light gray, and the eye emblem was printed on the glass door at the entrance on the first floor. A man in a white robe stood at the door, holding a stack of leaflets and distributing them to passersby.

Yuto Itadori, recalling his experiences over the past few days, took a deep breath and then crossed the road.

"Hello." He bowed slightly to the man in the white robe. "I'd like to know something."