Kadokawa Mystery and Horror Tales, Volume 2
Wooden clogs
This one is a really romantic story, gently told, no gore, just really good storytelling.
A guy writes a letter while on a train. He's going to tell the guy about an experience with ghosts that he once had.
Now we go 25 years back into the past as he recalls what happened.
He's going to visit relatives who are at a Zen temple but he encounters a woman walking along. She disappears in an instant.
He's let his health go and he doesn't eat much.
He sees the girl again.
The woman says the girl is Yoshie. She asks him not to go near the shrine he saw Yoshie come out of, though.
He sees her in the house.
The mother asks him to talk with Yoshie from time to time.
She gives him a book and they later end up talking. She says she's waiting to become “whole.”
He has another one of his coughing attacks. Something seems to be watching them from the brush.
Unless I'm completely misinterpreting what is being said, Yoshie's father wants Takagi to go ahead and have sex with her. (Could be what she means by meaning made “whole.”)
One of the not-so-friendly villagers.
He got her to ride a bike but she fell. Again, something seems to be watching them and it also seems that Yoshie can detect it. She tells him she's sorry and walks off and avoids him later.
He follows her to the shrine that he's not supposed to go to. She says she's “incomplete.” She tells him she'll never find her missing half.
That night (probably) he sees he walking away from the house again and follows her.
She goes to the shrine again. He gets closer to it despite having been warned to stay away.
He goes inside and sees something strange happening.
Yoshie was asleep.
He slept next to her but didn't have sex with her. A few days later he had to leave due to his father's ill health. She died three years later.
In the past he visits the mother after Yoshie's death and she tells him Yoshie had a sister. They both had typhoid, but her sister died from it. He finds out what the “other half” she was trying to find really was, and that the girl he slept with in the shrine was not Yoshie, but her dead sister.
Apparently he's planning on killing himself.
Regeneration
This story is filled with gore, mental illness and a nearly complete lack of logic. It's a quite twisted, sick story that makes little sense, even with a “suspension of disbelief” type of approach.
O.k. This is a rather strange beginning. The guy says he's waiting for her new head to grow back.
Two years previously he was in a mental health facility.
The guy's a professor of some philosophy according to the girl (Yui).
They end up falling in love.
Six months later he suggests to her that they get married.
She suggests she might be hiding a secret from her past.
She starts to tell him her secret. She says she cut part of a finger off when she was young and it apparently grew back.
She also says her father hated her. He once started to rape her but a pan of hot oil on the stove fell on her in the struggle. Her leg was burned so he cut it off thinking she'd grow a new one..
Her leg did grow back but she was under the effect of drugs and her father apparently had his way with her on numerous occasions.
She admits she killed her father (but it was in self defense).
She considers herself a monster. (Yet here's a problem; wouldn't the normal reaction to her ability be along the lines of “how marvelous” and “you can be studied and perhaps other people can heal themselves as you can”? )
Good. He finally says it's a blessing, not a curse. He again says he wants to marry her.
They got married.
At the end of that year she becomes ill. She has “juvenile dementia.” (There is such a disease.) In this story she's given two years to live.
She tells him he looks just like her father. Her condition went sharply downhill after that.
Somehow her head has become engulfed by flames. She's terribly burned, he tells he she can have the burns and cuts her head off. He keeps her body in the house hoping her head will regenerate (yet he doesn't have the body hooked up to any medical equipment; there's no source of nutrients for it, etc.)
He finds that her head has started to regenerate an entire body.
Last Day as a Teenager
A well done story, albeit with some gore (but not too much), but a somewhat confusing ending, at least for me.
Someone is looking for someone who is drowning.
As he passes a little girl he hears a voice saying that the day they agreed on has come.
He's joined by Kyoko, I'm assuming his girlfriend and the one who was drowning at the start of the film.
They almost get hit by a big roll of cable.
He sees the little girl looking down on him.
A scene from the past right after he pulled Kyoko out of the water. He hears a voice and it's the little girl (the voice is very deep, a male voice), asking if he wants to save Kyoko.
Some girl tells him he needs to be careful that day. (Apparently she can see things, sense things or something.)
He gets cut on a scalpel that was in his backpack (which he didn't put in it) and goes to the restroom to clean the cut and put a bandage on. He sees the little girl again.
Back to the past when he makes a deal with the girl.
She's an angel of death and will let Kyoko live in exchange for the boy's life. She'll give him three more years to live, until he's no longer a teenager.
Apparently if he doesn't die that day than Kyoko will die.
She agrees to stay with him all day (he's said he'll protect her) and she wants to go into an evacuation shelter. (Evacuation from what?)
She definitely likes him. He sees the girl there and he and Kyoko leave.
They're hold up in some other place after a streetlight fell and nearly hit them. Kyoko says it's 12:03.
The little girl appears again and starts a big truck rolling towards them.
Kyoko has a tight grip on the guy and won't let go. They both get hit and killed.
Another scene from the past, this one showing Kyoko talking to the little girl.
The angel of death makes a deal with Kyoko.
We see Kyoko come out of her body at the end and stand next to the angel of death. Yet we never see the guy come out of his body, which is something I was expecting to happen. Since it didn't, I was starting to wonder if something had gone wrong and another twist was going to be worked into the movie but it wasn't.
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