Under the Dust 2/3
“A ‘love hotel’, seriously?” Ryo stares at a house overgrown with vegetation, lost in the middle of a forest, in walking distance of the nearest lazy neighborhood. They see two locals as they walk down the street from the train station over here, and neither seemed to pay any extra attention to a group of young people armed with cameras who were taking photos of everything and filming each other.
Kame reaches out and tests the stability of a broken gate leading on to the property. There’s a sign asking for no trespassing, but who even reads these? The hinges give way after a few tugs and pushes, and then it needs just one more final push to get the gate to move through the overgrown grass. Kame looks over his shoulder, inviting the others to follow him. “I’ve been wanting to do this site for a while now. From everything I’ve heard, the inside should be really cool.”
“Let’s do this,” Jin says.
Kame likes the way those simple words set the atmosphere.
They are doing this.
“Wait. Is Meisa coming, or not?” Pi asks, reminding Kame the squad isn’t complete yet. Funny how Jin’s ‘let’s do this’ easily erased the part of Kame’s consciousness that knew they were supposed to meet Meisa here. Kame gave her a call last night after getting home and offered her to join them. She was clearly more curious about meeting the Americans rather than exploring a new location, which is a new one for her, but Kame can’t really blame her. A part of him is more giddy about seeing Jin’s reaction to this place than getting some cool footage for his channel.
Jin’s presence is seriously affecting Kame’s priorities.
He has no idea why it’s happening, or how to stop it.
Kame stops before walking through the gate. “Right. She is. We should probably wait for her.”
“Meisa is coming?” They are definitely having Ryo’s attention now.
“Jesus, Nishikido, you’ve really got it bad.” Jin smacks his friend’s shoulder while making sure to film every inch of Ryo’s reddening face.
“Well, the more the merrier, and all that shit, no?” Ryo defends himself weakly. He’s now more interested in the path that led them here than the house though.
While they wait, Pi tells them how he got a tip about this place from one of his followers who, while never actually having been inside and not being bold enough to go there, really wanted to see a video of it, and so Pi kind of promised to add it to his and Kame’s list of future explorations.
Jin tells them how they went to Europe, knowing they wouldn’t be able to see a third of all the tips they had got beforehand from people all over the place. French fans in particular had what seemed like an endless supply of tips for abandoned places Jin could visit and explore, and from the look of it, most of those mansions were in a perfect shape: the right level of decay accompanied by mostly intact interior.
“Man, now I want to go to France,” Kame groans and stretches against one of the posts holding the shaky gate at place. “I’ve always wanted to go there, for various reasons-”
“Mostly food,” Pi quips.
“For the culture and history,” Kame corrects him, adding some unnecessary stress to those words.
“And food,” Pi insists, and this time it leads to the intended reaction from Jin and Ryo, both of them grinning and eyeing Kame with amusement.
“And fashion,” Kame goes on, unfaltered.
Jin points his camera at Kame.
“And food,” Kame finally admits, rolling his eyes. “So what, I love food.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Jin assures him.
They are in the middle of a heated discussion about Jin and Ryo living off junk food for two months as they travelled across the States, documenting all possible closed-down mental asylums and tuberculosis hospitals, when Meisa finally shows up. As soon as she gets close enough to be recognized, Ryo forgets the end of his sentence.
Her pace speeds up as she’s almost there, and then she walks right into Kame’s personal space.
“How could you not tell me that Just Jin is coming to film here?” She pokes the center of Kame’s chest with a finger.
“And Yellow Ranger,” Ryo quickly adds, but his words don’t seem to register.
“Jesus, you guys are impossible! You’re supposed to tell me these things!” She shakes her head in frustration, then steps back and turns to Jin, presenting not only a warm welcome smile, but also the front of her black hoodie that has a barcode and the word ‘Jip’s’ printed in white across her chest. “Hi, nice to meet you. Biggest fan here.”
Jin beams. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Hey, what’s up?” Meisa shoots back.
Kame frowns. It’s like they are suddenly speaking a different language altogether. There’s something he’s missing, presumably because he didn’t watch the couple of weeks of watching time worth of content on Jin’s channel. Obviously, Meisa did. Maybe he should give it a try as well at some point. Like, when he’s bored or curious about different countries and how other urban explorers approach the subject of documenting decaying past. From the little he’s already seen, Jin’s doing a great job…
Meisa gets a quick hug, and for a reason he can’t really explain, Kame looks away and pretends to be busy testing the hinges of the shabby gate next to him, even though he knows they aren’t stuck and the way inside the property is in all clear.
“You have my hoodie,” Jin is grinning, holding Meisa’s shoulders and looking at her, like he’s never seen a girl in a hoodie before. “I’ve never seen anyone wear one of these!”
“Really? Oh my god, that’s such a shame! I love it. The material is amazing.”
“I know, right? Hey, Kame, since you said you’re into fashion stuff, I could get you one of those, too. It’s my limited streetwear collection. Always only two hundred pieces of each.”
Kame looks up. “Why not. One can never have enough hoodies.”
“That’s some serious truth right there,” Jin chuckles.
“What does ‘Jip’s’ even mean?” Kame finally asks, because if he didn’t, it would totally bug him all day. It’s like the whole ‘Jinsplorers’ moment all over again, only this time he’s even more confused. He saw Meisa in the very same hoodie before, but he never knew there was a connection to Jin.
“Jin’s. Important. People.” With each word, Jin points at one of the letters printed on the hoodie, without actually touching Meisa or making her feel uncomfortable. A quick glance at his friend’s face tells Kame she’s pretty impressed with Jin’s act. Personal space and consent, and not overstepping boundaries are a sure path to win Meisa’s trust. “I started the line to raise money for my travels, so every person who buys something pretty much helps me accomplish my dream of documenting every single abandoned place around the world. I can’t explain it, but it’s important to me, to do that, and that makes the people who help me important too. Thus, Jin’s Important People. Jip’s.”
“That’s pretty cool, actually.” Kame means it.
Knowing the best ways to sell your personal brand is a must when your income relies on people knowing you and liking you.
Kame’s not bad at it himself, but Jin, damn, Jin’s on a completely different level of knowing the rules of this game. Like… Tackey&Tsubasa level. Saying Kame is impressed would be an understatement.
Meisa pouts. “My ‘EXPLORE WITH MEisa’ sounds so lame in comparison.”
“So does not!” Jin counters. He sounds like he means it, too. Kame likes that, likes how genuine Jin is. He jumps head first into everything, this whole trip being a prime example. From what Kame understands, it was mostly a spur of the moment decision, a bit like, “We’re doing this now,” and the next day Kame had a million missed calls on his phone while Yamapi and Ryo were discussing actual details, all the how’s and when’s.
“Not lame at all,” Ryo jumps in again, sensing his chance. “I’d explore with you anytime!”
“Speaking of lame…” Jin grins.
“Are we still talking fashion, or are we doing some exploring?” Yamapi interrupts whatever is about to unfold. “Me and Kame have wanted to check this place out for a while now, so let’s do this.”
And just like that, they all get their cameras ready and one after another walk through the creaky gate. Feet in a variety of shoes, from Ryo’s solid combat boots to Jin’s sport shoes to Meisa’s bright red sneakers, make their way through the desolated front yard, heading towards a door on the left that looks broke open, unlike the main entrance decorated with more ‘no trespassing’ signs.
Kame, Jin, and Yamapi are the ones filming everything, their commentaries mingling in whenever they happen to get too close to each other’s filming spot, while Ryo and Meisa are more loners roaming around and looking for the perfect shot. It’s not easy to get one, though, because there are trees and wild greenery everywhere, shadowing what’s left of the building.
Kame finishes his intro first, which is a surprise, given how many times he had to repeat parts he had previously messed up, too distracted by Jin moving around and being loud and cheerful. Every time Kame caught the now familiar, “Hey, what’s up, Jinsplorers,” he wanted to know what Jin was talking about. Did Jin mention he’s doing this location with Kame? Probably yes, because that’s what the online community does-they boost each other up and encourage their followers to follow also other people. Kame himself has just spent some time prompting people to follow Jin if they want to see some cool videos from around the world.
“… and here’s Kame from Ronin Explores,” Jin says as he makes his way over to Kame’s location.
Kame gives Jin’s camera a wave. “Hi guys. Ready to get in there?”
“A love hotel closed down in the 80s? Hell, yeah!” Jin beams.
The side door gives in easily, and they are inside.
“Holy crap,” Jin says with a gasp, so close behind Kame that Kame can not only sense Jin’s camera over his shoulder, but feels Jin’s breath at the back of his neck. The puff of hot air makes him shiver; or maybe it’s just a reaction to the place, all desolated and falling apart, but still preserved well enough to offer a glimpse into its former shiny glory. Dark walls, an obscene picture hanging above a red bathtub filled with rain water, a heap of molding towels on the floor. A big window opening the space into a small, private yard, creating an illusion someone could’ve easily watched the people who took a bath there.
Kame zooms in onto the picture; under a grown apple tree, a naked woman kneels in front of a naked man, reaching for a cloth to veil her body, or his. The story of Adam and Eve presented here in this room seems like a joke, though, because people enjoying their time in here cared about all but modesty…
Kame says that much aloud for the camera while capturing every detail of the room.
When he accidentally gets Jin in the picture, Jin is grinning and giving him a thumb-up. “That’s pretty deep, huh?”
“I like to think about the places I visit,” Kame says simply.
Jin nods. “I get it. And I wasn’t mocking. You seem to be good at reading the atmosphere of the locations you explore. Not everyone can do that. Hell, even I struggle sometimes.”
Kame’s cheeks heat up.
“Thanks.”
They move on, from the bathroom to the adjacent bedroom with a ridiculously big bed surrounded by mirrors, some of them shattered, some of them only cracked, but most of them are still perfect in their frames, reflecting everything that could happen on the bed.
Jin steps forward, stopping at the edge of the bared mattress. He slowly turns around to film the mirrors and his own reflection in them.
“Man, this is kinky. People would just fuck while watching themselves doing it. But then again, it’s a love hotel, right? So auto-voyeurism is probably the least kinky stuff having been going on around here.”
Somehow, Kame can’t get the imagine of two writhing bodies multiplied by the mirror plates out of his head now, and he speaks before thinking, “I think it’s pretty hot.”
“Now I need to know whether you have a mirror in your bedroom or not!”
The worst thing about the moment isn’t Kame’s realization of what he just said, but the eagerness in Jin’s voice when he replies to Kame’s unexpected confession.
Fuck.
“What? No, no way!” Kame quickly discards the topic. “We should go check out the rest of this place,” he mutters, looking for a door and an escape route while Jin’s still looking at him, a mix of curiosity and amusement plastered all over his face.
“Whatever,” Jin chuckles. “I’m just gonna get some more details over here.” By ‘over here’ he means the bed, naturally, and as Kame moves towards the nearest door that should be connecting the room with the rest of the hotel, Jin behind his back is leaning over to film the mirror frames.
Kame is one foot out in the hallway when he hears Jin’s voice.
“What the-? Hey, have you seen it just now?”
But when Kame turns around, all he sees is Jin standing there with a perplexed expression, and the reflection of Jin’s back in the mirrors.
“Have I seen what?”
Jin glances over his shoulder, frowns, then quickly fiddles with his camera to rewind and replay the last recording. His frown deepens, and he shakes his head. “Nothing…”
“Have you got the footage you wanted?” Kame asks.
“Yeah… I guess…” Jin purses his lips, staring at the back display of the camera. “Hm.”
Kame doesn’t ask again.
Usually, when Kame explores places with other people, they all end up doing their own thing and only come together at the end, or if one of them finds something worth sharing that the others shouldn’t miss.
This time seems different though, because Jin is sticking with him, moving through dark, narrow hallways, testing which door can be opened and which is still locked, or stuck. Jin’s voice narrating the experience of exploring this place is a constant murmur in Kame’s own recording.
He doesn’t really mind.
Sometimes Jin’s commentary sparks a thought that might’ve never occurred to Kame on his own.
“You could rent a room here for literally just an hour, or two,” Jin is saying while looking through some papers and flyers scattered all over a reception desk in the lobby, a small room one would walk into through the main entrance. Kame is filming more provocative pictures on the walls, as well as creepy, mangy taxidermy sitting on a cabinet opposite to the desk-so far he’s recognized a peasant and something that could easily be a hybrid of a dove and a peacock. It’s hard to tell when half of it is rotten away or eaten by moths. “There’s ten rooms in here,” Jin goes on, and Kame forgets about the bird mutants, “which doesn’t sound like a lot, but really, people wouldn’t rent this place for a week, or anything. They just wanted to have a good time, and get out of here.”
“Most of them probably had families, too,” Kame says.
“Yeah, right. So they would come here for some kinky time with their lovers, because they couldn’t just go to any hotel-”
“Regular hotels would ask too many questions, plus someone could see them going in and out, and that would bring up a whole new pile of different questions. Places like this, though, no one saw or heard anything. People could come here with multiple lovers at the same time, men could bring other men-something that would’ve got you in some serious troubles elsewhere. But here… no one gave a fuck.”
Jin’s nodding again. “Man, this is crazy though. I mean… Look at this!” He’s flipping through more papers when he suddenly find something really cool. And he wants to share it with Kame. “Is this the ‘Mirror Room’?” He points at a picture in a bottom corner of the page open in front of him.
Kame quickly walks over there, and they both lean over the counter and stare at the image through their cameras, their foreheads almost touching.
“Yeah! That’s the place.” Kame quickly flips the page, only to discover more pictures. It’s a brochure of the hotel, listing down all ten rooms, each with a different theme, and prices for either a one-hour-stay or a whole night. “This is both creepy and amazing. We can literally match the pictures in this with what the rooms look like today.”
“I want to find this one!” Jin presses a finger to the middle of the second page.
The room has a series of Kamasutra-like embossments running all around the walls, depicting men and women in a variety of sexual encounters. The picture quality is low and grainy and doesn’t show many details, just a general idea of what’s going on, but there’s no doubt about what they are looking at.
“Do you think people used those as a manual when they wanted to spice up their bedroom action?” Jin asks in all seriousness, leaning closer, as if that could help him focus better and see the details.
“Or they would play a game of how many of those they could go through in the hour they got to spend in that room,” Kame says with a shrug.
Who could even know what was going on inside the heads of people who came into this hotel, or really, into love hotels in general. Different people have different reasons to do the things they do.
Jin chuckles. “I’d play that.”
“Should I be surprised?” Kame gives Jin a quick glance, their eyes meet, all too close before Jin pulls back and straightens up.
Kame studies the picture some more, but really, if they want to get a closer look at the naughty embossments, they need to find the place and hope it’s in at least half as good shape as the Mirror Room.
They move from one room to another. Some are more desolated than others: one has a collapsed roof and the debris has buried pretty much everything, making it impossible to match its interior with any of the pictures in the catalogue; another one, on the other hand, is in a nearly perfect shape, with a walk-in onsen styled bath and even a little shrine in a corner.
“Somebody put a lot of money and thought into this,” Jin muses as he films details of the altar with arranged vases and white plates for offerings, as well as a number of small objects that must have been left there not too long ago by people exploring this place before Kame and Jin entered the premises.
Jin reaches into his pocket and fumbles around for a bit before pulling something out and placing it onto the shelf. It’s a lighter, one of those old-school metal ones.
To Kame’s raised eyebrow Jin says, “What? The Code speaks about not taking anything away, not about not leaving something behind.”
“I’m pretty sure it says you shouldn’t leave a mess.”
“It’s a $100 lighter. Hardly a mess. The ghosts in here deserve something nice.“
“Now you sound like Meisa. You should ask her. I’m pretty sure she’ll know about some local ones as well.” Kame shakes his head, then goes back to what he was talking about before. He makes it a point to ignore the shelf now though. “Anyway. When people came here, they wanted to forget about the everyday reality outside,” Kame says. That seems like the best generalization he can come up with. “Love hotels like this one used to play on people’s imagination.”
Jin looks up. “Used to?”
“Yeah. These places gave people something they didn’t get at home. Many love hotels were full of kitschy stuff, from rotating beds and mirrors…” Kame nods as he notices Jin’s smirk, both of them thinking of the first room they saw here. “To some really tacky furnishings. Things you wouldn’t find in a regular hotel, so whoever walked in one of these immediately knew where they were and what they could expect. Then a law introduced in the 80s tried to regulate love hotels, so naturally, a lot of them got rid of the weird cheap stuff to look like ‘normal’ hotels, in which case the law didn’t concern them anymore.”
“What’s indecent about pornographic engravings all over the walls?” Jin chuckles.
Kame shakes his head.
“So places either changed their façade and kept going, or were simply closed down?”
“Most of them underwent some serious revamping and kept going, under a thin veil of fake decency. But it’s hard to give exact numbers. You can’t simply walk into a library and ask for academic books about stuff like that.”
“Really? I’ve read studies about porn before. I mean, serious studies.”
“A half of the people who seek love hotels are married couples who can’t have sex at home while they either live under one roof with their parents, or have their own kids. The clientele of places like this hasn’t changed much over time. Sex is not something you write about, or even talk about openly here. ”
Jin raises a brow. “You do. Now.”
“Yeah, and my parents would frown if they heard me. My grandparents… grandpa would be scandalized.” Kame feels a twitch in the corner of his lips. “Grandma would probably want to see this place though.”
“As if they didn’t visit one of these in the past as well,” Jin can’t help himself, and just the thought alone turns the twitch in Kame’s face into a burst of laughter.
“Oh god! Don’t say that!”
“Too late,” Jin is grinning and filming Kame and his snorts and hiccups.
“We should just find the porn comic room now.” Kame is not sure he can now look at anything in here without thinking of his grandparents, which is disturbing as hell, but at least he can breathe now when the worst of his fit is over, and he and Jin can continue their exploration.
They are just about to round a corner, stepping over some planks and crumbled wallpaper piled up on the floor, when they hear Ryo’s voice.
“What the hell-? Meisa! Pi! You guys need to see this! Where the fuck is Jin, he can’t miss this!”
Jin and Kame glance at each other, then Jin takes in a sharp breath and jumps over some of the scrap lying under his feet. “I’m here!”
“What is it?” Kame follows right behind.
He bumps into Jin’s back a moment later when Jin halts in the opening of the nearest door. Jin wavers upon the collision, but he stands firm, and Kame quickly peels himself off of Jin.
“Why the fuck is there a rocking horse in here?” Jin asks, laughing, but also very much perplexed.
Kame peeks into the room over Jin’s shoulder.
There’s nothing much standing out as far as the décor goes. Definitely no pornographic pictures on the walls. Dark purple wallpaper is peeling off, revealing smudgy walls with scattered clusters of forming mold. One of the dingy stuffed bird mutants they saw in the lobby earlier is sitting on an otherwise empty shelf. The only remarkable thing about the whole place is a giant bed taking up most of the room’s space; a black and white zebra pattern bedspread is covering the mattress, and right in the middle of the bed, there’s a big rocking horse. Its whole body is sheathed in red leather, with black and gold details of mane and a bridle. It’s got dead-looking eyes, black dots painted on white discs.
Ryo is leaning forward to get some nice close-up shoots without destroying the intentional set up.
“Someone had fun arranging this one,” he comments.
“Fucking creepy,” Jin says, taking a step inside the room. “Look at the freak, just chilling there…”
“I can’t believe someone brought it in here.”
Jin approaches the bed. “From an amusement park to a love hotel.”
“You should get on it,” Ryo suggests with a chuckle. “It’s gonna do a sick picture.”
He doesn’t need to say it twice.
“Oh man…!”
Jin walks around to get the scene on film, and then is on the bed, balancing on the mattress dipping under his steps as he makes his way to the horse. His feet burrow into the shabby bedding, leaving prints and crumpled sheets, and the horse wobbles as Jin gets close.
“It’s got this coin mechanism here, you know, like the stuff for kids in malls,” Jin says after further observation. “Is there a supermarket somewhere nearby, Kame?”
“Not really. Jin, I don’t think it’s-”
Unlike Jin and Ryo who are too busy arranging Jin’s photo session with the horse, Kame has enough time to come to a conclusion the two of them are wrong. He’s in no way an expert on this kind of stuff, but with the little he knows and has read before, he’s positive the horse is not a kid’s toy.
There’s a reason why it’s here.
No one had to bring it over.
Jin balances some more to straddle the thing, still filming everything he does. “Guys, there’s a fucking rocking horse. Like, would you believe that? Oh, look, it probably had a saddle at some point. See the hole here, and here?” He points to the horse’s back.
Then he sits down, grinning widely for Ryo’s camera. “For Instagram!”
“For Instagram!” Ryo echoes.
“Hmm, this is actually comfortable…” Jin sways a bit back and forth, the mattress the horse is sitting on giving the move an extra bounce.
And Kame decides it’s the best moment to bring some light into the whole thing. “The saddle you’re missing most likely had a dildo on it,” he says and his rich voice fills the room.
Ryo chokes. “What?”
Jin stops rocking, but doesn’t jump off the horse the way Kame kind of expected him to. The lack of reaction is a bit disappointing, if Kame is to be completely honest. His camera is running, but Jin’s not freaking out.
Jin’s only reaction is to shuffle a bit back and look down at the two holes in the leather covering the horse’s body.
“It’s like a sex toy?” Kame clarifies. “It’s a vibrating horse. There was a dildo attached to it at some point. You-” he stops himself and clears his throat, not quite meeting Jin’s eyes. “Someone would put money in, sit on it, and as the horse started vibrating and the dildo rotated with increasing frequency, the person was in for a wild ride.”
Not that Kame is an expert on this sort of things.
“Oh-my-god!” Ryo is wheezing, laughing so hard there are tears in his eyes, and he needs to lower his camera because his hands are shaking. “You just got fucked by a horse!”
Jin sits without moving. “I feel violated.”
Ryo wheezes. “Wait, I need to document this properly.”
They mess around for a bit, with Jin poking the holes where various add-ons could be attached, and Ryo trying to figure out how the whole machine once used to work. Kame stays out of it, listening with amusement to the number of dick jokes Ryo can come up with and the ease Jin either counters them or waves them off, all the while still sitting on that damn horse like it’s the most comfortable chair he’s ever planted his ass on.
“What’s going on here?” Meisa’s voice brings Kame back to reality.
The funny thing is he doesn’t remember spacing out, or what he was thinking about while he apparently wasn’t present.
He rubs his forehead.
“We found a vibrating horse.” As if that weren’t obvious enough.
Meisa glares at Jin and Ryo, now both on the bed. At least Jin has finally got up.
“Great,” Meisa sighs, “and you just had to ruin the set up, huh?”
“All the fun parts are gone though,” Jin tells her, as if that was the explanation she’s waiting for.
“Your ass is gonna live another day,” Ryo cracks up.
Jin chuckles. “Lucky me.” He turns his camera to his face. “Have you heard, guys? My ass is safe.”
Meisa, shaking her head and probably breaking at least 1/100 of the pedestal she’s put Just Jin on, takes a few pictures, too.
“Hey, at least now it doesn’t look too arranged,” Ryo offers helpfully. He snaps a picture of Meisa glaring at him. “This one’s definitely not for Instagram.”
The two of them are still bickering about pros and cons of arranging stuff inside abandoned buildings when they finally run into Yamapi some ten minutes later, following Kame through a long, mostly empty hallway to the far corner of the hotel complex. While they were too busy messing around with the giant horse-sex-toy, Yamapi accidentally stumbled upon the room Jin and Kame hoped to find.
There’s not much left though, to Kame’s disappointment.
Jin’s not happy about it either.
“What a bummer,” he groans, filming the crumbling pieces still stubbornly holding on to the walls while the rest has long fallen off and turned into dusty piles on the floor. “Can you see it, Jinsplorers? The room is completely destroyed. The part over there even looks like someone came here with a hammer and smashed it on purpose.”
“I don’t think it was necessary,” Kame tells him, as he’s filming just a couple of steps away. “For all the shiny, extravagant furnishing in here, the level of craftsmanship is actually pretty poor.”
“People didn’t come here to admire the décor,” Meisa says matter-of-factly, crouching down to take a picture of something lying on the floor.
“The décor was still a part of the game though,” Jin counters.
“That’s for sure.” At least they agree on that much.
Meisa stands up, pointing her camera at Jin. She’s got this look in her face, one Kame knows all too well, and he can almost, almost tell what’s to come next. When Meisa speaks, Kame is not disappointed. “Now, would you come to a place like this for fun times, or nah?”
For a moment there, Kame has no control over his reactions, and his eyes dart in Jin’s direction. He wants to see this. It’s a joke, and Kame wants to smack himself for not having come up with it himself, because it’s definitely the kind of teasing he’d normally bother Pi with. He’d ask which one of the rooms would be Pi’s favorite, or if he’d take some inspiration from those now shattered engravings. But now it’s Meisa asking Jin, and Kame is so curious about the answer he almost forgets to breathe. It’s pretty silly, to be honest.
And it gets worse when Jin looks at him to meet Kame’s eyes as he answers. “I’d be definitely interested in that Mirror Room.”
Kame swallows.
The mental image of the couple rolling around the sheets in that very bed becomes less vague then, with one of the bodies suddenly gaining distinctive features of Jin’s sharp shoulders and dark messy hair with close-cut patches on the sides.
Kame frowns. He’s not getting that image out of his head any time soon, is he?
“Oh-oh!” Meisa grins.
“Oh-oh-what?” Yamapi asks at the same time as Kame mumbles, “Oh no,” and they look at each other and laugh.
Ryo glances at one, then the other, then at Jin.
Jin shrugs. “Look, I sat on that dildo-horse. Don’t kinkshame me for mirrors, okay?”
That makes Meisa laugh as well. “I would never!”
“Good,” Jin grimaces.
“That’s totally her there-are-ghosts face, brace yourself,” Pi chuckles when the worst of his laughing fit slowly wears off.
“What?” Jin’s eyes grow wide.
“Ghosts?” Ryo perks up and peers at Jin. “Now that’s something I want to know.”
“It’s said there’s a ghost of a young woman in the room with the mirrors. Her name is Hamiko,” Meisa says calmly, slowly looking from Kame to Pi to Ryo, and finally, to Jin where her gaze lingers a little longer. Meisa is good at a couple of things, and recognizing the best target in her audience is one of them. Ryo may be eager to hear all about the supernatural stuff going on in here, but Jin’s definitely the most receptive. “I’ve spoken to someone who saw her in one of the mirrors and she tried to communicate. They could read her lips, and all.”
“Man, that’s so cool!” Ryo gasp. “What did she say?”
Meisa shrugs. “She was waiting for a lover who never showed up. I guess she’s still waiting.”
“Did she kill herself in here?” Ryo asks eagerly.
“Really, dude?” There’s only a tiny hint of panic in Jin’s voice, and since no one else seems to notice, Kame decides he’s just over-analyzing it now. Over-analyzing Jin. “I liked that room.”
Ryo makes a face.
“If it’s of any consolation, I don’t think she actually died here,” Meisa says.
“Aw, what a bummer,” Ryo mumbles.
“Don’t ghosts usually haunt places where they like… you know, became ghosts?” Pi asks, likely out of genuine curiosity and not in order to rile Jin up some more.
“Not always. Ghosts are attached to things they cared about. Sometimes it’s an object, other times a ghost sticks to a place they had the strongest connection to when they still lived. And Hamiko used to meet her lover in this hotel for years. Some say since she was a schoolgirl even.”
“Dude, that sounds like a manga plot!” Ryo grins. He’s liking this thing way too much. “A school uniform and all those mirrors… hmmm…”
Jin sighs again and gives up. “I officially don’t like that room anymore.”
“Oh come on! It’s a perfectly nice, kinky room. Sure, no animal sex toys, so I understand you can’t fully appreciate it-”
“Oh, shut up, Nishikido!”
Ryo walks over and pats Jin’s shoulder, while wrinkling his nose at Meisa and mouthing, “Ghosts aren’t his thing.” Then he lets his voice raise to a normal volume: “We should go back there. I want to check the mirrors! Hamiko-chan!”
Jin groans and smacks Ryo’s hand off his shoulder. “There are no ghosts. In the mirrors, or anywhere else.” With that Jin stomps out of the room without another word.
“He’s so easy!” Ryo chuckles.
Meisa raises an eyebrow. “You think it’s a joke?”
Ryo waves a hand dismissively. “A dead lady in a mirror is nothing. You should’ve seen him in this one asylum in West Virginia! He was jumping at the sight of his own shadow whenever wind grazed the windows because it sounded like a kid’s sobbing!”
While Meisa doesn’t look too impressed, Yamapi laughs and he and Ryo start thinking of places with some freaky horror lore attached to them to take Jin to next.
Kame really wants to join them-he’d be the first to dismiss this whole mirror-ghost episode as a nonsense, just like he does with every other story Meisa tells him during their exploring; but he can’t shake off the memory of Jin staring at the mirrors surrounding the bed earlier. He hasn’t really thought anything about it until now. And now it’s all he can think about.
-
When it’s time to part for the evening, Jin talks Kame into coming to the hotel with him. He’s got an extra Jip’s hoodie in his room and he wants Kame to have it.
To his credit, Ryo didn’t actually nag Meisa about giving him one of her hoodies as well, even though Jin’s pretty sure his friend would love to just follow Meisa to her place, a hoodie being in the game, or not.
“Thanks for this,” Kame says, standing in the middle of Jin’s room and holding his new hoodie against his chest with both hands.
Jin grins at him. “No problem. I’ve got a few t-shirts with me as well, so I’m seriously considering doing a fan meet-up at some point.” He’s just not sure there would be enough people interested, or what the best place to organize such a thing would be.
“In the end the two weeks you’ve got here might not be enough.”
“Yeah, well, I can always come back, right?” Jin closes his suitcase with a few tugs on the zipper, and looks around.
The room is a mess of early morning chaos, because Jin had hardly enough time to brush his teeth and do something about his hair before he left to meet with Kame and Yamapi today. He also forgot about all that mess during the day and it pretty much punched him in the face a couple minutes ago when he entered the room, with Kame following suit. Not that Jin cares. From his experience, no one in the urban exploring community would judge him for any of this. They are all pretty much the same. Always more concerned about having their cameras and phones, and all batteries fully charged, than about making their beds and tucking away yesterday’s dirty clothes.
There are half empty water bottles on the vanity table by a window, heaps of clothes scattered all over the floor and chairs, Jin’s camera bag and his backpack are on the bed where he’s tossed them the first thing after walking in.
Jin gives the room another quick glance, then turns to Kame.
“Do you want a drink or something?” he asks.
He’s buzzing with the day’s events and experience, and isn’t really ready to put an end to it. He wants to ride this amazing feeling for a bit longer. And he doesn’t want to do it alone.
“We could check the pictures and some of the footage. You know, compare what we’ve got.”
Or they could even do some vlogging. That would be cool.
Jin’s been filming short entries ever since the decision to come to Japan was made and plane tickets were bought. It’s never more than five minutes, or so, of him sharing step-by-step preparations for the journey. Now he’s here and he kind of wants to tell the world that Kame knows the best Japanese abandoned spots.
Kame shrugs. “Why not. Pi and Ryo are most likely debating ghost manga anyway, so it’s not like I’m missing much.”
“Come on, now! You’d rather spend time with those two? I’m hurt.”
“Maybe I’d rather spend time with Meisa,” Kame teases. But he’s taking off his backpack, putting it down on the floor, and carefully placing his new hoodie on top of it.
“That’s fair.” Jin nods. Meisa is cool, a bit scary when she’s annoyed, as Jin had a chance to find out today, but still cool nonetheless-but right now, Jin is glad the one keeping him company is Kame.
They get some drinks and settle on the floor with their cameras and Jin’s laptop. Their backs rest against the bed, their legs stretched out, and they are surrounded by a dozen various cables to connect the computer and the cameras.
Kame’s comes first.
The data card still carries also some pictures from Kame’s previous adventures, and while Kame is trying to navigate Jin to the ones taken in the love hotel today, Jin gets curious and opens a folder dated a couple of days back.
They look through the photos. The laptop is sitting on Jin’s thighs, slightly angled sideways so Kame can see the monitor without too much color distortion. Sometimes it means Kame needs to lean in a bit closer, pressing his shoulder against Jin’s, sometimes it almost looks like the easiest way to do this would be for Kame to rest his head against Jin’s shoulder permanently. A couple of times Kame kind of does just that, without realizing it. Jin doesn’t flinch away, too absorbed in the pictures in front of him.
“I’m still editing the final video for this one,” Kame says, when Jin asks about the place the pictures were taken at.
Jin wouldn’t mind watching the raw material either, to be honest. He knows firsthand there’s something about all those little things and too long shoots that rarely make it to the twenty minute long videos that get eventually posted online. It’s also tough to pick and choose what to share with the viewers and what’s gonna get dismissed and just sit in a folder somewhere.
“You should definitely add some of the footage with the old photos.” Not that Kame actually needs any tips on how to edit videos. From everything Jin had a chance to see, Kame is as close to a professional as one can get. “Is it just me, or do old photographs kind of add this… I don’t know, realism? Like, you can actually see the people who existed in that place once upon a time. It’s not just an empty setting.”
Kame stares at the picture on the laptop screen, a shelf with a couple of framed black and white photos. He nods, lips pressed together. He’s quiet for a moment, then lets out a soft chuckle. “Meisa would tell you it’s because there are ghosts. Somewhere. Somehow.” He points at the screen. “One apparently moves some of the frames from one place to another in there, too.”
“Really?” Jin zooms in on one of the photographs. Two kids with a dog. “Did you see any moving frames?”
“As if!” Kame nudges Jin’s shoulder, this time leaning in on purpose.
Jin pushes back, bouncing Kame in the opposite direction. They laugh and stop only when the laptop in Jin’s lap dangerously wobbles and nearly topples over on to the floor.
“I need to keep you and Meisa apart! She can be very convincing when she starts the whole boo-boo storytelling.”
Convincing, hm.
Jin skips through a couple more pictures until he gets to the end of the folder. Then promptly opens the one created today.
“So you don’t believe in that stuff.” It’s not even a question. Jin’s seen enough of Kame’s reactions to already know the answer if it were a question. Ghosts aren’t real. Of course they aren’t.
“I will believe when I see one.”
Noticing they are now looking at the new photos, Kame calms down and focuses on the screen again. His shoulder is pressed against Jin’s, and Jin can smell the faint scent of citrusy shampoo and dust in Kame’s hair.
It’s a little weird for a second because Jin’s not usually one to notice those things, and he definitely doesn’t go around sniffing guys to know what shampoo they use. Not that he’s sniffing Kame’s hair deliberately. It’s just right there, in his personal space.
Then they start looking through the photos taken earlier that day, and Jin’s thoughts take a sharp turn. Away from shampoos and wondering what Kame’s hair might feel under his fingers, and more towards the adventure they went on.
The outdoor pictures are pretty decent, given there wasn’t really much to see in the middle of all the overgrown greenery. Jin was switching between filming and taking photos, and now his fingers itch to start posting everything on Instagram right away. One picture after another. His followers would either go mad with excitement, or unfollow him for excessive spamming. With the wide variety of reasons people follow his social media, Jin can imagine either is possible.
“I still can’t get over how well preserved the whole site is,” Jin says after a moment. It will never stop amazing him. “You’d never find something like that in the States. Fucking vandals will go any length to put a tag on everything, just to show they were there.” He tells Kame about this one tiny town in the middle of nowhere that seemed perfectly locked up in time, surrounded by nothing but mountains and a forest, but when they finally got close enough, the first thing they saw was fucking graffiti all over the place. Someone must’ve hiked for hours just to ruin the place.
“I’d still love to see that someday.”
Jin looks at Kame. “Then you should totally come visit. We could go on a roadtrip and check out some cool stuff!”
Jin isn’t one to plan his life too much ahead, because where’s the fun in doing that, but right now the gears in his head are spinning fast, already planning all sorts of scenarios for when Kame arrives to the States. For Jin, it’s not a matter of if but rather, when. He’s got some stuff lined up for the following month or so after coming back from Japan, a trip he didn’t really plan either, but after that, everything is fair game. If Kame just calls him one day to tell him he’s getting on a plane the following morning, Jin will be more than ready to pick him up at the airport.
Which is, after all, pretty much a reverse situation of what happened with Jin’s trip over here.
“Really?” Kame perks up, forgetting about the laptop for a moment.
“Sure. It seems fair, doesn’t it? And if your friends want to join you, they definitely should. Though I probably don’t have enough couches you all could sleep on.”
“You do have hotels over there though, right?”
“Yeah, well. But we’re friends now, and I don’t let my friends stay in hotels when they could as well stay at my place.” The apartment isn’t big, but he’s previously fitted up three people just fine. Sure, one of them was his girlfriend at the time and she didn’t need an extra bed, but that’s a detail, and if Kame eventually comes with both Yamapi and Meisa, they will figure something out.
Kame gives him a bright smile. “That’s so cool! You’ll have to show me all the supposedly haunted stuff so I can then tell Meisa.”
“Oh-oh! Why is everyone so obsessed with ghosts?”
“Because it’s fun?” Kame shrugs and reaches out to the laptop to skip the next few pictures that show mostly the overgrown front yard of the love hotel. At the same time, Jin’s hand moves as well and they collide halfway over the keyboard. Jin chuckles and Kame mumbles, “Sorry,” then pulls his hand back, letting Jin do the key pressing and setting up the pace of the picture changes.
“Meisa seems to take it all pretty seriously though. Making it sound like there really might be something out of this world. I mean, photo frames changing location? For real?”
“It’s a well-known place, people go there all the time. They may not spray all over the walls, but they still want to leave a mark.”
“Maybe,” Jin admits, but he’s not convinced. He doesn’t want to believe in ghosts, but some of the stories are so titillating it’s hard to just wave them off like it’s nothing. “What about the lady in the hotel today? There are real people who saw her and even communicated with her.”
Kame looks at Jin with a raised eyebrow. “People will tell you all sorts of things.”
Jin unplugs Kame’s camera and connects his own, then taps at the keyboard a few times, searching for the right photo. “I saw… something.-Don’t laugh.-Way before Meisa said anything about the place being haunted or about the ghost showing up in the Mirror Room. I saw something.”
He skips past more pictures, looking for one particular photo.
“Like what exactly?”
That’s cool. At least Kame is not laughing or telling him it’s a complete nonsense. Sure, Kame probably still thinks just that, but Jin’s grateful Kame isn’t saying it aloud. Because a big part of Jin also thinks it’s pretty stupid. It’s the part that always leads him into the next abandoned place with lead-based paint creepily peeling off mold-infested walls and corroded window hinges shrieking under the tiniest gust of draught. It’s the part that assures him the biggest danger at those places is black mold, or property owners unexpectedly showing up and threatening to call the police because yes, the whole trespassing thing is something people often take seriously, even though Jin never enters the premises with an intent to steal anything.
Jin wishes the rational part of him had a better command over the other part that gets all jumpy at weird sounds, and that likes to be enticed into believing there’s something that can’t be simply explained with reason in this world.
And it’s this other part of him that knows exactly what he saw earlier in one of the mirrors.
“I don’t know, something” he hears himself saying when he finally finds the right photo. It’s a picture of the bed surrounded by mirrors. Jin remembers filming the whole thing in one long shoot, slowly taking in the differences between where the mirrors were still intact and where there was nothing left anymore, just the wooden frame and possibly some shards. Then he switched to the photo mode to zoom in on some of the intricate decorations.
And she was right there.
“A lady in a kimono. Standing in the far corner behind me. She raised a hand, like she was trying to reach out.”
Jin could see her as clearly as he can see Kame now, but there’s nothing in the picture. He’s not even sure what he was hoping to find. Proof there was a ghost in the room with them today? Proof he didn’t just make it all up? That it wasn’t a play of lights and shadows later intensified by Meisa’s story?
Jin rubs the side of his nose, squinting his eyes at the laptop screen.
To his surprise, Kame leans closer to look as well.
“Maybe you saw me and didn’t realize right away the angles and lights and shadows?”
That would be certainly an option. But. But Kame was already on his way out of the door. Nowhere behind Jin to be reflected in the mirror. And then there’s this. “Were you wearing a kimono though?”
“Not today.” Kame nudges Jin’s shoulder. “I could wear one tomorrow if you ask nicely.”
“Really?”
Now Jin really wants to see that. No more ghosts. He wants to see Kame looking all traditional and serious-quite a contrast to his current stylish looks of a cool anime character. With his perfect hair and his spot-on sense of fashion.
Jin chuckles at the thought.
All those hours of watching stuff with Ryo must’ve seriously damaged his brain.
Kame slides a little lower against the bed, relaxing. “Well, it’s not the most comfortable piece of clothing to wear for exploring places, but I do own one or two. My parents insisted.”
“Now I want to see that.”
Kame rolls his eyes. “I look ridiculous.”
Jin carefully puts the laptop on the side and bends his knees. He was just starting to feel the tingle of incoming cramping.
“That’s unlikely the case.” His head tilts back against the bed and he lets it rest there, turned just slightly to the side so he can watch Kame’s face.
Kame watches right back.
He doesn’t say anything, and Jin’s not sure where to go from there. They were just talking rubbish about ghosts and now Jin can’t stop thinking about how attractive Kame would look in fine clothes. That’s not something Jin usually thinks about in relation to guys. Meisa, Meisa would look incredible in a kimono, too, but strangely enough, that particular aesthetic doesn’t hold Jin’s attention without him willfully forcing the image into his head. Meanwhile, mental images of Kame appear on their own and with shocking ease.
Jin carefully steers the conversation to Kame’s family then, because that seems like a safe topic. And he’s curious. Curious about who Kame is and what he likes, and sure, Jin already knows plenty just from having watched a number of Kame’s videos, but Kame’s voice has this husky tilt to it when he tries to express something personal in English, and Jin could probably listen to Kame talking all night.
Which is, coincidentally, exactly what happens.
Kame talking about his big family is only one step from Jin talking about his parents and brother Reio, and before they know it, it’s past midnight and they are eating take-outs and drinking beer, and Jin is just tipsy enough to tell Kame about this one time back in his high school senior year when he went down on a guy at some party, because he wanted to figure out if he was into girls because being into girls was expected from him, or whether it was just the way he is.
Kame laughs so hard he spills some of his beer, and it gets even worse because Jin grins and says, “It was a complete disaster, of course, because no amount of experimental porn watching can prepare you for what it’s like to have a dick in your mouth.” That turns Kame’s laugher into hysterics and he’s just wheezing and choking on the last bite of noodles he swallowed.
“I’ve never done it again,” Jin admits between chuckles.
“Would you though?” Kame asks, peering at Jin from under bangs of hair that no longer hold a shape and are falling messily into his face.
Jin shrugs. “I don’t know. Never really thought about it.” Then he narrows his eyes. “What about you?”
Kame’s face heats up, and Jin forgets to laugh because he’s too busy looking.
Kame slowly shakes his head, eyes cast down to his food. He pokes a piece of shrimp with his chopsticks a few times. He mumbles, “Definitely never had a dick in my mouth,” and the words are hardly audible, but Jin hears them anyway.
It’s been a while since Jin laughed so much he felt tears rolling down his cheeks.
-
(part 3)
Kame reaches out and tests the stability of a broken gate leading on to the property. There’s a sign asking for no trespassing, but who even reads these? The hinges give way after a few tugs and pushes, and then it needs just one more final push to get the gate to move through the overgrown grass. Kame looks over his shoulder, inviting the others to follow him. “I’ve been wanting to do this site for a while now. From everything I’ve heard, the inside should be really cool.”
“Let’s do this,” Jin says.
Kame likes the way those simple words set the atmosphere.
They are doing this.
“Wait. Is Meisa coming, or not?” Pi asks, reminding Kame the squad isn’t complete yet. Funny how Jin’s ‘let’s do this’ easily erased the part of Kame’s consciousness that knew they were supposed to meet Meisa here. Kame gave her a call last night after getting home and offered her to join them. She was clearly more curious about meeting the Americans rather than exploring a new location, which is a new one for her, but Kame can’t really blame her. A part of him is more giddy about seeing Jin’s reaction to this place than getting some cool footage for his channel.
Jin’s presence is seriously affecting Kame’s priorities.
He has no idea why it’s happening, or how to stop it.
Kame stops before walking through the gate. “Right. She is. We should probably wait for her.”
“Meisa is coming?” They are definitely having Ryo’s attention now.
“Jesus, Nishikido, you’ve really got it bad.” Jin smacks his friend’s shoulder while making sure to film every inch of Ryo’s reddening face.
“Well, the more the merrier, and all that shit, no?” Ryo defends himself weakly. He’s now more interested in the path that led them here than the house though.
While they wait, Pi tells them how he got a tip about this place from one of his followers who, while never actually having been inside and not being bold enough to go there, really wanted to see a video of it, and so Pi kind of promised to add it to his and Kame’s list of future explorations.
Jin tells them how they went to Europe, knowing they wouldn’t be able to see a third of all the tips they had got beforehand from people all over the place. French fans in particular had what seemed like an endless supply of tips for abandoned places Jin could visit and explore, and from the look of it, most of those mansions were in a perfect shape: the right level of decay accompanied by mostly intact interior.
“Man, now I want to go to France,” Kame groans and stretches against one of the posts holding the shaky gate at place. “I’ve always wanted to go there, for various reasons-”
“Mostly food,” Pi quips.
“For the culture and history,” Kame corrects him, adding some unnecessary stress to those words.
“And food,” Pi insists, and this time it leads to the intended reaction from Jin and Ryo, both of them grinning and eyeing Kame with amusement.
“And fashion,” Kame goes on, unfaltered.
Jin points his camera at Kame.
“And food,” Kame finally admits, rolling his eyes. “So what, I love food.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Jin assures him.
They are in the middle of a heated discussion about Jin and Ryo living off junk food for two months as they travelled across the States, documenting all possible closed-down mental asylums and tuberculosis hospitals, when Meisa finally shows up. As soon as she gets close enough to be recognized, Ryo forgets the end of his sentence.
Her pace speeds up as she’s almost there, and then she walks right into Kame’s personal space.
“How could you not tell me that Just Jin is coming to film here?” She pokes the center of Kame’s chest with a finger.
“And Yellow Ranger,” Ryo quickly adds, but his words don’t seem to register.
“Jesus, you guys are impossible! You’re supposed to tell me these things!” She shakes her head in frustration, then steps back and turns to Jin, presenting not only a warm welcome smile, but also the front of her black hoodie that has a barcode and the word ‘Jip’s’ printed in white across her chest. “Hi, nice to meet you. Biggest fan here.”
Jin beams. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Hey, what’s up?” Meisa shoots back.
Kame frowns. It’s like they are suddenly speaking a different language altogether. There’s something he’s missing, presumably because he didn’t watch the couple of weeks of watching time worth of content on Jin’s channel. Obviously, Meisa did. Maybe he should give it a try as well at some point. Like, when he’s bored or curious about different countries and how other urban explorers approach the subject of documenting decaying past. From the little he’s already seen, Jin’s doing a great job…
Meisa gets a quick hug, and for a reason he can’t really explain, Kame looks away and pretends to be busy testing the hinges of the shabby gate next to him, even though he knows they aren’t stuck and the way inside the property is in all clear.
“You have my hoodie,” Jin is grinning, holding Meisa’s shoulders and looking at her, like he’s never seen a girl in a hoodie before. “I’ve never seen anyone wear one of these!”
“Really? Oh my god, that’s such a shame! I love it. The material is amazing.”
“I know, right? Hey, Kame, since you said you’re into fashion stuff, I could get you one of those, too. It’s my limited streetwear collection. Always only two hundred pieces of each.”
Kame looks up. “Why not. One can never have enough hoodies.”
“That’s some serious truth right there,” Jin chuckles.
“What does ‘Jip’s’ even mean?” Kame finally asks, because if he didn’t, it would totally bug him all day. It’s like the whole ‘Jinsplorers’ moment all over again, only this time he’s even more confused. He saw Meisa in the very same hoodie before, but he never knew there was a connection to Jin.
“Jin’s. Important. People.” With each word, Jin points at one of the letters printed on the hoodie, without actually touching Meisa or making her feel uncomfortable. A quick glance at his friend’s face tells Kame she’s pretty impressed with Jin’s act. Personal space and consent, and not overstepping boundaries are a sure path to win Meisa’s trust. “I started the line to raise money for my travels, so every person who buys something pretty much helps me accomplish my dream of documenting every single abandoned place around the world. I can’t explain it, but it’s important to me, to do that, and that makes the people who help me important too. Thus, Jin’s Important People. Jip’s.”
“That’s pretty cool, actually.” Kame means it.
Knowing the best ways to sell your personal brand is a must when your income relies on people knowing you and liking you.
Kame’s not bad at it himself, but Jin, damn, Jin’s on a completely different level of knowing the rules of this game. Like… Tackey&Tsubasa level. Saying Kame is impressed would be an understatement.
Meisa pouts. “My ‘EXPLORE WITH MEisa’ sounds so lame in comparison.”
“So does not!” Jin counters. He sounds like he means it, too. Kame likes that, likes how genuine Jin is. He jumps head first into everything, this whole trip being a prime example. From what Kame understands, it was mostly a spur of the moment decision, a bit like, “We’re doing this now,” and the next day Kame had a million missed calls on his phone while Yamapi and Ryo were discussing actual details, all the how’s and when’s.
“Not lame at all,” Ryo jumps in again, sensing his chance. “I’d explore with you anytime!”
“Speaking of lame…” Jin grins.
“Are we still talking fashion, or are we doing some exploring?” Yamapi interrupts whatever is about to unfold. “Me and Kame have wanted to check this place out for a while now, so let’s do this.”
And just like that, they all get their cameras ready and one after another walk through the creaky gate. Feet in a variety of shoes, from Ryo’s solid combat boots to Jin’s sport shoes to Meisa’s bright red sneakers, make their way through the desolated front yard, heading towards a door on the left that looks broke open, unlike the main entrance decorated with more ‘no trespassing’ signs.
Kame, Jin, and Yamapi are the ones filming everything, their commentaries mingling in whenever they happen to get too close to each other’s filming spot, while Ryo and Meisa are more loners roaming around and looking for the perfect shot. It’s not easy to get one, though, because there are trees and wild greenery everywhere, shadowing what’s left of the building.
Kame finishes his intro first, which is a surprise, given how many times he had to repeat parts he had previously messed up, too distracted by Jin moving around and being loud and cheerful. Every time Kame caught the now familiar, “Hey, what’s up, Jinsplorers,” he wanted to know what Jin was talking about. Did Jin mention he’s doing this location with Kame? Probably yes, because that’s what the online community does-they boost each other up and encourage their followers to follow also other people. Kame himself has just spent some time prompting people to follow Jin if they want to see some cool videos from around the world.
“… and here’s Kame from Ronin Explores,” Jin says as he makes his way over to Kame’s location.
Kame gives Jin’s camera a wave. “Hi guys. Ready to get in there?”
“A love hotel closed down in the 80s? Hell, yeah!” Jin beams.
The side door gives in easily, and they are inside.
“Holy crap,” Jin says with a gasp, so close behind Kame that Kame can not only sense Jin’s camera over his shoulder, but feels Jin’s breath at the back of his neck. The puff of hot air makes him shiver; or maybe it’s just a reaction to the place, all desolated and falling apart, but still preserved well enough to offer a glimpse into its former shiny glory. Dark walls, an obscene picture hanging above a red bathtub filled with rain water, a heap of molding towels on the floor. A big window opening the space into a small, private yard, creating an illusion someone could’ve easily watched the people who took a bath there.
Kame zooms in onto the picture; under a grown apple tree, a naked woman kneels in front of a naked man, reaching for a cloth to veil her body, or his. The story of Adam and Eve presented here in this room seems like a joke, though, because people enjoying their time in here cared about all but modesty…
Kame says that much aloud for the camera while capturing every detail of the room.
When he accidentally gets Jin in the picture, Jin is grinning and giving him a thumb-up. “That’s pretty deep, huh?”
“I like to think about the places I visit,” Kame says simply.
Jin nods. “I get it. And I wasn’t mocking. You seem to be good at reading the atmosphere of the locations you explore. Not everyone can do that. Hell, even I struggle sometimes.”
Kame’s cheeks heat up.
“Thanks.”
They move on, from the bathroom to the adjacent bedroom with a ridiculously big bed surrounded by mirrors, some of them shattered, some of them only cracked, but most of them are still perfect in their frames, reflecting everything that could happen on the bed.
Jin steps forward, stopping at the edge of the bared mattress. He slowly turns around to film the mirrors and his own reflection in them.
“Man, this is kinky. People would just fuck while watching themselves doing it. But then again, it’s a love hotel, right? So auto-voyeurism is probably the least kinky stuff having been going on around here.”
Somehow, Kame can’t get the imagine of two writhing bodies multiplied by the mirror plates out of his head now, and he speaks before thinking, “I think it’s pretty hot.”
“Now I need to know whether you have a mirror in your bedroom or not!”
The worst thing about the moment isn’t Kame’s realization of what he just said, but the eagerness in Jin’s voice when he replies to Kame’s unexpected confession.
Fuck.
“What? No, no way!” Kame quickly discards the topic. “We should go check out the rest of this place,” he mutters, looking for a door and an escape route while Jin’s still looking at him, a mix of curiosity and amusement plastered all over his face.
“Whatever,” Jin chuckles. “I’m just gonna get some more details over here.” By ‘over here’ he means the bed, naturally, and as Kame moves towards the nearest door that should be connecting the room with the rest of the hotel, Jin behind his back is leaning over to film the mirror frames.
Kame is one foot out in the hallway when he hears Jin’s voice.
“What the-? Hey, have you seen it just now?”
But when Kame turns around, all he sees is Jin standing there with a perplexed expression, and the reflection of Jin’s back in the mirrors.
“Have I seen what?”
Jin glances over his shoulder, frowns, then quickly fiddles with his camera to rewind and replay the last recording. His frown deepens, and he shakes his head. “Nothing…”
“Have you got the footage you wanted?” Kame asks.
“Yeah… I guess…” Jin purses his lips, staring at the back display of the camera. “Hm.”
Kame doesn’t ask again.
Usually, when Kame explores places with other people, they all end up doing their own thing and only come together at the end, or if one of them finds something worth sharing that the others shouldn’t miss.
This time seems different though, because Jin is sticking with him, moving through dark, narrow hallways, testing which door can be opened and which is still locked, or stuck. Jin’s voice narrating the experience of exploring this place is a constant murmur in Kame’s own recording.
He doesn’t really mind.
Sometimes Jin’s commentary sparks a thought that might’ve never occurred to Kame on his own.
“You could rent a room here for literally just an hour, or two,” Jin is saying while looking through some papers and flyers scattered all over a reception desk in the lobby, a small room one would walk into through the main entrance. Kame is filming more provocative pictures on the walls, as well as creepy, mangy taxidermy sitting on a cabinet opposite to the desk-so far he’s recognized a peasant and something that could easily be a hybrid of a dove and a peacock. It’s hard to tell when half of it is rotten away or eaten by moths. “There’s ten rooms in here,” Jin goes on, and Kame forgets about the bird mutants, “which doesn’t sound like a lot, but really, people wouldn’t rent this place for a week, or anything. They just wanted to have a good time, and get out of here.”
“Most of them probably had families, too,” Kame says.
“Yeah, right. So they would come here for some kinky time with their lovers, because they couldn’t just go to any hotel-”
“Regular hotels would ask too many questions, plus someone could see them going in and out, and that would bring up a whole new pile of different questions. Places like this, though, no one saw or heard anything. People could come here with multiple lovers at the same time, men could bring other men-something that would’ve got you in some serious troubles elsewhere. But here… no one gave a fuck.”
Jin’s nodding again. “Man, this is crazy though. I mean… Look at this!” He’s flipping through more papers when he suddenly find something really cool. And he wants to share it with Kame. “Is this the ‘Mirror Room’?” He points at a picture in a bottom corner of the page open in front of him.
Kame quickly walks over there, and they both lean over the counter and stare at the image through their cameras, their foreheads almost touching.
“Yeah! That’s the place.” Kame quickly flips the page, only to discover more pictures. It’s a brochure of the hotel, listing down all ten rooms, each with a different theme, and prices for either a one-hour-stay or a whole night. “This is both creepy and amazing. We can literally match the pictures in this with what the rooms look like today.”
“I want to find this one!” Jin presses a finger to the middle of the second page.
The room has a series of Kamasutra-like embossments running all around the walls, depicting men and women in a variety of sexual encounters. The picture quality is low and grainy and doesn’t show many details, just a general idea of what’s going on, but there’s no doubt about what they are looking at.
“Do you think people used those as a manual when they wanted to spice up their bedroom action?” Jin asks in all seriousness, leaning closer, as if that could help him focus better and see the details.
“Or they would play a game of how many of those they could go through in the hour they got to spend in that room,” Kame says with a shrug.
Who could even know what was going on inside the heads of people who came into this hotel, or really, into love hotels in general. Different people have different reasons to do the things they do.
Jin chuckles. “I’d play that.”
“Should I be surprised?” Kame gives Jin a quick glance, their eyes meet, all too close before Jin pulls back and straightens up.
Kame studies the picture some more, but really, if they want to get a closer look at the naughty embossments, they need to find the place and hope it’s in at least half as good shape as the Mirror Room.
They move from one room to another. Some are more desolated than others: one has a collapsed roof and the debris has buried pretty much everything, making it impossible to match its interior with any of the pictures in the catalogue; another one, on the other hand, is in a nearly perfect shape, with a walk-in onsen styled bath and even a little shrine in a corner.
“Somebody put a lot of money and thought into this,” Jin muses as he films details of the altar with arranged vases and white plates for offerings, as well as a number of small objects that must have been left there not too long ago by people exploring this place before Kame and Jin entered the premises.
Jin reaches into his pocket and fumbles around for a bit before pulling something out and placing it onto the shelf. It’s a lighter, one of those old-school metal ones.
To Kame’s raised eyebrow Jin says, “What? The Code speaks about not taking anything away, not about not leaving something behind.”
“I’m pretty sure it says you shouldn’t leave a mess.”
“It’s a $100 lighter. Hardly a mess. The ghosts in here deserve something nice.“
“Now you sound like Meisa. You should ask her. I’m pretty sure she’ll know about some local ones as well.” Kame shakes his head, then goes back to what he was talking about before. He makes it a point to ignore the shelf now though. “Anyway. When people came here, they wanted to forget about the everyday reality outside,” Kame says. That seems like the best generalization he can come up with. “Love hotels like this one used to play on people’s imagination.”
Jin looks up. “Used to?”
“Yeah. These places gave people something they didn’t get at home. Many love hotels were full of kitschy stuff, from rotating beds and mirrors…” Kame nods as he notices Jin’s smirk, both of them thinking of the first room they saw here. “To some really tacky furnishings. Things you wouldn’t find in a regular hotel, so whoever walked in one of these immediately knew where they were and what they could expect. Then a law introduced in the 80s tried to regulate love hotels, so naturally, a lot of them got rid of the weird cheap stuff to look like ‘normal’ hotels, in which case the law didn’t concern them anymore.”
“What’s indecent about pornographic engravings all over the walls?” Jin chuckles.
Kame shakes his head.
“So places either changed their façade and kept going, or were simply closed down?”
“Most of them underwent some serious revamping and kept going, under a thin veil of fake decency. But it’s hard to give exact numbers. You can’t simply walk into a library and ask for academic books about stuff like that.”
“Really? I’ve read studies about porn before. I mean, serious studies.”
“A half of the people who seek love hotels are married couples who can’t have sex at home while they either live under one roof with their parents, or have their own kids. The clientele of places like this hasn’t changed much over time. Sex is not something you write about, or even talk about openly here. ”
Jin raises a brow. “You do. Now.”
“Yeah, and my parents would frown if they heard me. My grandparents… grandpa would be scandalized.” Kame feels a twitch in the corner of his lips. “Grandma would probably want to see this place though.”
“As if they didn’t visit one of these in the past as well,” Jin can’t help himself, and just the thought alone turns the twitch in Kame’s face into a burst of laughter.
“Oh god! Don’t say that!”
“Too late,” Jin is grinning and filming Kame and his snorts and hiccups.
“We should just find the porn comic room now.” Kame is not sure he can now look at anything in here without thinking of his grandparents, which is disturbing as hell, but at least he can breathe now when the worst of his fit is over, and he and Jin can continue their exploration.
They are just about to round a corner, stepping over some planks and crumbled wallpaper piled up on the floor, when they hear Ryo’s voice.
“What the hell-? Meisa! Pi! You guys need to see this! Where the fuck is Jin, he can’t miss this!”
Jin and Kame glance at each other, then Jin takes in a sharp breath and jumps over some of the scrap lying under his feet. “I’m here!”
“What is it?” Kame follows right behind.
He bumps into Jin’s back a moment later when Jin halts in the opening of the nearest door. Jin wavers upon the collision, but he stands firm, and Kame quickly peels himself off of Jin.
“Why the fuck is there a rocking horse in here?” Jin asks, laughing, but also very much perplexed.
Kame peeks into the room over Jin’s shoulder.
There’s nothing much standing out as far as the décor goes. Definitely no pornographic pictures on the walls. Dark purple wallpaper is peeling off, revealing smudgy walls with scattered clusters of forming mold. One of the dingy stuffed bird mutants they saw in the lobby earlier is sitting on an otherwise empty shelf. The only remarkable thing about the whole place is a giant bed taking up most of the room’s space; a black and white zebra pattern bedspread is covering the mattress, and right in the middle of the bed, there’s a big rocking horse. Its whole body is sheathed in red leather, with black and gold details of mane and a bridle. It’s got dead-looking eyes, black dots painted on white discs.
Ryo is leaning forward to get some nice close-up shoots without destroying the intentional set up.
“Someone had fun arranging this one,” he comments.
“Fucking creepy,” Jin says, taking a step inside the room. “Look at the freak, just chilling there…”
“I can’t believe someone brought it in here.”
Jin approaches the bed. “From an amusement park to a love hotel.”
“You should get on it,” Ryo suggests with a chuckle. “It’s gonna do a sick picture.”
He doesn’t need to say it twice.
“Oh man…!”
Jin walks around to get the scene on film, and then is on the bed, balancing on the mattress dipping under his steps as he makes his way to the horse. His feet burrow into the shabby bedding, leaving prints and crumpled sheets, and the horse wobbles as Jin gets close.
“It’s got this coin mechanism here, you know, like the stuff for kids in malls,” Jin says after further observation. “Is there a supermarket somewhere nearby, Kame?”
“Not really. Jin, I don’t think it’s-”
Unlike Jin and Ryo who are too busy arranging Jin’s photo session with the horse, Kame has enough time to come to a conclusion the two of them are wrong. He’s in no way an expert on this kind of stuff, but with the little he knows and has read before, he’s positive the horse is not a kid’s toy.
There’s a reason why it’s here.
No one had to bring it over.
Jin balances some more to straddle the thing, still filming everything he does. “Guys, there’s a fucking rocking horse. Like, would you believe that? Oh, look, it probably had a saddle at some point. See the hole here, and here?” He points to the horse’s back.
Then he sits down, grinning widely for Ryo’s camera. “For Instagram!”
“For Instagram!” Ryo echoes.
“Hmm, this is actually comfortable…” Jin sways a bit back and forth, the mattress the horse is sitting on giving the move an extra bounce.
And Kame decides it’s the best moment to bring some light into the whole thing. “The saddle you’re missing most likely had a dildo on it,” he says and his rich voice fills the room.
Ryo chokes. “What?”
Jin stops rocking, but doesn’t jump off the horse the way Kame kind of expected him to. The lack of reaction is a bit disappointing, if Kame is to be completely honest. His camera is running, but Jin’s not freaking out.
Jin’s only reaction is to shuffle a bit back and look down at the two holes in the leather covering the horse’s body.
“It’s like a sex toy?” Kame clarifies. “It’s a vibrating horse. There was a dildo attached to it at some point. You-” he stops himself and clears his throat, not quite meeting Jin’s eyes. “Someone would put money in, sit on it, and as the horse started vibrating and the dildo rotated with increasing frequency, the person was in for a wild ride.”
Not that Kame is an expert on this sort of things.
“Oh-my-god!” Ryo is wheezing, laughing so hard there are tears in his eyes, and he needs to lower his camera because his hands are shaking. “You just got fucked by a horse!”
Jin sits without moving. “I feel violated.”
Ryo wheezes. “Wait, I need to document this properly.”
They mess around for a bit, with Jin poking the holes where various add-ons could be attached, and Ryo trying to figure out how the whole machine once used to work. Kame stays out of it, listening with amusement to the number of dick jokes Ryo can come up with and the ease Jin either counters them or waves them off, all the while still sitting on that damn horse like it’s the most comfortable chair he’s ever planted his ass on.
“What’s going on here?” Meisa’s voice brings Kame back to reality.
The funny thing is he doesn’t remember spacing out, or what he was thinking about while he apparently wasn’t present.
He rubs his forehead.
“We found a vibrating horse.” As if that weren’t obvious enough.
Meisa glares at Jin and Ryo, now both on the bed. At least Jin has finally got up.
“Great,” Meisa sighs, “and you just had to ruin the set up, huh?”
“All the fun parts are gone though,” Jin tells her, as if that was the explanation she’s waiting for.
“Your ass is gonna live another day,” Ryo cracks up.
Jin chuckles. “Lucky me.” He turns his camera to his face. “Have you heard, guys? My ass is safe.”
Meisa, shaking her head and probably breaking at least 1/100 of the pedestal she’s put Just Jin on, takes a few pictures, too.
“Hey, at least now it doesn’t look too arranged,” Ryo offers helpfully. He snaps a picture of Meisa glaring at him. “This one’s definitely not for Instagram.”
The two of them are still bickering about pros and cons of arranging stuff inside abandoned buildings when they finally run into Yamapi some ten minutes later, following Kame through a long, mostly empty hallway to the far corner of the hotel complex. While they were too busy messing around with the giant horse-sex-toy, Yamapi accidentally stumbled upon the room Jin and Kame hoped to find.
There’s not much left though, to Kame’s disappointment.
Jin’s not happy about it either.
“What a bummer,” he groans, filming the crumbling pieces still stubbornly holding on to the walls while the rest has long fallen off and turned into dusty piles on the floor. “Can you see it, Jinsplorers? The room is completely destroyed. The part over there even looks like someone came here with a hammer and smashed it on purpose.”
“I don’t think it was necessary,” Kame tells him, as he’s filming just a couple of steps away. “For all the shiny, extravagant furnishing in here, the level of craftsmanship is actually pretty poor.”
“People didn’t come here to admire the décor,” Meisa says matter-of-factly, crouching down to take a picture of something lying on the floor.
“The décor was still a part of the game though,” Jin counters.
“That’s for sure.” At least they agree on that much.
Meisa stands up, pointing her camera at Jin. She’s got this look in her face, one Kame knows all too well, and he can almost, almost tell what’s to come next. When Meisa speaks, Kame is not disappointed. “Now, would you come to a place like this for fun times, or nah?”
For a moment there, Kame has no control over his reactions, and his eyes dart in Jin’s direction. He wants to see this. It’s a joke, and Kame wants to smack himself for not having come up with it himself, because it’s definitely the kind of teasing he’d normally bother Pi with. He’d ask which one of the rooms would be Pi’s favorite, or if he’d take some inspiration from those now shattered engravings. But now it’s Meisa asking Jin, and Kame is so curious about the answer he almost forgets to breathe. It’s pretty silly, to be honest.
And it gets worse when Jin looks at him to meet Kame’s eyes as he answers. “I’d be definitely interested in that Mirror Room.”
Kame swallows.
The mental image of the couple rolling around the sheets in that very bed becomes less vague then, with one of the bodies suddenly gaining distinctive features of Jin’s sharp shoulders and dark messy hair with close-cut patches on the sides.
Kame frowns. He’s not getting that image out of his head any time soon, is he?
“Oh-oh!” Meisa grins.
“Oh-oh-what?” Yamapi asks at the same time as Kame mumbles, “Oh no,” and they look at each other and laugh.
Ryo glances at one, then the other, then at Jin.
Jin shrugs. “Look, I sat on that dildo-horse. Don’t kinkshame me for mirrors, okay?”
That makes Meisa laugh as well. “I would never!”
“Good,” Jin grimaces.
“That’s totally her there-are-ghosts face, brace yourself,” Pi chuckles when the worst of his laughing fit slowly wears off.
“What?” Jin’s eyes grow wide.
“Ghosts?” Ryo perks up and peers at Jin. “Now that’s something I want to know.”
“It’s said there’s a ghost of a young woman in the room with the mirrors. Her name is Hamiko,” Meisa says calmly, slowly looking from Kame to Pi to Ryo, and finally, to Jin where her gaze lingers a little longer. Meisa is good at a couple of things, and recognizing the best target in her audience is one of them. Ryo may be eager to hear all about the supernatural stuff going on in here, but Jin’s definitely the most receptive. “I’ve spoken to someone who saw her in one of the mirrors and she tried to communicate. They could read her lips, and all.”
“Man, that’s so cool!” Ryo gasp. “What did she say?”
Meisa shrugs. “She was waiting for a lover who never showed up. I guess she’s still waiting.”
“Did she kill herself in here?” Ryo asks eagerly.
“Really, dude?” There’s only a tiny hint of panic in Jin’s voice, and since no one else seems to notice, Kame decides he’s just over-analyzing it now. Over-analyzing Jin. “I liked that room.”
Ryo makes a face.
“If it’s of any consolation, I don’t think she actually died here,” Meisa says.
“Aw, what a bummer,” Ryo mumbles.
“Don’t ghosts usually haunt places where they like… you know, became ghosts?” Pi asks, likely out of genuine curiosity and not in order to rile Jin up some more.
“Not always. Ghosts are attached to things they cared about. Sometimes it’s an object, other times a ghost sticks to a place they had the strongest connection to when they still lived. And Hamiko used to meet her lover in this hotel for years. Some say since she was a schoolgirl even.”
“Dude, that sounds like a manga plot!” Ryo grins. He’s liking this thing way too much. “A school uniform and all those mirrors… hmmm…”
Jin sighs again and gives up. “I officially don’t like that room anymore.”
“Oh come on! It’s a perfectly nice, kinky room. Sure, no animal sex toys, so I understand you can’t fully appreciate it-”
“Oh, shut up, Nishikido!”
Ryo walks over and pats Jin’s shoulder, while wrinkling his nose at Meisa and mouthing, “Ghosts aren’t his thing.” Then he lets his voice raise to a normal volume: “We should go back there. I want to check the mirrors! Hamiko-chan!”
Jin groans and smacks Ryo’s hand off his shoulder. “There are no ghosts. In the mirrors, or anywhere else.” With that Jin stomps out of the room without another word.
“He’s so easy!” Ryo chuckles.
Meisa raises an eyebrow. “You think it’s a joke?”
Ryo waves a hand dismissively. “A dead lady in a mirror is nothing. You should’ve seen him in this one asylum in West Virginia! He was jumping at the sight of his own shadow whenever wind grazed the windows because it sounded like a kid’s sobbing!”
While Meisa doesn’t look too impressed, Yamapi laughs and he and Ryo start thinking of places with some freaky horror lore attached to them to take Jin to next.
Kame really wants to join them-he’d be the first to dismiss this whole mirror-ghost episode as a nonsense, just like he does with every other story Meisa tells him during their exploring; but he can’t shake off the memory of Jin staring at the mirrors surrounding the bed earlier. He hasn’t really thought anything about it until now. And now it’s all he can think about.
-
When it’s time to part for the evening, Jin talks Kame into coming to the hotel with him. He’s got an extra Jip’s hoodie in his room and he wants Kame to have it.
To his credit, Ryo didn’t actually nag Meisa about giving him one of her hoodies as well, even though Jin’s pretty sure his friend would love to just follow Meisa to her place, a hoodie being in the game, or not.
“Thanks for this,” Kame says, standing in the middle of Jin’s room and holding his new hoodie against his chest with both hands.
Jin grins at him. “No problem. I’ve got a few t-shirts with me as well, so I’m seriously considering doing a fan meet-up at some point.” He’s just not sure there would be enough people interested, or what the best place to organize such a thing would be.
“In the end the two weeks you’ve got here might not be enough.”
“Yeah, well, I can always come back, right?” Jin closes his suitcase with a few tugs on the zipper, and looks around.
The room is a mess of early morning chaos, because Jin had hardly enough time to brush his teeth and do something about his hair before he left to meet with Kame and Yamapi today. He also forgot about all that mess during the day and it pretty much punched him in the face a couple minutes ago when he entered the room, with Kame following suit. Not that Jin cares. From his experience, no one in the urban exploring community would judge him for any of this. They are all pretty much the same. Always more concerned about having their cameras and phones, and all batteries fully charged, than about making their beds and tucking away yesterday’s dirty clothes.
There are half empty water bottles on the vanity table by a window, heaps of clothes scattered all over the floor and chairs, Jin’s camera bag and his backpack are on the bed where he’s tossed them the first thing after walking in.
Jin gives the room another quick glance, then turns to Kame.
“Do you want a drink or something?” he asks.
He’s buzzing with the day’s events and experience, and isn’t really ready to put an end to it. He wants to ride this amazing feeling for a bit longer. And he doesn’t want to do it alone.
“We could check the pictures and some of the footage. You know, compare what we’ve got.”
Or they could even do some vlogging. That would be cool.
Jin’s been filming short entries ever since the decision to come to Japan was made and plane tickets were bought. It’s never more than five minutes, or so, of him sharing step-by-step preparations for the journey. Now he’s here and he kind of wants to tell the world that Kame knows the best Japanese abandoned spots.
Kame shrugs. “Why not. Pi and Ryo are most likely debating ghost manga anyway, so it’s not like I’m missing much.”
“Come on, now! You’d rather spend time with those two? I’m hurt.”
“Maybe I’d rather spend time with Meisa,” Kame teases. But he’s taking off his backpack, putting it down on the floor, and carefully placing his new hoodie on top of it.
“That’s fair.” Jin nods. Meisa is cool, a bit scary when she’s annoyed, as Jin had a chance to find out today, but still cool nonetheless-but right now, Jin is glad the one keeping him company is Kame.
They get some drinks and settle on the floor with their cameras and Jin’s laptop. Their backs rest against the bed, their legs stretched out, and they are surrounded by a dozen various cables to connect the computer and the cameras.
Kame’s comes first.
The data card still carries also some pictures from Kame’s previous adventures, and while Kame is trying to navigate Jin to the ones taken in the love hotel today, Jin gets curious and opens a folder dated a couple of days back.
They look through the photos. The laptop is sitting on Jin’s thighs, slightly angled sideways so Kame can see the monitor without too much color distortion. Sometimes it means Kame needs to lean in a bit closer, pressing his shoulder against Jin’s, sometimes it almost looks like the easiest way to do this would be for Kame to rest his head against Jin’s shoulder permanently. A couple of times Kame kind of does just that, without realizing it. Jin doesn’t flinch away, too absorbed in the pictures in front of him.
“I’m still editing the final video for this one,” Kame says, when Jin asks about the place the pictures were taken at.
Jin wouldn’t mind watching the raw material either, to be honest. He knows firsthand there’s something about all those little things and too long shoots that rarely make it to the twenty minute long videos that get eventually posted online. It’s also tough to pick and choose what to share with the viewers and what’s gonna get dismissed and just sit in a folder somewhere.
“You should definitely add some of the footage with the old photos.” Not that Kame actually needs any tips on how to edit videos. From everything Jin had a chance to see, Kame is as close to a professional as one can get. “Is it just me, or do old photographs kind of add this… I don’t know, realism? Like, you can actually see the people who existed in that place once upon a time. It’s not just an empty setting.”
Kame stares at the picture on the laptop screen, a shelf with a couple of framed black and white photos. He nods, lips pressed together. He’s quiet for a moment, then lets out a soft chuckle. “Meisa would tell you it’s because there are ghosts. Somewhere. Somehow.” He points at the screen. “One apparently moves some of the frames from one place to another in there, too.”
“Really?” Jin zooms in on one of the photographs. Two kids with a dog. “Did you see any moving frames?”
“As if!” Kame nudges Jin’s shoulder, this time leaning in on purpose.
Jin pushes back, bouncing Kame in the opposite direction. They laugh and stop only when the laptop in Jin’s lap dangerously wobbles and nearly topples over on to the floor.
“I need to keep you and Meisa apart! She can be very convincing when she starts the whole boo-boo storytelling.”
Convincing, hm.
Jin skips through a couple more pictures until he gets to the end of the folder. Then promptly opens the one created today.
“So you don’t believe in that stuff.” It’s not even a question. Jin’s seen enough of Kame’s reactions to already know the answer if it were a question. Ghosts aren’t real. Of course they aren’t.
“I will believe when I see one.”
Noticing they are now looking at the new photos, Kame calms down and focuses on the screen again. His shoulder is pressed against Jin’s, and Jin can smell the faint scent of citrusy shampoo and dust in Kame’s hair.
It’s a little weird for a second because Jin’s not usually one to notice those things, and he definitely doesn’t go around sniffing guys to know what shampoo they use. Not that he’s sniffing Kame’s hair deliberately. It’s just right there, in his personal space.
Then they start looking through the photos taken earlier that day, and Jin’s thoughts take a sharp turn. Away from shampoos and wondering what Kame’s hair might feel under his fingers, and more towards the adventure they went on.
The outdoor pictures are pretty decent, given there wasn’t really much to see in the middle of all the overgrown greenery. Jin was switching between filming and taking photos, and now his fingers itch to start posting everything on Instagram right away. One picture after another. His followers would either go mad with excitement, or unfollow him for excessive spamming. With the wide variety of reasons people follow his social media, Jin can imagine either is possible.
“I still can’t get over how well preserved the whole site is,” Jin says after a moment. It will never stop amazing him. “You’d never find something like that in the States. Fucking vandals will go any length to put a tag on everything, just to show they were there.” He tells Kame about this one tiny town in the middle of nowhere that seemed perfectly locked up in time, surrounded by nothing but mountains and a forest, but when they finally got close enough, the first thing they saw was fucking graffiti all over the place. Someone must’ve hiked for hours just to ruin the place.
“I’d still love to see that someday.”
Jin looks at Kame. “Then you should totally come visit. We could go on a roadtrip and check out some cool stuff!”
Jin isn’t one to plan his life too much ahead, because where’s the fun in doing that, but right now the gears in his head are spinning fast, already planning all sorts of scenarios for when Kame arrives to the States. For Jin, it’s not a matter of if but rather, when. He’s got some stuff lined up for the following month or so after coming back from Japan, a trip he didn’t really plan either, but after that, everything is fair game. If Kame just calls him one day to tell him he’s getting on a plane the following morning, Jin will be more than ready to pick him up at the airport.
Which is, after all, pretty much a reverse situation of what happened with Jin’s trip over here.
“Really?” Kame perks up, forgetting about the laptop for a moment.
“Sure. It seems fair, doesn’t it? And if your friends want to join you, they definitely should. Though I probably don’t have enough couches you all could sleep on.”
“You do have hotels over there though, right?”
“Yeah, well. But we’re friends now, and I don’t let my friends stay in hotels when they could as well stay at my place.” The apartment isn’t big, but he’s previously fitted up three people just fine. Sure, one of them was his girlfriend at the time and she didn’t need an extra bed, but that’s a detail, and if Kame eventually comes with both Yamapi and Meisa, they will figure something out.
Kame gives him a bright smile. “That’s so cool! You’ll have to show me all the supposedly haunted stuff so I can then tell Meisa.”
“Oh-oh! Why is everyone so obsessed with ghosts?”
“Because it’s fun?” Kame shrugs and reaches out to the laptop to skip the next few pictures that show mostly the overgrown front yard of the love hotel. At the same time, Jin’s hand moves as well and they collide halfway over the keyboard. Jin chuckles and Kame mumbles, “Sorry,” then pulls his hand back, letting Jin do the key pressing and setting up the pace of the picture changes.
“Meisa seems to take it all pretty seriously though. Making it sound like there really might be something out of this world. I mean, photo frames changing location? For real?”
“It’s a well-known place, people go there all the time. They may not spray all over the walls, but they still want to leave a mark.”
“Maybe,” Jin admits, but he’s not convinced. He doesn’t want to believe in ghosts, but some of the stories are so titillating it’s hard to just wave them off like it’s nothing. “What about the lady in the hotel today? There are real people who saw her and even communicated with her.”
Kame looks at Jin with a raised eyebrow. “People will tell you all sorts of things.”
Jin unplugs Kame’s camera and connects his own, then taps at the keyboard a few times, searching for the right photo. “I saw… something.-Don’t laugh.-Way before Meisa said anything about the place being haunted or about the ghost showing up in the Mirror Room. I saw something.”
He skips past more pictures, looking for one particular photo.
“Like what exactly?”
That’s cool. At least Kame is not laughing or telling him it’s a complete nonsense. Sure, Kame probably still thinks just that, but Jin’s grateful Kame isn’t saying it aloud. Because a big part of Jin also thinks it’s pretty stupid. It’s the part that always leads him into the next abandoned place with lead-based paint creepily peeling off mold-infested walls and corroded window hinges shrieking under the tiniest gust of draught. It’s the part that assures him the biggest danger at those places is black mold, or property owners unexpectedly showing up and threatening to call the police because yes, the whole trespassing thing is something people often take seriously, even though Jin never enters the premises with an intent to steal anything.
Jin wishes the rational part of him had a better command over the other part that gets all jumpy at weird sounds, and that likes to be enticed into believing there’s something that can’t be simply explained with reason in this world.
And it’s this other part of him that knows exactly what he saw earlier in one of the mirrors.
“I don’t know, something” he hears himself saying when he finally finds the right photo. It’s a picture of the bed surrounded by mirrors. Jin remembers filming the whole thing in one long shoot, slowly taking in the differences between where the mirrors were still intact and where there was nothing left anymore, just the wooden frame and possibly some shards. Then he switched to the photo mode to zoom in on some of the intricate decorations.
And she was right there.
“A lady in a kimono. Standing in the far corner behind me. She raised a hand, like she was trying to reach out.”
Jin could see her as clearly as he can see Kame now, but there’s nothing in the picture. He’s not even sure what he was hoping to find. Proof there was a ghost in the room with them today? Proof he didn’t just make it all up? That it wasn’t a play of lights and shadows later intensified by Meisa’s story?
Jin rubs the side of his nose, squinting his eyes at the laptop screen.
To his surprise, Kame leans closer to look as well.
“Maybe you saw me and didn’t realize right away the angles and lights and shadows?”
That would be certainly an option. But. But Kame was already on his way out of the door. Nowhere behind Jin to be reflected in the mirror. And then there’s this. “Were you wearing a kimono though?”
“Not today.” Kame nudges Jin’s shoulder. “I could wear one tomorrow if you ask nicely.”
“Really?”
Now Jin really wants to see that. No more ghosts. He wants to see Kame looking all traditional and serious-quite a contrast to his current stylish looks of a cool anime character. With his perfect hair and his spot-on sense of fashion.
Jin chuckles at the thought.
All those hours of watching stuff with Ryo must’ve seriously damaged his brain.
Kame slides a little lower against the bed, relaxing. “Well, it’s not the most comfortable piece of clothing to wear for exploring places, but I do own one or two. My parents insisted.”
“Now I want to see that.”
Kame rolls his eyes. “I look ridiculous.”
Jin carefully puts the laptop on the side and bends his knees. He was just starting to feel the tingle of incoming cramping.
“That’s unlikely the case.” His head tilts back against the bed and he lets it rest there, turned just slightly to the side so he can watch Kame’s face.
Kame watches right back.
He doesn’t say anything, and Jin’s not sure where to go from there. They were just talking rubbish about ghosts and now Jin can’t stop thinking about how attractive Kame would look in fine clothes. That’s not something Jin usually thinks about in relation to guys. Meisa, Meisa would look incredible in a kimono, too, but strangely enough, that particular aesthetic doesn’t hold Jin’s attention without him willfully forcing the image into his head. Meanwhile, mental images of Kame appear on their own and with shocking ease.
Jin carefully steers the conversation to Kame’s family then, because that seems like a safe topic. And he’s curious. Curious about who Kame is and what he likes, and sure, Jin already knows plenty just from having watched a number of Kame’s videos, but Kame’s voice has this husky tilt to it when he tries to express something personal in English, and Jin could probably listen to Kame talking all night.
Which is, coincidentally, exactly what happens.
Kame talking about his big family is only one step from Jin talking about his parents and brother Reio, and before they know it, it’s past midnight and they are eating take-outs and drinking beer, and Jin is just tipsy enough to tell Kame about this one time back in his high school senior year when he went down on a guy at some party, because he wanted to figure out if he was into girls because being into girls was expected from him, or whether it was just the way he is.
Kame laughs so hard he spills some of his beer, and it gets even worse because Jin grins and says, “It was a complete disaster, of course, because no amount of experimental porn watching can prepare you for what it’s like to have a dick in your mouth.” That turns Kame’s laugher into hysterics and he’s just wheezing and choking on the last bite of noodles he swallowed.
“I’ve never done it again,” Jin admits between chuckles.
“Would you though?” Kame asks, peering at Jin from under bangs of hair that no longer hold a shape and are falling messily into his face.
Jin shrugs. “I don’t know. Never really thought about it.” Then he narrows his eyes. “What about you?”
Kame’s face heats up, and Jin forgets to laugh because he’s too busy looking.
Kame slowly shakes his head, eyes cast down to his food. He pokes a piece of shrimp with his chopsticks a few times. He mumbles, “Definitely never had a dick in my mouth,” and the words are hardly audible, but Jin hears them anyway.
It’s been a while since Jin laughed so much he felt tears rolling down his cheeks.
-
(part 3)