I guess ghosts don’t sleep. While mortals snore, talk in dreams or try to run from phantom attackers. Ghosts pace back and forth, trying to remember things like how to use the bathroom, open a box of sugar or make coffee when they have no body to do it with. The half light of night is the domain of those stuck between worlds. They don’t watch tv or listen to the radio. Something about sleeping people makes them so fascinated, little things like breathing, farting and falling out of bed are endlessly amusing at the spirit world. Furyo unlike some ghosts isn’t tied to a certain apartment, he isn’t reliving a tragic life or hoping for an ancestor to honor their shrine during an estate sale.

Furyo leaves before Angelina wakes up. He doesn’t remember if he opened the door or left through an open window. Something about death makes moments fuzzy, memories clouded and plans fall apart. Time is also unreliable. For him a day and a half might be weeks to the living. Sometimes he loses time, gets stuck between buildings or lost in the malaise of post modern landscapes of the damned. Along for the ride is Mr Ghost Lantern and The Master’s Oni Mask. Acting as a translator and a charm to help him either become visible or interact with the earth world. It alarms him to find him self staring blindly into walls or lurking in closets dormant like a hibernating bear.

Part of the mystery of the afterlife is a growing intolerance for human noise. Things like top 40 radio, misremembered song lyrics and old women baby talking animals fills him with hate. He has taken time to figure out how to interfere with broadcast signals when a block of bad music becomes intolerable. Most sing along pop music makes him want to fire a gun into the listeners stupid drooling face. Everywhere he goes sirens, announcements and running children make his brain boil. He understands why ghosts are most active at night, hide during the day in dark crawl spaces and tunnels. Human-kind are assholes, not nearly as interesting as they think they are. Beware O mankind not to offend the spirit world, they will not forget your disrespect!

Even while alive he was drawn to sites of violence, battlefields, accident scenes… Now as he walks its like a bell going off. Lights flicker and old songs hum on the wind. An abandoned row of ramen stands closed for the night may be mundane to the living, but to him every rustling leaf and dead animal in a puddle holds some omen for a lost soul nearby. Spirits do not always mean to bring discomfort, sickness and cruelty to human-kind but unresolved ugly feelings do. An unsatisfied spirit can easily spell doom to a whole family. A crazy ancestor with an intense aura can stain the survivors like a stench from condoms in a marriage bed or a dead rat inside the wall. Bringing bacteria, lung flus and sinus infections, if allowed longer their mold and hate builds up cancer and blood poisons over years of unresolved trauma.

Furyo tries to focus on his list. A girl who died in an abandoned swimming pool in a park, an elderly man pushed in front of a train, a single mother abducted from a jogging path 5 minutes before she picks up her kids from School. These spirits allude him, he moves on to ghosts who aren’t hiding from his help. Many things cause these psychic wounds in a place. Not all are death, consistent abuse, injustice and unethical medical experiments also can have a congestion of spiritual energies where a bathroom stall or car port can harbor malevolent energies seeking a release. All these pained voices echo a cruel signal into the world. A strange feeling in the woods, or walking along an underpass may reflect events from decades, even centuries before. Battlefields and sites of massacres are now 4 lane highways and where lovely riverside villages stood for 1000 years now it’s a metroplex where the river is diverted underground and full of syringes and dead children’s raincoats. Stagnant water, mutilated trees, broken paths where spirits walked for centuries can cause parasitic infestation.

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Furyo has been sent to check on ghosts who refuse to keep their abuse to them selves. Angry spirits lying in wait to spread their death contamination to others. Luring lone children or mentally ill homeless into places to drown or fall into an open elevator shaft, causing toddlers to jam forks in light sockets or elderly people intentionally crashing into on coming traffic just to have a conversation with paramedics. Furyo’s first stop for the day is a bank of desolate laundry machines where college student named Marika Sugimoto was beaten and raped by her landlord in 1982. She was wearing a red sweater and a modest navy blue skirt midway to her ankle. The landlord had been passively friendly but Marika was uncomfortable with small talk and spent her days making her own clothes and studying to work in computer code.

Her spirit appears to young people in an alcove where she used to smoke. The Landlord is most haunted by this, and despite being the killer… has invited 2 different paranormal themed tv shows to do specials on the laundry room in the underground parking structure. Using faked footage, stock sound effects and an actress to recreate the murder brought moderate ratings and the story is largely thought to be mostly fictional. Furyo didn’t find her the first day. He followed the landlord until she appeared trying to ignite rags he left in a bin beside the stove. Marika was overjoyed to have a friend after 12 years alone. She was willing to depart if Furyo would help her set the land-lord on fire in his sleep. Sharing a cigarette while the killer burned to death was cathartic for them both. Marika tried to piss on his burning face to keep the blankets from catching and the building from burning down, Furyo helped, they averted a disaster.

Another opportunity to settle some unpleasant feelings from the suffering ghosts, was a kid named Hiroshi Kimura. He was playing with metal toy trucks some time in the mid 60s, walking along a reservoir and discovered a downed electric tower, getting some of his friends they decided to try to push the downed tower into the water. Hiroshi was electrocuted and by the time rescuers came to the location, had been reduced to little more than a blackened skeleton. This caused destructive ptsd with his surviving friends who returned to the location for years to drink and mourn what happened as kids. Hiroshi tries to get passing children to fall in the water or climb the rebuilt electric tower, causing the mysterious deaths of 4 other children over 30 years. Hiroshi was not a good spirit and when approached tried to stab Furyo with a piece of metal from the original accident. Furyo decided in this case, the spirit would be best obliterated with exorcism.

Lastly a local pervert named Issei Ishimura who had the bones for 79 children in boxes hidden in his elderly mothers apartment. The man was 59 and never left home with his 83 year old mother. Late at night he would sneak out, driving his plumbing van and climb in windows and steal children. Keeping them hostage in his cramped room, then storing their mummified remains wrapped in masking tape and stored under his bed and in his closet. Furyo gained access to the apartment and waited with the mother. Learning more and more how to be seen as more than a blurred shape or figment of the imagination. He startled the kidnapper and forced him to jump from his 19th story apartment. Furyo was proud to lead a whole parade of decades of lost and exploited children back to the temple for reincarnation. As some spirits can drift away as the body desiccates, Furyo isn’t sure if 79 was the actual number of victims or just who was left after decades of isolation. Some remains fitting in small shoe boxes after falling apart from years of humidity and attacks by moisture.