D-0002 Please pass the circular on to the next household the same day

In part of Kirino 3-chome, a cross-check result remains on record showing that a monthly neighborhood newsletter tucked into the neighborhood circulars can later produce a column that was not present at the time of distribution. The heading of the column can be read as “condolence,” but no fact of death has been confirmed for the people listed. Rather, the stories are told in a sequence where, in the days after a name appears, ill health, falls, and absences from work with no clear cause continue to follow.

The first record appears to be from late September 2024. A household that had taken over as group leader noticed that an unfamiliar column had increased in the margin of the returned circular. The column contained the surname of an elderly man in the same group and a number that looked like his age, but the family reportedly said, “There was one character off, so we thought it was someone else.” Three days later that man went down with illness and has not gone out since for some time. No death certificate or funeral record could be found, yet several residents have said, “I feel like I already wrapped a condolence offering.”

The circular itself is a commercially available blue vinyl-covered binder, with an old neighborhood-association name sticker layered over the corner. The page content is a routine notice printed on a home printer, listing things like the duty roster for resource waste, the schedule for replacing security lights, and a call for photos for the senior citizens’ gathering. The anomaly seems to be confined to the lower margin. The column does not look as though paper had been added on; rather, it seems as if it had been built in from the start, with the line spacing compressed and the surrounding text gradually shortened.

In a circular from November 2024, when it was sent around the group twice, names are said to have increased by one each time it returned. The woman listed in the second round said that the day after reading the column, she found that only her name had been written in her maiden name. After that, two members of her family said that her maiden name had “always been that way,” while another could no longer remember her current surname. There was no change in the family register or the insurance card, but the only place her maiden name remained printed was on the paper sleeves for chopsticks at the dinner table.

An attempt was also apparently made to stop the circular. When one household kept it in the entryway shoe cabinet instead of returning it to the group leader, the next morning a copy of the same text was found in the mailbox of the neighboring household. The copy had no condolence column; instead, in the lower right of the page, only the words “not yet circulated” were printed in small type. The resident of the household that had stopped it wrote that from that day on, every time they heard the neighborhood broadcast chime, they could smell incense even though it was not yet evening. There was also a round in which the condolence column was blacked out with a pen — but on the page that came back next, the shape of the blackout had settled neatly, like a small mourning badge.

It is unclear whether the phenomenon can be explained solely by printing or page replacement. Even though multiple households are looking at the same paper, there are cases where the presence or absence of the column and the reading of names do not match. Even when the same layout is photographed on a smartphone, the column appears in some shots and not in others depending on who took them; and in the photos where it does appear, by the next day only the date in the file name is said to have rolled back to the previous day. On the other hand, there also seems to be a tendency for the more people who see the column, the more the condition of the person named becomes common neighborhood knowledge. It can also be read not as the paper informing the neighborhood that someone has died first, but as the neighborhood’s eyes gradually mourning the names printed on the page.

As of 2025-02-08, the blue circular is said to have been replaced with another new one. However, in the collection point where the old circular was supposedly disposed of, a single neighborhood newsletter soaked by rain was found. The lower margin was torn, so the presence or absence of the column could not be confirmed. Along the torn edge, a thin purple ink remained like dried pollen.