D-0006 Not yet, ready now, I'm right here

This was compiled from copies of an after-school club’s daily log and from interviews with staff and parents. The park is a small children’s park between prefectural housing blocks in Sagamihara; apart from a slide, a sandpit, and the shrubbery along its edge, there is nothing in it. Residents call it Nichome Park.

The first record is from just after the May holidays. At pickup time, a second-grader who had been the seeker mentioned that four children had hidden but that, not yet, had come back five times. The child did not seem troubled by it, they say; the day’s log gives it one line under play, with the note, probably voices overlapping.

By the end of June the same account had come up a dozen or more times. It is always the children who do the counting; three hid on some days and six on others, and the surplus, in every account, was one. The children, if anything, find it funny — one of them, asked in an interview, said: there’s a kid who’s really good at hiding. It was the staff, writing it down each time, who began to be bothered.

On several days, after everyone had been found, one more reply came back from the depths of the shrubbery. Whoever went to look found no one. Only, at the height of a crouching child, the grass was pressed down, folded inward, it is said.

In early June, when the accounts were still few, one of the staff stood alone in the park at nightfall and tried saying out loud: ready yet. There was no reply. Only, from the next day on, the roll calls taken by that one staff member kept coming out one child over, and at their own request they were taken off roll-call duty.

Once, and once only, there was an evening when the replies fell short. In mid-June, five children hid, and, not yet, came back four times. One of the children who had been hiding went home crying: but I did say it. Which child’s voice went uncounted has not been established.

A long-time resident who agreed to an interview noted that the same question has been repeated in this park for decades, and said that the questions, piling up, must at some point have raised a side that answers. In the course of compiling this file, another reading was set down. Ready yet names no one. It is a question addressed to the role of whoever is hiding — and so long as something is hiding, anything at all may answer it.

Since the start of July the after-school club has told the children not to play hide-and-seek in this park. How well that is kept is not known. Since then, reports have continued from nearby residents of, ready yet, and nothing more, heard in the park at dusk with no one playing. No one has answered it yet.