Yomiyama

Yomiyama is the town around which the disasters of Third-Year Class 3 are organized, a place whose geography turns local history into an active source of fear. The town is not merely a backdrop: its name reaches from the mountain to the shrine, its institutions preserve the memory of earlier tragedies, and its buildings become stages where attempts to control the phenomenon repeatedly fail. Even the practical limits of the disasters are described geographically, making Yomiyama both a community and a field of supernatural exposure.

Name, Mountain, and Boundary

Yomiyama began as the name of a mountain before it became the name of the town. Reiko Mikami explains that the mountain came first and that the settlement took its name from it, while Tatsuji Chibiki connects the name with Yomi, the land of the dead. The association is strengthened by the fact that the boy Misaki, whose death stands at the origin of the class’s calamity, also bore Yomiyama as his surname. Local oral traditions consequently describe Yomiyama as a Mountain of Yomi and imagine the shrine built on its slope as a linchpin separating the living world from the next.

This interpretation remains uncertain rather than established as objective fact. Tatsuji Chibiki reports that some people believe the shrine’s sacred position explains why the disasters once stopped, but his cold qualification makes clear that this is only one explanation among several. The uncertainty itself gives the landscape its power: ordinary place-names, family history, and local folklore overlap until the town seems to offer physical confirmation of the class’s hidden rules.

The Town’s Geographic Reach

The disasters do not affect people without limit. Tatsuji Chibiki’s records lead him to conclude that their range extends through the members of the class and blood relatives within two degrees: parents, grandparents, and siblings. Blood relation is necessary, while stepparents and stepsiblings are outside the range. He has found no case of a distant family member living elsewhere being affected, and very few examples of someone who lives outside Yomiyama dying away from the town. The pattern raises the practical possibility that leaving town might provide protection, even though the evidence does not make that possibility an assured escape.

Yomiyama therefore functions as a kind of geographic network rather than a single point. Class membership establishes one route of exposure, blood ties extend another, and residence supplies the strongest local concentration. The town’s danger is consequently social as well as spatial: its roads and buildings connect people to the class, while kinship carries the consequences beyond the school grounds.

Institutions and Abandoned Spaces

Several locations within Yomiyama reveal how the town’s ordinary infrastructure has been repurposed by memory. Building Zero’s art club room occupies half of a former classroom on the building’s western end, with the culture club room beside it and a placard identifying the neighboring room as the Local Historical Society. The secondary library offers another institutional refuge; when Koichi Sakakibara and Mei Misaki go there to avoid eating with the rest of the class, the room is empty and Tatsuji Chibiki, its librarian, is absent. Mei reads The Lonely Crowd there, a private act of withdrawal within a place designed for communal knowledge.

The old classroom of Third-Year Class 3 belongs to a more damaged layer of the town’s educational landscape. It lies on the second floor of a building that has been off-limits and unused for years. Dust, grime, damage, and a stagnant odor make the corridor feel abandoned before the former classroom is even reached. The room is the third from the western end, a detail verified by Tomohiko Kazami, who had gone there with Izumi Akazawa and others to retrieve the desk and chair assigned to the person who was “not there.” The building’s physical neglect mirrors the class’s suppressed history: what the school excludes from ordinary use remains available as a repository of dangerous evidence.

Yomiyama Shrine and the Camping Ritual

The school’s old camping facility stands at the foot of Yomiyama, and the building is called Sakitani Memorial Hall. It was donated to the school by an alumnus and local celebrity who had originally built it for his company. The hall is a Western-style structure with a slightly classical air, standing in a forest, but the school has little idea what to do with it; its institutional afterlife is one of uncertain maintenance and occasional use for club camping trips.

In 1998, Third-Year Class 3 undertakes a two-night, three-day camping trip beginning August 8 at Sakitani Memorial Hall. The head teacher, Mr. Koga, proposes the trip and the accompanying visit to Yomiyama Shrine, which stands partway up the mountain. The shrine is severely run-down, apparently neglected and almost forsaken, despite bearing the same name as the town. During the visit, the students clean it together and become convinced that this communal act might break the curse. Mr. Koga assures them that everything will be all right, but the attempt fails: the disasters are not stopped by cleaning the shrine.

The ritual thus changes the meaning of Yomiyama without mastering it. The mountain and shrine are treated as sacred sites capable of restoring order, yet the group’s confidence collapses when the promised protection does not arrive. Later plans call for everyone to ascend Yomiyama again, with Tatsuji Chibiki accompanying them and warning them to be careful of accidents on the return. Rain may cancel the outing, leaving even the proposed countermeasure dependent on ordinary weather in a landscape already charged with extraordinary danger.

Social Fear and Narrative Significance

Yomiyama’s spaces produce different forms of pressure. The school contains the rules and the records; the old classroom preserves what has been excluded; the shrine offers a failed ritual of purification; and Sakitani Memorial Hall becomes a temporary communal enclosure where fear can be managed only through assurances that prove unreliable. When Manabu Maejima suffers an attack at the hall, Tatsuji Chibiki tells the students that it is an illness he is accustomed to, not an extraordinary event or freak accident, and orders them to remain calm. The narration immediately exposes this reassurance as a lie, showing how the town’s institutions respond to supernatural crisis by imposing a controlled interpretation on visible suffering.

The town also becomes the setting for scapegoating. Izumi Akazawa tells Mei Misaki and Koichi Sakakibara that they bear responsibility for the disasters that have occurred since May, including Mr. Kubodera’s death, and demands an apology from Mei for ceasing to be “not there” while acting as though nothing had happened. Her accusations convert Yomiyama’s diffuse and incomprehensible danger into personal blame. In that movement from geography to accusation, the town’s central function becomes clear: it concentrates history, ritual, institutional secrecy, and fear until every location appears to belong to the same threatening system.