Summary
In a crooked coastal town where paper lanterns bleed vermilion onto rain-slick alleys, Ikeru Shikabane unspools like a feverish scroll painted with bone-ink. A nameless mortuary assistant—half-alive, half-remembered—discovers that certain corpses exhale a silver mist that re-animates the past. He barters with yakuza embalmers, Shinto priests drunk on formaldehyde, and a child medium who pulls memories out of cadavers like silk scarves. Each resurrection costs a year of his own lifespan, tallied by cherry petals tattooed across his torso. When the body of a vanished film actress is wheeled in, her eyes still blinking in the gloom, the assistant’s own childhood—erased by wartime firebombs—comes clawing back in stuttering frames. The town’s river runs backward; corpses rehearse their deaths nightly; a benshi narrator mutters intertitles only the dead can read. Caught between elegy and exorcism, the tale culminates in a derelict cinema where celluloid ghosts splice themselves into the living flesh of the audience, forcing the assistant to choose between perpetual remembrance or merciful erasure.
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