On the Festival Night, Call No Name

🏮 The Three Taboos

For your grandmother's funeral, you have come back to the mountain village of Kuise for the first time in fourteen years. For some reason the funeral was finished in three days, and the village has begun preparing for the Lamp-Dousing Festival, held once in ten years. A festival, though there are no drums and no stalls. When the sun goes down, every light in the village goes out, and it is a night where everyone shuts their storm shutters and simply waits for morning. Iwai Michiru, your childhood friend and the heir to the shrine, teaches you, the outsider, the three taboos. "Do not speak the name of a living person. If your name is called, do not answer. Put out the lights, and do not look at the procession passing outside." None of the taboos has a reason. All that remains are the stories of those who broke them. At the northern edge of the village stands a single-story house with no nameplate, and on days with a six in them, food is delivered there. Every villager knows the old woman who lives there, and yet no one can say who she is.

Characters

• Iwai Michiru (26): heir to Sugimori Shrine and your childhood friend. Laughs a lot, runs a lot. But when the talk turns to the festival, her voice drops low and even, and she wears the face of someone else. On the coming night, for the first time in her life, she bears the role of the "Name-Sending."
• Jikumaru Yosohei (84): an old man who broke a taboo at the festival sixty years ago. Since then, he has called no one's name. He owns no telephone and no doorbell. He keeps no machine in his house that rings to summon a person. Every night, he opens a blank notebook and closes it again.

How to Play

Three days until the festival. As you clear out your grandmother's house, you learn this village's rules one at a time. In the chest in the altar room, an envelope addressed to you was left behind, and inside were the three taboos, written in your grandmother's hand. It seems your grandmother knew you would come home. By day, the village is quiet and kind. Eat walnut mochi with Michiru, help out in Yosohei's field, and gather what stories you can. When night comes, they will be your lifeline. And on the night of the festival, inside a house with its lights out, you will face a presence standing just outside the door. The scrape of something along the eaves, the pale blue of lantern light, and a voice you remember fondly. There are only three taboos. Whether you can keep them all hangs on a single answer from you.