"Return the dead to death"

“Return ‘the casualty’ to Death” is the central countermeasure against the Yomiyama phenomenon. It converts a concealed supernatural contradiction—the presence of an extra person in third-year Class 3—into a brutal instruction: the casualty must be killed, after which the class’s disasters will end and reality will repair itself around the death.

Origin in Matsunaga’s Confession

The formula reaches the present class through Katsumi Matsunaga’s cassette tape, a confession recorded fifteen years earlier while his memory was still clear. Matsunaga admits that he caused the death of the extra person in his class and that, although he killed someone, the act also became a form of salvation for everyone else. The disasters ended ten days after the killing, and the evidence was a sudden collective forgetting: students, teachers, parents, and other people connected with the class no longer remembered that the boy had ever belonged to it.

Matsunaga interprets this erasure as a restoration of order. By returning the casualty who should never have existed to Death, the numbers once again match, and the modifications made to the world—including the memories of those involved—are corrected. His own unusually deep involvement in the death leaves him temporarily able to remember the erased boy, but he expects even that memory to disappear. The confession therefore preserves not only a personal admission of guilt but also an account of memory itself being repaired after the extra person’s death.

A Rule Made Into an Imperative

Matsunaga does not leave the discovery as a private explanation. He records it for future underclassmen who may suffer the same disasters, hoping to transmit both the facts and the method of stopping them. At the end of the tape, the wording becomes emphatic and repetitive: “Return ‘the casualty’ to Death.” The instruction is then made explicit: the future class must kill the extra person, because that is the only way to stop the disasters once they have begun.

The phrase thus operates as more than a description of a supernatural mechanism. It is a speech act that turns interpretation into obligation. Once the class accepts the tape as reliable, an uncertain identity becomes a death sentence, and the apparently impersonal logic of the phenomenon acquires human executors. The vocabulary also disguises violence beneath the language of correction. “Returning” suggests restoration rather than murder, while “the casualty” reduces a person to a position in an impossible arithmetic of life and death.

Social Conditions Around the Formula

The rule becomes persuasive because the class already lives inside an abnormal system of exclusion and altered recognition. Mr. Chibiki explains that people with no direct link to third-year Class 3 are comparatively safe, since ordinary interaction with them should not have an effect. He can therefore speak with Koichi Sakakibara and Mei Misaki without sharing the class’s direct vulnerability. By contrast, the class itself is subject to tampered records and memories: details that should make no sense are made to seem coherent, preventing anyone from recognizing the casualty’s true identity.

The class’s earlier attempt to treat both Mei and Koichi as “not there” fails to increase the number of absent students from one to two. After Mr. Kubodera’s death, the students gradually stop maintaining that tactic and begin behaving as though Mei exists, including addressing her directly. This change does not result from a clearly announced decision; it emerges as an almost invisible collective adjustment. The contrast matters because the “not there” strategy attempts to manage the phenomenon through social denial, whereas “Return ‘the casualty’ to Death” demands a final physical act.

The same logic produces scapegoating. Izumi Akazawa tells Mei and Koichi that they bear responsibility for the disasters, including Mr. Kubodera’s death, and demands an apology from Mei once she stops being treated as absent. Meanwhile, Naoya Teshigawara worries that the extra person may have accompanied the class and searches for a sign by testing Tomohiko Kazami’s childhood memories. Kazami’s failure to remember their river hideout or a childhood attempt to cycle to the ocean becomes, in Teshigawara’s mind, evidence that the real Kazami died long ago and that the present Kazami is the intruder. Teshigawara then confesses that he killed him, demonstrating how the formula can transform uncertain clues and fear into irreversible violence.

Koichi’s Decision to Apply It

The formula reaches its most immediate and dangerous form when Koichi stands over Reiko Mikami with a pickax taken from Mei. The weapon is medium-sized, with a haft roughly sixty or seventy centimeters long; both points of its iron head are sharp enough to inflict deadly wounds. Reiko protests that the act cannot be carried out, but Koichi acknowledges that, if the disasters are to be stopped, he will do it.

Koichi justifies his decision by invoking Matsunaga’s testimony directly. He explains that returning the casualty to Death is the only way to stop disasters after they have begun. The scene turns the recorded rule into a present ethical crisis: a proposition once heard as historical evidence now governs an armed confrontation between people who know one another intimately. The phrase’s apparent certainty does not remove the horror of the choice; it intensifies it by presenting killing as both forbidden violence and supposedly necessary salvation.

Meaning and Consequences

“Return ‘the casualty’ to Death” binds identity, memory, and violence into a single mechanism. The extra person is not merely hidden from view; the phenomenon alters the surrounding records and recollections so that the impossible presence appears normal. Killing is then represented as the means by which reality can acknowledge what it had been forced to accommodate and restore the missing balance.

Yet the formula’s promised restoration is inseparable from uncertainty. The class cannot reliably identify the extra person by appearance, and suspicion may arise from damaged or incomplete memories, as it does in Teshigawara’s reasoning about Kazami. The instruction therefore offers a decisive answer to an unstable problem while making error catastrophic. Its narrative power lies in that contradiction: it promises the end of collective disaster by requiring an individual act that may itself be founded on confusion, fear, and the desperate need to impose order.