1998 school year

The 1998 school year is the decisive temporal frame for the novel’s main catastrophe. It begins with third-year Class 3 confronting the Yomiyama phenomenon through an unprecedented strategy involving two students who are treated as “not there,” and it proceeds from uneasy classroom coexistence to the collapse of that strategy, the discovery of hidden histories, and the Sakitani Memorial Hall massacre. The year’s significance lies in the way ordinary school time—classes, examinations, summer vacation, and a proposed camping trip—becomes the schedule by which danger gathers and returns.

Beginning of the School Year

The year’s class records establish the institutional setting of the crisis. Mr. Chibiki keeps twenty-seven years of third-year Class 3 lists, arranged from 1972 through 1998, with the newest records placed on top. The first two pages therefore document the current class, naming Mr. Kubodera as head teacher and Ms. Mikami as assistant teacher, followed by the students’ surnames. Koichi Sakakibara appears in the final row because he joined the class late as a transfer student.

The same list already records the year’s first losses. Red X marks stand beside Yukari Sakuragi and Ikuo Takabayashi. Beside Sakuragi’s name are notes identifying a May 26 accident at school and the same-day car accident that killed her mother, Mieko; beside Takabayashi’s name is the notation “June 6—illness.” The list also records the June 3 workplace accident involving Takeru Mizuno’s older sister, Sanae. In this way, the school year is represented not as a neutral calendar but as an accumulating archive of deaths and family connections.

The Two-Person Strategy and June to July

During the first part of the year, Koichi and Mei Misaki are both placed in the “not there” position. Their separation from the rest of the class affects even the most ordinary routines. On a day of continuous rain, they refuse to eat in the classroom with everyone else and leave together after fourth period. One possible refuge is the art club room on the first floor of Building Zero, at the far western end. The room was formerly a normal classroom, divided in two and reduced to half its original size; the neighboring room bears a placard identifying it as the Local Historical Society. The improvised, partitioned space reflects the broader condition of the class: familiar institutions have been rearranged to accommodate an abnormal reality.

They also use the Secondary Library as a retreat. When the bell for fifth period rings, the library is empty, and Mr. Chibiki is absent. Mei reads The Lonely Crowd, a book she borrowed from the main library, while the room’s isolation gives their private investigation a temporary shelter. Mr. Chibiki later explains that he is “safe” because he has no direct ties to third-year Class 3; for that reason, he can interact normally with Koichi and Mei without being affected. His position allows Mei to obtain information from him and makes the library an unusual zone where the class’s rules can be examined from outside their immediate reach.

The strategy is tested against the calendar. June ends and July begins without a fresh calamity on the first day of the new month, but the tension in the classroom intensifies because Ms. Mizuno and Takabayashi have already died in June. Their deaths become the measure by which the two-person strategy is judged: if the number of students treated as “not there” has been doubled, the class must determine whether that change can prevent further deaths. Outwardly, Koichi and Mei’s strange school life continues unchanged, but the apparent calm is already understood as provisional rather than secure.

That peace lasts only a little over a month after Takabayashi’s death on June 6. On Monday, July 13, the class’s fragile stability shatters. The date marks the transition from a controlled experiment in collective avoidance to an openly violent phase of the school year. The first-semester examinations conclude without incident, and the class reaches the final week before summer vacation, but the ordinary academic timetable cannot contain the danger accumulating beneath it.

Records, Memory, and the Hidden Casualty

The 1998 school year is governed not only by visible deaths but by uncertainty over whether the class can recognize its true cause. Koichi asks Mr. Chibiki whether records and memories are altered while the “extra person,” also called “the casualty,” is hidden within the class. The phenomenon’s effect is not merely that people overlook someone. According to Mr. Chibiki, details that would ordinarily make no sense are made to seem coherent, while no one recognizes the casualty’s true identity. His immediate confirmation turns altered memory and documentation into active mechanisms of the disaster.

The class list demonstrates how such a mechanism can coexist with apparently precise administration. Names, contact information, staff assignments, dates, accidents, illnesses, and family deaths are all preserved on paper, yet the document does not yield a complete or reliable explanation of what is happening. The school year therefore becomes a conflict between records that appear factual and a phenomenon that changes the meaning of facts. The archive can show that people have died while still concealing why the deaths belong to a larger pattern.

Summer Preparations and Dangerous Spaces

As the first semester closes, Mr. Chibiki predicts that the class will arrange a camping trip. On July 21, during the final homeroom before summer vacation, Ms. Mikami announces a two-night, three-day class camping trip scheduled for August 8 through 10. The trip carries the class’s unresolved crisis into a new environment, replacing the school’s daily routines with an enclosed period of collective movement and shared danger.

The school’s older spaces foreshadow that movement. Koichi and the others enter the second floor of Building Zero, which has been off-limits and unused for years. Dust, grime, damage, and a stagnant odor make the corridor feel abandoned even though daylight enters through the north-side windows. The former classroom of third-year Class 3 is the third room from the western end. Teshigawara had verified its location with Kazami, who had helped Akazawa and others retrieve the desk and chair intended for the student who was “not there.” The old classroom thus links the present strategy to the physical remains of earlier classes and turns school architecture into a repository of repeated catastrophe.

The Sakitani Memorial Hall becomes the most important destination of the year’s final phase. It stands in a forest at the foot of the mountain as a Western-style building with a slightly classical appearance. Sakitani, an alumnus of North Yomi and a local celebrity, originally built it for his company and donated it to the school several decades earlier. Although named in his honor, the school has no clear use for the building. Its uncertain institutional status—owned, preserved, and yet functionally neglected—helps make it a threshold space where the class’s temporary order can break down.

Violence and the August Catastrophe

The school year’s violence first appears within the classroom when Mr. Kubodera’s speech collapses into incomprehensible sounds and he withdraws a sharp-bladed object from a bag resting on his desk. The scene transforms a familiar teacher’s desk into the point from which lethal violence emerges. Later, at the Sakitani Memorial Hall, Koichi encounters another sequence of warning signs: late at night, with the main lights off, he sees a door to the dining hall standing open by only a few centimeters. After noticing blood, he enters despite having the option to follow the others. Something grabs his ankle in the darkness; when he finally forces open a door whose knob has become hot, he discovers that the strange sound and smell come from a fire consuming the room. Flames, heat, and smoke drive him back, converting curiosity into immediate physical danger.

The aftermath, recorded in the following days, fixes the catastrophe in time. Before dawn on August 9, 1998, firefighters fail to save the Sakitani Memorial Hall, which is almost entirely destroyed. Six bodies are found at the scene. The autopsies establish that none died from the fire itself. The caretaker, Kensaku Numata, was stabbed in the neck with numerous metal cooking skewers and then burned in the blaze. Four students—Maejima, Yonemura, Sugiura, and Nakao—died from blood loss after being stabbed and cut repeatedly with a sharp blade. Akazawa died after falling from the second-floor balcony and apparently breaking her spine.

The investigation identifies Mieko Numata, Kensaku Numata’s wife and co-manager of the hall, as responsible for all six deaths. After killing Kensaku, she is believed to have spread kerosene through the kitchen and started the fire. Mr. Chibiki restrained her, but she died before she could be handed over to the police, apparently succeeding in suicide by biting through her own tongue. The immediate facts of the massacre are therefore conclusive even though its deepest motive remains unclear. The final revelation of the 1998 school year is not that every death can be explained by the supernatural pattern, but that the crisis also creates conditions in which human violence, institutional neglect, damaged memory, and fear become inseparable.