Tomohiko's House

Tomohiko's house is a traditional Japanese house, built into private woodland on the side of a mountain. Very few houses are built in the area, but one of them is the house owned by Shoko, which is connected to Tomohiko's house by a secret passage through the woods that only Mariye knows about.

The house is disused at the start of the novel, allowing the artist to move in as a lodger and caretaker. It has a very large music room with Tomohiko's collection of vinyl, which mostly consists of German operas. It has no television or internet, and it is so remotely placed that cell phones do not work well there. On the property there is a shrine, which the artist discovers when he is ringing a bell; when he and Menshiki discover a pit dug into the earth behind the shrine, they suspect that the...