Jukai - Ch. 6 - Record Six: The Calling Voice
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Honestly a bit weak, this one. The monster had nothing to do with the dead girl.
To be fair the old man said "The dead"...could be anyone but they smell them negative emotion like sharks smelling blood in the water and will bait you every time by calling out to you..
The ghost stories are delightful horror nonsense, but what I'm really invested in is the priestess reading the tales. I can't wait for the intro to Record 58: "Yesterday, as I was reading the record of the Spooky McDonald's, a furious demon erupted from a massive hole in the floor, with it's face bearing a cruel resemblance of my grandmother. But I love my grandma, so I'm sure that was just a fluke 😌"
And then turns out "Record 58" is just bait as it turns out..the Priestess herself is a sealed horror too and actual last page is her lunging at the real target....YOU!
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It's a common superstition. Ghosts and other creatures will imitate your loved ones to lure you in do whatever to you.
When I was in scouts back in school, when we went camping, we would use nicknames to call out to each other. There was this belief that using someone's real name would cause that person to be spirited away or possessed. Not really the same as what happened here, but you could somewhat see a similarity. I think.
It's also a common trope in horror. Like that popular one with the author's mom calling for him from downstairs, but the mom isn't home/ was upstairs.
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It's basically a common twist. Ghost are attracted to negative emotion, thus why people are always being reminded to not linger in sadness/guilt too long.
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truck driver: *sees the traffic light turns green
truck driver: *sees a girl still standing in the middle of the road
truck driver: imma floor it lmao
truck driver: *sees a girl still standing in the middle of the road
truck driver: imma floor it lmao
He's working off of Isekai Logic.
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I think, when every single tale in an anthology with an overarching narratige is consistently "bad" in the exact same way, it's worth taking it as a deliberate choice and asking "what message does it convey?". I'll do a third reread when the next chapter comes out but it seems pretty clear: she's cynically handing out empty and useless advice/"morals of the story", when each story demonstrates (umbrella flying away, leaf falling), the irrelevance of human agency. It gets clear by the time we reach the shrike - each monster/curse is simply a predator. The tree didn't care about shrine taboos, this yotai didn't care about your dead friend, the "headless woman" doesn't care if you have an umbrella or not - and no advice can protect you. So that's the cynicism - we just need to see why.
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I thought this tale was going to be a metaphor for moving on from sadness and guilt, but like others have said, the monster here has nothing to do whatsoever with the victims, it's just the average wild predatory ghost that hunts humans. I also wonder if the old man is trolling the targets - by telling them to not look back, he expects that most of the targets will instead be even more curious/regretful etc and inevitably take a look.
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Actually I found the random paranormal factor to be refreshing as a lot of anthology horror stories try to shoehorn in some kind of fable or cause-and-effect logic where here poor grief-stricken girls are just being targeted by an unknowable terror in those moments of greatest weakness for no real reason. It's very Junji Ito-esqe.
Also that truck driver in the beginning was the real horror of this chapter.
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