"About 'homing ability' and 'homesickness'"

If you interpret "homing ability" in a broad sense, you can say that most animals have a homing ability.

It's the same with humans. We like to sleep, rest, and eat at a place where we feel comfortable--namely, our homes.

Your home is to you what nests are to animals.

Therefore, we can say that humans have a homing ability as well.

First of all, why do animals need nests?

The answer is the same as for humans.

Sleeping, resting, and eating are the essential actions for survival. At the same time, those actions leave one defenseless as well.

That's why you need a "safe area" where you can be defenseless.

Everybody knows that not having this "safe area" results in a high level of stress.

When you move an animal to a new environment, it naturally becomes stressed.

When you force a person to live in a foreign land where they aren't comfortable, they become greatly stressed as well.

Everybody also knows that this kind of stress is called "homesickness".

The Japanese don't know much about "homesickness".

We defined it as mental weakness, and we neglected to treat it for a long period of time.

However, "homesickness" has a very long history. In Europe's Middle Ages, people believed that it wasn't a mental but rather a physical disease.

People also believed that out of everyone, the Swiss got the disease the most.

The Swiss, you see, were known to be an ethnic group that worked away from home in that era.

They lived far away from their homes. There were no telephones at that time, so they couldn't even hear their families' voices for ages and ages.

It's easy to imagine that the young Swiss workers got homesick while working in a strange land.

These Swiss who got homesick wanted to go home,

but they couldn't because of their jobs. The conflict made them weak physically and mentally. Some of them went crazy and tried to escape from their reality by committing suicide or running away.

The Swiss at the time were very superstitious, and many folk remedies and occult-like treatments to prevent homesickness went around.

Since going home was the only treatment, they must've called it a fatal disease.

But it isn't really one, of course.

Specifically, "homesickness" is a sign of that human homing instinct. Your brain desires to go back to your "safe area\

At first, your brain makes you remember the happy memories of your home, and it urges you to go home in a natural way.

But when reason stops you from achieving your desire, your brain starts sending unnatural signals to your body.

As a result, your body gets weak, and that makes it more difficult for you to live in a strange land. In the end, you have to bend reason in order to achieve your desire to go home.

So, homesickness is born from our homing instincts.

And the stronger one's homing instinct is, the stronger their homesickness.

The strength of that homing instinct varies from individual to individual, and depends on the environment in which those individuals live.

When your home is safe and the environment you live in is dangerous, your homing instinct grows stronger.

On the other hand, when the environment you live in is safer than your home, your homing instinct becomes very weak.

Safety isn't the only element that affects its strength. Cultural aspects affect it too.

The many customs demanding families to return home for major events varies with each region, so your birthplace's culture also alters the strength of your homing instinct.

Amongst those regions, the "transcendents" of Onigafuchi Village were believed to have an excessively strong homing instinct.

The people of Onigafuchi forbade their fellows from ever leaving.

Many believed this was the effect of the elitism and sense of purity I already mentioned before.

People today still strongly believe that Oyashiro-sama puts his curse on you if you break his rule and abandon the village. This superstition can be interpreted as homesickness.

If homesickness is directly proportional to one's homing instinct,

then the exaggerated expression, "curse," would signify the strength of that homesickness, and also their homing instinct.

I can assume that they hated the outside world and created an insular society precisely because of their powerful homing ability.

Unfortunately, there's no way to measure the strength of the homing ability that the primitive people of Onigafuchi had.

It was so strongly forbidden to leave the village that nobody left long enough to get homesick.

However, after the Meiji era, things changed.

The sacredness of Onigafuchi dwindled with the efforts of modernization.

Many young people started longing for city life, and some people were forced to leave the village to get a job.

As a result, villagers started venturing outside the village borders.

That was when the transcendents of Onigafuchi realized how strong their homing ability was for the first time.

The residents of Hinamizawa got extremely homesick.

After a while, people started to call this homesickness "the curse of Oyashiro-sama".

It became rumored that a person who left the village to get a job in a strange land was cursed, that he went crazy and died, and people who had left the village started coming back to either it or the nearby town.

Their homesickness and their homing ability were very strong, because of their culture.

It's reasonable to think that these were cultivated by the unique religion in Hinamizawa, namely the cult of Oyashiro-sama.

From the moment they were born, they were taught the rules of Oyashiro-sama. They must've felt guilty about leaving the village unconsciously.

As a result, they considered their homesickness to be the curse of Oyashiro-sama.

I'm not sure if their homesickness got stronger because of the rules of Oyashiro-sama, or if they made the rules of Oyashiro-sama because their homesickness got stronger.

...I don't know which came first.

...I got tired of reading such small print, and lay down on the floor on my back.

The true identity of the curse of Oyashiro-sama is... homesickness?

Miyo-san believed my story, and she let me read these scrapbooks. That's why I expected to find something interesting.

...But what it's saying is that the answer to it all is "homesickness," which many doctors told me so many times at counseling. I'm a little upset.

The word "homesickness" can't explain the extraordinary experience I had.

I saw Oyashiro-sama come down to me from a bright light in the bathroom.

I saw the dusky-red nasty maggots come out of my blood vessels.

This scrapbook doesn't explain any of that.

I don't understand how Miyo-san was going to explain the cloud of maggots.

Maybe she didn't have any explanation of that to begin with.

Was it just a delusion...?

I flipped through one of the other scrapbooks Miyo-san let me borrow,

looking for an explanation of the "maggots" I saw.

...Then... I found it.

It had the exact title I was looking for.

"About 'maggots'\n and 'the curse of Oyashiro-sama'"

In the Meiji era, a group of villagers were on their way back to Hinamizawa, and they started discussing a rumor about a weird disease.

They said that "maggots" started crawling out of the wounds of a person who left Hinamizawa, and that the maggots ate the person's body from the inside.

The Shinto priest of the Furude Shrine at that time explained that the weird disease was a sign of "the curse of Oyashiro-sama".

According to tradition, the Shinto priest showed the villagers an ancient scroll, and he told them that the story of the maggots had been passed down through the ages.

This is what the scroll said: The world where the demons came from must be interpreted as the land of death,

and the demons in that land of death had to live their lives while being eaten by maggots.

The villagers who are of the demon's blood had nothing to worry about as long as they lived in Hinamizawa under the protection of Oyashiro-sama.

But once they left Hinamizawa, abandoning that protection, the maggots that had been sleeping in the blood of the demons would start to awaken, and they'd eat their bodies from the inside out.

This "maggot disease" scared the villagers for a while, and they asked the Shrine to provide them with protective talismans whenever they had to leave the village on business.

(This is interesting, as it's similar to the way homesickness was dealt with by the Swiss in the Middle Ages.)

After the war started, the delusion of the "maggot disease" faded away, but there remained a custom to send talismans to families that lived away from Hinamizawa.

The talismans had the word "maggot" on them.

But the most interesting part about all this is that the residents of Hinamizawa didn't know about the "maggot disease" until the rumors began.

I'd thought that their unconscious worship made those people think of homesickness as a "curse".

So this case of the previously unknown "maggot disease" directly contradicted the research I had done so far.

It's natural to think that the group of people who were on their way back to the village were lost in a mass delusion because they strongly believed in the curse, and that the Shinto priest took advantage of their state of panic to instill a deeper faith in them...

But I'm not fully convinced that it was merely a coincidence that this mass delusion matched with the story in the old picture scroll.

I wonder if it's possible to see maggots in a wound without having the prerequisite knowledge when a person is cursed by Oyashiro-sama.

I wish Oyashiro-sama would put his curse on someone I could study.

I'd love to see those maggots coming out of someone.

...I felt as if Miyo-san was here and making that request of me.

I remember.

When she gave me the scrapbooks... she said that I might be the only who could understand them.

I felt good just for a moment

because I found out that the maggots weren't a delusion.

But at the same time... it destroyed my excuse that it was a delusion.

......The maggots weren't a delusion... They were there.

All of a sudden, my wrists, elbows, inner thighs, and neck started itching.

......I felt the urge to cut open a blood vessel, but I quietly held it down.

I remembered that Miyo-san looked very serious when I talked about the maggots.

...She must've thought it was creepy.

But so did I.

...While I was crying because nobody believed me...... a part of me didn't want to believe that my body was filled with those creepy things.

I think part of me wanted to believe that it was a delusion.

But now I know it wasn't.

It wasn't a delusion... There are some people who had the same experience.

...Maggots in the demon's blood will awaken when you lose the protection of Oyashiro-sama...

In other words... they may not awaken under the protection of Oyashiro-sama,

but all the villagers still have the maggots in them without knowing it...

People of the demon's blood are... people who have the creepy maggots in their bodies...

I tried not to jump to conclusions, and flipped the pages again.

...I unconsciously looked for something related to maggots.

"About 'Parasites' and control of the host"

The "maggot disease" made me think about something. Is it possible to say that the extremely strong homesickness of Hinamizawa was an infectious disease caused by some kind of parasite?

I'm not trying to connect the maggots they saw with parasites.

I'm trying to think about the possibility that their culture (their religion) might be associated with an infectious disease.

Many infectious diseases are caused unintentionally by parasites.

A parasite's host is literally its home.

It wants to live within the host's body for as long as it can. The best way to do that is to coexist with the host without the host knowing it.

But some parasites try to control their hosts and use them for prosperity.

For example, some parasites have an ability to control their host

in order to force them to be eaten by a superior host.

A typical example is the Dicrocoelium dendriticrum. It uses snails or ants as intermediate hosts, and it forces them to move to the upper side of vegetation so that it's easier for a superior host to consume it.

One parasite that controls more complicated animals is called Toxoplasma gondii. It uses mice as intermediate hosts, with the superior hosts being cats.

This parasite makes a mouse lose its fear of cats in order to increase its chance of getting eaten, so that the parasite can live within a cat instead.

There are parasites that choose hosts at random.

The rabies virus is commonly known for that.

It lives and breeds in the brain of a host, and it moves into the host's saliva through the salivary glands.

It makes the host extremely aggressive, in order to make it bite things randomly, so that it in turn can move into other hosts through the saliva.

...That's what rabies does.

Many parasites have a similar ability to control hosts to their benefit.

The examples I used above are about parasites that move into other hosts to prosper.

But I think there must be some kind of parasite that controls its hosts in order to have a comfortable environment in which to live.

I want to try to connect this theory to the abnormal homing ability and homesickness of the Onigafuchi residents.

Let's say there's some kind of parasite that exists in Hinamizawa, and it lives within all of the villagers' bodies.

For the parasite, Hinamizawa is the most comfortable environment to live in,

so it gives the hosts a strong homing ability, in order to make them stay in Hinamizawa.

Furthermore, it causes the hosts to get homesick whenever they ignore this homing ability and try to leave.

Parasites need hosts in which to live.

It's convenient for them if their hosts build a community in the environment where it feels comfortable.

This theory makes it easier for me to explain the mysteries I described earlier.

The transcendents of Onigafuchi knew about the existence of this parasite.

They knew that, as hosts to the parasites, they couldn't live outside of the village. That's why they created a culture and rules that prohibited contact with the outside world.

It also explains why people acted so abnormal during the dam conflict.

So... The demons that came out of the swamp in the legend of Oyashiro-sama can be interpreted as the mass spread of the parasite.

The story about the demons attacking the villagers must be a metaphor for the behavior of the infected villagers who were controlled by the parasite.

...This theory is too crazy. I should have just laughed about it.

But I felt bad for Miyo-san, so I decided not to.

Hinamizawa is controlled by a parasite...?

You could use that theory to explain how the maggots came out of me.

...I felt a little bit dizzy. I was so confused, and a part of me thought it was ridiculous... and another part of me thought it was more convincing than any curse.

But... Miyo-san was probably erased because she wrote these scrapbooks.

If so...

the contents of these scrapbooks must be something that they can't ignore.

...They'd try to get all of her scrapbooks and consign them to oblivion.

...What if they noticed some of her scrapbooks are missing?

...I felt a chill running through my spine.

I have to keep it a secret that I have these scrapbooks.

...And I'll have to try to understand more about their contents.

I remember Miyo-san told me that the Three Families are behind the series of the mysterious deaths, and that they're trying to resurrect the cult of Oyashiro-sama.

...According to the theory I just read... the parasite must be trying to maintain the current environment of Hinamizawa.

The healthiest environment for it is a completely closed village, just like the primitive Onigafuchi.

It must be very comfortable for the parasite if no hosts go outside the village.

They don't even like that the villagers often leave the village to go shopping.

That means... the parasite would try to goad the hosts into resurrecting the cult of Oyashiro-sama.

Hm?

...I remember there was an article in the scrapbook saying that the demon's blood runs thickest in the Three Families.

That would mean... that they have a larger amount of the parasite in them than the other villagers, and that they're under its control.

The Three Families seem to be planning to bring the village back to the Onigafuchi era.

Reviving the Watanagashi festival after the dam conflict can be interpreted as their desire to revive the faith that had started to fade away in the Meiji era.

The Three Families, especially the Sonozaki family, have a great influence over the region and the public organizations...

...What's going on here...?

I'd thought this to be a poorly written theory... but the pieces fit together, one after another.

I've never played a jigsaw puzzle as crazy as this.

I felt my brain swirling due to this absurd theory. A part of me thought this was ridiculous, and another part of me thought I might be about to expose an unbelievable truth.

...When I tried to look into the center of it, I felt as if I was going to fall into the whirlpool and drown.

...I'll have to devote myself to reading more seriously.

There must be some truth to this.

...It caused misfortune and made my life miserable after I moved to Ibaraki.

I might be able to find the truth, including the cause of my parents' divorce and my desperate behavior...!

Right then, I heard a knock on the door all of a sudden, scaring me.

I hid the scrapbooks under a cushion.

"Reina, you have a phone call."

"A phone call?

This late?

...Who is it?"

"It's from a bookstore.

Did you order some books?

They said they were Ooishi-san from the Okinomiya bookstore."