You Are In Hinamizawa, Summer of '89

It’s June 17th, 1989. The sun burns through paper-thin curtains as the sound of cicadas drills into your skull. You're on a futon, half-awake, blinking against the light. It smells like damp earth and old wood. You hear footsteps downstairs and the clatter of someone making miso soup. You don’t remember arriving in this village, but you know you’ve been here before. You chalk it up to déjà vu.

This is Hinamizawa, a rural village nestled deep in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture. Isolated and quaint. The population is less than 3,000, and you just moved here with your family for a fresh start. You've already made friends at school, and they're waiting for you outside to walk together.

You step into the heavy summer air. Everything smells alive—wet grass, pine, gasoline, something metallic underneath it all. You meet your friends on the dirt path to school: Rena, Mion, Keiichi, Satoko, and Rika. You laugh and banter as teenagers do. Rena makes a pass at you, but you're too oblivious to understand female emotions, so she sighs. Everyone laughs at your expense.

On the way there, you pass the remnants of a dam construction site that was mysteriously halted years ago. You've heard a few whispers here and there, but you know it's a sensitive topic for the village. Years prior, Hinamizawa was under threat of going underwater due to the dam construction. Locals say protests turned violent, that someone died, that the government backed down in fear of what Hinamizawa could do. When you ask your friends about it, their smiles tighten. They change the subject.

The school is small, just one room. Everyone seems overly chipper, but you're used to it by now. You play games with your friends after school. Before parting ways, they invite you to the Cotton Drifting Festival that night. They tell you it's a village tradition, and you get to play games, eat food, and throw cotton down the stream. You're not sure what it all means, but you want to be part of the village, so you agree.

As the sun sets, lanterns come to life all over the village. The Cotton Drifting Festival is a yearly ritual to honour Oyashiro-sama, the town’s guardian deity. People drift cotton into the river to represent cleansing the soul. The whole thing reeks of tradition, but you're just here for the food. At the festival, everyone is smiling. Children laugh, and elders pass out sweets.

You meet two outsiders: Tomitake, a freelance photographer, and Takano, a nurse from the clinic. They're foreigners like you, so you feel comfortable talking to them. They ask how you like the village so far, and you say you're mostly satisfied with the serenity, but curious about some things—things like the dam site and the worship of Oyashirio, the deity of the village. You don’t really understand any of it, but you want to know why everyone's so gung-ho about the topic.

They pull you aside, their tone hushed and curious. Takano hands you a worn folder stuffed with research notes and tells you not to reveal them to anyone before running off. You're unsure whether you're supposed to believe any of this, but you instinctively hide the folder from your friends; you don't know why you do.

You go over to meet your friends who are waiting to see Rika's dance. Rika is the daughter of one of the village leaders, so she performs a traditional cotton dance every year. She uses a big metal hammer to scrape cotton off a wooden board. Her movements are so precise they feel unnatural, like muscle memory from another lifetime.

You search for Rena and Mion afterward. They’d vanished during the performance. When you find them, they're in good spirits and gush about how cool the dance was...but they weren’t there. You're confused, but don't give it much thought. You end the night with playful banter before heading home.

The next day goes as normal. You head to school, but during one of your classes, a detective drops by to talk to you—Detective Oishi. He’s from outside the village, and he doesn’t bother hiding his disdain for the locals. Before letting you settle in, he tells you Tomitake—the photographer you met last night—was found dead, having ripped at his own throat until he bled out. And Takano, the nurse, is missing. You tell Detective Oishi that you just saw them last night. He asks about your friends, implying they might be involved. You want to defend them, but something holds you back.

Later that day, Rena invites you to the garbage dump. She says she’s looking for something. The air smells foul, and the sun is too hot. You confront her about the things that she refuses to tell you, like what the curse really is and, more specifically, where she ran off to last night. Her face twists. She grows aggressive, accusatory. Her words are sharp, and her smile is gone. She calls you a liar for hiding things too—just as she keeps secrets, so do you. You promptly leave after making up an excuse to go home.

You feel like you’re being followed. You see a white van with men in caps sitting inside, hiding their faces. You feel an irresistible itch, so you start scratching your neck. You get home and open Takano’s research folder, and you can’t believe your eyes.

She theorized that the village is infected with a parasitic disease, one that causes paranoia, hallucinations, and eventually madness. Almost everyone in the village is infected, and levels of the disease vary. The swamp in the village is sacred, or at least that’s what the villagers believe. They say it’s where Oyashiro-sama descended from the heavens. But Takano thinks it’s the infection site—a hotbed of spores and parasites that get into the villagers' bloodstream.

Takano notes how a symptom of the infected is to scratch at their necks, like they're trying to dig something out that isn't there. She lists past incidents. A priest who once tried to modernize the village was found dead. His wife and child drowned in the swamp not long after, ruled a suicide. The records are vague, but the timing is suspicious. It was science hiding behind folklore.

There’s an annual pattern. Every year on the night of the Cotton Drifting Festival, someone dies and someone vanishes. Sometimes it’s outsiders, sometimes locals. Always, the village acts like nothing happened, like it’s just the curse again.

Takano writes that this ritualized violence may serve a darker purpose, either a cleansing process by the villagers to maintain some invisible balance, or a desperate attempt to appease the god-figure they fear is watching. You read about the Three Families—Mion’s and Rika’s among them—who hold disproportionate sway over village affairs. The Sonozakis, Mion's family, are practically a mafia, enforcing tradition like religion. They smile at festivals and host games for the kids, but their reach extends everywhere: the clinic, the school, the police.

The pages of Takano's research start to feel warm in your hands. You realize you’ve been scratching your neck. Not a lot, but enough to break the skin. Then you flip to the last few pages. Takano mentions something called Level 5—once a patient reaches that point, there’s no coming back. Infecteds will begin to believe everyone is out to get them. They'll start hearing footsteps, seeing people watching them from windows. Sometimes they kill. Sometimes they kill themselves. Either way, it ends in blood.

You stare at the last line she wrote. It reads: “The village is a living organism, and it protects itself.”

You slam the folder shut. And then there’s a knock on your door.

It’s Rena and Mion. They brought food and said you look unwell. Their voices are syrupy-sweet. They ask why you were talking to Detective Oishi. You're suspicious—how do they know that, and why are they questioning you about it? Before you say anything, the room gets very dark.

Your neck starts to itch, and you have a flashback—

You asked Mion and Rena to come in, and it ends with you beating them to death with a bat. You don’t know why you did it, but you remember that you did.

You scream at them to leave you alone and shut all the doors and windows. After a couple of hours, you think they're gone, but Rena remains outside your house, muttering something. You can't tell what it is, but it looks like she's saying "im sorry" repeatedly.

The next day, you make your way to the clinic, but something stops you, an ungodly sight near the shrine. You find Rika’s body. She’s crumpled near the shrine, blood soaking through her naked body. Her eyes are open, and her ribcage is exposed. You run away.

You decide to leave the village for good. You run toward the thick-cut forests, basking in sunlight before nightfall. The cicadas don’t stop, but neither do you. You make it out somehow, but can’t shake the feeling that you hear footsteps running after you. Suddenly, it stops. You fall to the ground, passing out.

You come to, and a TV above your hospital bed is playing the news. The village of Hinamizawa and everyone in it were massacred. They say it was a volcanic gas leak, but you know that’s not true. You know what you saw. You know all your friends are dead. There’s nothing you can do.

You hear a voice telling you it’s your fault—you should’ve stayed, you should've helped. The memory seeps in, and it feels like there are insects crawling inside your skin. You go to scratch your neck, and maggots fall out onto the floor. You need the insects out, so you keep digging. Pools of blood surround the floor as the hospital staff rush in to stop you with a needle labelled C–130 in hand.

You get to a point where you can’t dig any deeper. It's getting dark now.

You're awake again, good.

The sun burns through paper-thin curtains as the sound of cicadas drills into your skull. You're on a futon, half-awake, blinking against the light. It smells like damp earth and old wood. You hear footsteps downstairs and the clatter of someone making miso soup. You don’t remember arriving in this village, but you know you’ve been here before.