It was a bright spring morning when Mandragora came upon the sweet little cottage with the two dead bodies hanging from its eaves.
“What’s all this then?” he asked his skulls, rattling out behind him on their 100 leather tethers.
“Looks like a violation,” they called, bobbing and jostling to see. “A clear violation. Bodies from the eaves, what else could that be?”
Mandragora walked over and studied the bodies. One was a man and he had his skin intact, though one of his legs was gone, and the other was a woman but it wasn’t easy to tell because all her skin had been removed. Mandragora poked the man’s blotchy pink flesh.
“Was I not clear last time? I posted the laws all over.”
“Yes yes,” nodded the skulls, “you were very clear. No cannibals and no human-skinning.”
Image from here.
Looking for the Lost is one man’s swansong for the ancient vestiges of rural Japan, a multi-threaded tramp through history and culture in search of something perhaps impossible to find. Our narrator Alan Booth rambles on foot through some of the remotest hills and valleys in the country, legend-tripping the paths taken by various historical figures. He is invariably exhausted, blistered, and sodden with rain, mocked by school-children and construction workers, set upon by alternatingly fierce and friendly mama-sans, in whose company he is witty, gently drunk, erudite, and hailed as a bit of a celebrity in the karaoke booth.
