Mistress Koharu

1.

The call came in the middle of April, sometime after 7 p.m. while Chikako had been listening to a self-proclaimed "fan" of hers, a man in his thirties who worked at a trading company, complain about his job.

The caller was a young woman who introduced herself as the editor of a magazine, and, presuming that it was going to be an interview request, Chikako was about to ask her to come before the bar opened when the woman explained that she was planning a small gathering, and she wondered if it would be possible to use Rosebud for such a get together.

Rosebud had an alcove space where a party of five or six people could sit at a mahogany table and drink in private. For larger groups, she had three folding chairs at the ready.

The following evening, the woman visited to see the space, handed Chikako a business card that identified her as the assistant editor of the monthly magazine Atlantis, and explained that she was planning to gather four enthusiastic readers of the magazine who post regularly to their website, giving them a chance to "share their knowledge and experience" and discuss the magazine together, and two or three additional readers might participate as "observers" and listen in on the discussion as well.

Chikako had never heard of the magazine, and when she asked what sort of publication it was, the assistant editor answered, "A magazine about the occult."

While Chikako gave the okay, she imagined a group of young cult members gathering late at night on the roof of an abandoned building, whispering to each other, "It's a UFO," each time they saw a shooting star, and she questioned whether she should really have a group of megalomaniacs using her bar as a space to elaborate on their conspiracy theories in hushed tones. In truth, she wished she had turned them down.

But come the day of their meeting, the participants all arrived in jackets and ties and turned out to be earnest salaryman types. Only the man who introduced himself as the editor stood out with his long hair and sunglasses, dressed in what looked like US military surplus clothing.

Atlantis was a monthly magazine, printed in B5 format, that was established in 1983. It was a specialty publication for occult maniacs and claimed it would "reveal the truth of the world's mysteries and secrets." The magazine covered a wide range of topics including UFOs, cryptids, psychic powers, paranormal activities, reincarnation, and conspiracy theories. What most distinguished them from other similar magazines was that they included as much scientific explanation as possible, trying their hardest to build credibility rather than simply publishing whatever preposterous stories they could find.

Kicking things off, the editor said that he wanted to name this gathering the "Paranormal Activity Research Committee" and begin convening regularly, once every two months. He intended to take what he learned from their discussions and apply it to the pages of the magazine. The assistant editor added that today's plan was to discuss occult activities that had been on TV, and she explained that they would be recording their entire conversation. Then the discussion began.

Aside from the six members of the group sitting around the table, two additional men joined as "observers," and Chikako prepared an additional small table for them.

The first man to speak was an older accountant who had a firm in Suginami Ward. He began by mentioning his hobby of diving and his interest in aquatic life, then asked if any of them had happened to have heard of the megalodon before, before launching into an explanation of the giant shark species and the rumors that it still exists.

A species of shark said to have lived approximately 1.5 million years ago, megalodons were about ten to fifteen meters long. A monster shark close in size to a whale.

Throughout the twentieth century, theories that various cryptids were actually surviving megalodons circulated from time to time, such as in 1918, when something resembling a giant shark was spotted in Australia, and again in 1954, when a tooth ten centimeters long was found piercing the hull of a ship. However, definitive evidence that the species still roamed the oceans was yet to be discovered.

"I used to watch Animal Planet on satellite TV quite frequently, and in November of 2013 they aired a program called Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives. I'm not really a fan of documentaries, but I thought this one was deeply fascinating, not the kind you see every day ."

At the beginning of this documentary ran a sensational warning bound to raise the hopes of any viewers: "The following program contains graphic images. Viewer discretion is advised." The story begins with footage recorded on April 5, 2013, of the sinking of a charter ship.

The ship was lost in the deeps off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, and not a single body of those who had chartered the fishing boat was found. In the footage recovered from the accident, one of the female passengers can be heard screaming, "Oh my God! A shark!"

Marine biologist Colin Drake was invited to survey the area in hopes of finding the truth behind this tragedy, and the Discovery Channel film crew were allowed exclusive access to film his expedition.

Ten days after the incident, on April 15, a shark lookout watching the sea with binoculars witnessed movement on the surface of the water off the cape, seemingly waves produced by the thrashing of a whale. She photographed and recorded the scene with her telephoto lens, and later, when she checked the video, she noticed behind the thrashing whale a dorsal fin of approximately 1.8 meters in height breeching the water.

In the show, Drake discovers a black and white photograph of a very similar dorsal fin, said to be taken seventy years earlier by a crewman on a German U-boat as it was leaving the Cape of Good Hope, and he compares these two images to videos and photographs of a whale carcass in Hawaii taken January 21, 2009. He raises the question of whether a megalodon could have been the culprit in all these incidents.

One after the other come clips that had to have been real, such as footage captured on November 20, 2012, by the Brazilian Coast Guard, when, attempting a rescue by helicopter on stormy seas, the shadow of a fish more than eighteen meters in length appears in the water beneath them. Then, the documentary reaches its climax with Drake, attempting to capture this elusive monster, boarding a research vessel and heading out to where the charter ship had met its end.

"However, after The Monster Shark Lives aired in America, doubts were raised about whether it was or was not a documentary, and ultimately it was revealed to be fiction. Drake and all the rest were actually actors, but since it was done so skillfully and put together like a documentary, even I bought it completely.

"The public's faith in Animal Planet was shaken, and people started doubting everything. They'd see polar bear families suffering from global warming and wonder if it wasn't fake news."

The middle-aged man sitting next to the accountant, who had introduced himself as a high school teacher, then said, "I once watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel about levitation, and I'm still not sure if I should trust it."

The Supernaturalist was an adventure documentary which followed Dan White, an American with a twenty-year career as a magician, to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, where he went to investigate rumors of monks with supernatural powers who live in the Himalayan Mountains.

Led by a shaman named Hizbaba, they head east by plane to an "unnamed mountain village." From there they travel by foot into unexplored regions of the mountains, but White is abandoned by Hizbaba after the shaman receives a message in his dreams telling him to turn back. White is left with no choice but to travel alone to the "orange monastery" he is told of by a sadhu, a Hindu holy man.

Upon finally arriving at the monastery, White tells an old monk that he heard the monk could levitate, and the monk initially refuses to cooperate, saying, "Your magic is fantastic, but we are not the same. This is Buddhist meditation." Impressed by White's stubborn passion, however, the monk eventually agrees. "I will try one time. I need you to move back. If you stay close to me then my energy doesn't work."

The monk sits in a semicircle of candles, the wall behind him checkered with prayer flags, and begins chanting a mantra.

Being a magician, White questions the monk's request for them to step away, later commenting that there must have been something behind him he didn't want them to see, but still he backs up four or five meters away from the monk. He then witnesses the monk rise from the ground and levitate at a height of about two to three centimeters.

"There's no wires. I don't see anything. Isn't that crazy," he said, and...