When I was five years old, family circumstances forced us to move to my father's hometown. His village had a strange custom: young boys were made to dress as girls until they started elementary school. On top of that, boys were given a girl's name alongside their real name, and everyone in town usually referred to them by their female name.

"You've got a girl's name, too," my dad told me out of nowhere. "What is it?" "Tsubaki. If anyone asks your name, that's what you tell them."

Hearing this suddenly from my father, I didn't know how to react. Maybe it would have been different if I'd grown up with it from as early as I could remember, but having moved to the village out of nowhere, I couldn't get used to having a girl's name, nor could I accept the bizarre tradition that the locals took completely for granted.

Back then, I was a rowdy little kid who loved running around and playing superhero. Being told out of nowhere to put on a skirt and tie up my hair filled me with pure rebellion. Whenever I threw a tearful fit, my father and grandmother would scold me harshly, sometimes even withholding my meals. As the days wore on, my will to resist slowly withered away, and I reluctantly accepted reality.

(If I just stay quiet and do what they say, I won't get hit... It's only until I start elementary school.)

Desperately trying to brainwash myself, I slipped my arms into the blouse my grandmother made me wear and put on the frilly skirt.

One day, I went outside to play explorer. My grandmother had forbidden me from going far, but ever since moving here, I'd been curious about the shrine on the mountain behind our house. The shrine sat at the top of a long, moss-covered flight of stone stairs, and a cold, eerie air hung over its bare dirt grounds.

There wasn't a soul in sight. I spent the time doing whatever I pleased—swinging a small branch around, peeking inside the offertory box in front of the main hall. After about ten minutes, I noticed the sound of footsteps approaching from behind. When I turned around, a boy who looked to be about my age was standing there.

"Who are you?" "The tengu's page."

Still in kindergarten at the time, I was confused, having no idea what words he was even saying. The boy calling himself the tengu's page had a remarkably adorable face, and his skin was pale as porcelain.

"Play with me."

I was getting bored playing by myself anyway, so I invited the boy I'd just met to play hopscotch. Playing hopscotch was a lot of fun, but there was still something distinctly odd about him. Every other boy in the village wore skirts and tied up their hair in girls' clothing, yet he was dressed like a rich little boy from the Showa era, wearing shorts held up by suspenders.

As we sat taking a break on the shrine steps, he suddenly asked me a question out of nowhere.

"What's your name?" "Grandma and Dad told me to say Tsubaki."

When I answered, the boy fell silent with an indescribable expression on his face.

"I wish I'd listened to my dad, too."

Worried by his sudden gloominess, I leaned in to peer closely at his face.

"What's your real name? It's not 'tengu's page,' right? Don't your parents get mad at you for not dressing like a girl?"

The next instant, the thicket of trees surrounding the shrine grounds rustled ominously, and a wind reeking of wild animals blew against us.

"Time's up. I've come to fetch you."

I turned around at the deep voice, and there stood a man who had suddenly appeared in a corner of the grounds. He looked like an ordinary, large, red-faced middle-aged man, but the moment the boy looked at him, his face instantly froze in fear.

When the man intimidated him with a sharp glare, the boy dropped his shoulders in resignation and walked back toward him. Right before taking the boy's hand to leave, the man turned his bulging eyes down at me.

"Your name?" "Tsubaki..." "Another girl. Not a single boy born around here lately."

It felt like I was being blamed for something, making me feel terribly uncomfortable.

After that, I entered elementary school and was freed from dressing as a girl. Eventually, I started attending a high school outside the village and completely forgot about that mysterious childhood experience. Then one day, a friend I'd met in high school mentioned that he wanted to come visit my house over summer break. He lived with his mother in a poor single-parent household, so to avoid putting an extra burden on his mom who worked day and night, he asked if he could bring his five-year-old younger brother along as well.

"Sure, sounds good."

However... that decision turned out to be a fatal mistake.

During the first week of summer break, my friend and his little brother came to the village, and we played all kinds of games together. My grandmother had already passed away, and my father was often away for work, so there was no worry about getting scolded for staying up late making noise. After going through all our usual activities—fighting games, cards, watching movies—we laid side by side on our futons and chatted aimlessly. When I mentioned my village's strange custom, my friend was utterly shocked.

"Huh, they make boys dress as girls? Why?" "Who knows? Beats me." "I'd get it if it were the other way around to protect against creeps... Is Takashi gonna be okay?" "He's fine if he's only staying for a few days. It'd be cruel to force a skirt on him anyway."

As I muttered this while recalling my own bitter childhood memories, my friend's younger brother, Takashi, looked visibly relieved.

"Yay! I didn't want to wear a skirt anyway."

The next day, however... when my friend and I woke up, Takashi was missing from the futon between us. We ran all around the house calling his name, but he was nowhere to be found. Searching high and low throughout the neighborhood yielded nothing, and it eventually turned into a major ordeal with the village youth association being deployed.

"Where on earth did he go? Could it be..." "Do you know something?"

Confronted fiercely by my friend, I told him—half-doubting it myself—about playing with the mysterious boy at the shrine. Driven by a hunch that Takashi might be there, we headed to the shrine grounds at dusk and were left speechless by the shock. Standing in the middle of the grounds was that exact same boy from ten years ago, completely unchanged.

"Takashi!"

Beside the boy stood Takashi with hollow eyes, holding hands with him. My friend rushed forward to tackle the boy and get his brother back, but a powerful gust of wind blew him away, sending him rolling hard onto the ground.

"What good fortune—another page added to the fold."

Wandering out from the twilight shadows was the large, red-faced man. He scooped up both Takashi and the boy in his arms, soared into the sky in an instant, and vanished toward the mountain. Left behind were only my friend, sobbing hysterically as he called out Takashi's name, and me in a state of utter shock.

A few hours later... when we told the search party about what happened at the shrine, everyone turned pale and began talking among themselves in hushed voices. That was when I was informed of the truth: for hundreds of years, spiritings-away had occurred repeatedly in this village, all the work of a tengu. Every child taken by the tengu was a male child, and seventy years ago, a boy who had moved to the village had vanished. That was why the villagers dressed young boys in girls' clothes and gave them female names—to deceive the tengu's eyes.

In the end, Takashi was presumed to have gotten lost in the mountains or kidnapped by a predator, and the police investigation was closed after a few years. This is just my own speculation, but I suspect the boy I played with at the shrine in my childhood was the boy who disappeared seventy years ago, used by the tengu as a decoy to hook new prey...