“Ahahahahaha.”
Hiroyuki and Toru, my friends, grabbed their stomachs as they rolled around on the ground and laughed.
“How embarrassing it is. But you know, I was also shocked when I found my naughty books back on the bookshelf!”
“On top of that, they were found by my sister. She gave me a look as if I’m the most disgusting thing in the world.”
“Man, I get immensely jealous whenever that cute sister of yours with pigtails calls you ‘big brother’.”
“Oi, don’t give my sister that dirty look. I don’t even consider her a woman. Things between blood siblings is basically a crime! You are delusional like those who don’t have a sister!”
“But you said you once stole your sister’s underwear, didn’t you?”
“Tell me about it.”
“Wahahahaha, Wahahahaha.”
It was a casual conversation between a group of boys who were friends and knew each other well.
Today we were supposed to talk about hilarious stories, however, things soon tilted towards adult topics.
We didn’t have enough money to go into a game arcade and waste our time away. There was nothing interesting to do. My parents nagged me too much. Whenever I would stumble upon them, they would keep asking me things about my career choice, how am I preparing for the entrance examination etc…. I wanted to borrow a game from my friends.
But I already owe them one….There have been some interesting games lately… And things like that.
After laughing for a while over some random topics, we soon diverted away from the topic of discussion and the usual atmosphere returned again.
***
After leaving school, the three of us didn’t go straight home.
I didn’t want to go home early because as soon as my parents see me, they keep nagging me to study.
Therefore, it became a daily routine for the three of us to stop by this Tanuki Shrine on our way home from school and hang out there until it got dark. And this habit started sometime ago.
Tanuki Shrine was, of course, a name which many people, including us, were familiar with.
The shrine must have had a long golden history which we weren’t aware of. However, few people called it by its correct name.
The name Tanuki Shrine must have originated from the statue of the raccoon dog god that we were currently playing with like our own personal toy.
[T/N: Tanuki (狸) means raccoon dog.]
I was curious as to why a statue like this would exist in the precincts of a shrine dedicated to a god, however, I didn’t feel like digging into it. It was because I was too uninterested in a shrine that was abandoned.
The image of a shrine that appears in my mind when I think of one is a glamorous structure standing on top of a hill. Small stone steps leading to the base of a magnificent torii gate. However, Tanuki Shrine was completely different from that image.
[T/N: Torii (鳥居) means the gateway of a Shinto shrine, with two uprights and two crosspieces.]
The area of Tanuki Shrine was not more than the size of a cat’s head.
Moreover, it was located in an old residential area that was filled with garbage. Wedged between the houses on both sides, the shrine looked like it would collapse at any moment.
The branches of the untended garden plants on both sides of the house jut out from each other with the unseemly wires hovering above, entangling with each other across them.
There was a torii gate, like in your usual shrine, however, it was lower and looked more shabby than an usual shrine. There was also a structure beside it that seemed like an offering box, but it also looked shabby and only met the minimum requirements for being there.
Because of its dilapidated appearance, no one came to visit the shrine.
Therefore, for the three of us who were like outcasts from other teenagers, it was a blind spot in a small residential area and perfect for our hangouts.
As usual, we quickly ran out of topics to talk about. Since we had nothing better to do or talk about, we looked up at the sky full of entangled electrical wires boredly.
Whenever the atmosphere turned like this, the environment of the conversation usually deteriorates.
We talked about how we did on the mock exam the other day, or which highschool we want to get into….No, it wasn’t a topic we liked to discuss. So everyone was wondering if we could somehow break through this silence without mentioning things we didn’t like.
Suddenly, Hiroyuki got up.
The expression on his face said he was thinking of doing something mischievous, as if he had come up with something interesting.
“Tomohiro, make sure there’s no one on the street okay?”
“Yeah? Okay, but why?”
The moment he asked me to make sure if there was anyone on the street, I understood that he was up to something terrible. However, we were tired of boredom and needed that kind of thrill so we didn’t stop him.
So I did as the duty entrusted me to, looking at both sides of the street to make sure nobody was there.
“There’s no one…”
“Hey, Hiroyuki, it’s dangerous to steal offering money like this…!”
From Toru’s exclamation, I understood what Hiroyuki was planning.
“Hiroyuki…isn’t it wrong to steal offering money? You could get punished by gods.”
“If gods truly cared about the shrine and its god, we would have gotten punished by now. Not to mention, didn’t you also pee on the torii gate, Tomohiro? He also scribbled on the shrine’s outer wall.”
“No, I think it’s still a bad idea-”
“Ah…there is a pin lock.”
At the back of the offering box, there was a structure that looked like a drawer to take out the contents inside. However, a padlock was hanging from there.
However, it was not your ordinary padlock with a keyhole, but it contained a keyboard-like structure with numbers written on it. It seemed like the lock could only be opened by entering a three-digit number.
“Three digits… So how many combinations are there?”
“If it’s 0~9, then it’s 10³. So around a thousand combinations.”
“A thousand combinations? That’s surprisingly not many.”
On the surface, we all agreed that we didn’t want to dig into the matter because we were afraid of being punished by gods. However, deep down, we were all excited to have found a new game to kill our time with.
Hiroyoshi aligned the three numbers to 000 and pulled. Of course, nothing happened. He then shifted the last digit to 1, making it 001, and pulled again…
From that day onwards, the task of looking for the correct pin number to unlock the offering box became a new game for us. We felt it was a bit wrong to label ourselves ‘money thieves’, a title that could sully our reputation and kill the atmosphere. So we thought of ourselves as spies, and took the job of stealing money from the offering box as a badge of honor and pretended that we were only stealing secret military information to bring it somewhere safe.
***
We were very close to opening the offering box…. The thrill to open the offering box was what we liked the most. Also, the number of combinations, which was a thousand, was just right for us bored people. If there were 10,000 combinations, we would have soon gotten tired of attempting to open it. However, since there were 1,000, the hope that if we worked hard, we could open the offering box someday was what drove us to try harder.
Obviously, there was this looming threat that we could get punished by gods or beaten by people if we were found out. However, we also knew that the crime wasn’t too serious to the point that we would be taken to the police custody. This kind of risk-free thrill was the perfect stimulus for the people of our ages, who always showed a disinterested expression in almost everything.
Although we whispered among ourselves that it would be great if the offering box had a lot of money inside, but with how light it was, we also expected that it could be empty.
Not to mention, we had been hanging around the vicinity of the Tanuki Shrine for a long time, but we have never seen anyone dropping an offering.
However, such information didn’t matter to us. From the beginning, we had no interest in what was inside. Opening the lock was our sole purpose.
Although I consoled myself saying that we weren’t doing anything wrong since there wasn’t any money inside the offering box, perhaps I was the only one who was panicking inside the most.
