The Room Next Door

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This happened when I was still living in an apartment.
The apartment was located on the outskirts of a rural village and the room next to mine had been empty for ages.

One day I was trying to get some sleep when I heard some hushed voices form the next room.
"Yamano kansan, mou oran jaro. Saru do mazesena, tataruzo."*1

They were talking in dialect. The words could be translated as: "The mountain god is probably no longer there. If you don't set a monkey on it or something, a curse would ensue."
I'd never heard that sort of conversation before so didn't dwell too much on their meaning.

But their voices, which at first were mere whispers, gradually grew louder and louder, and eventually turned into a cacophony.  I assumed, without thiking much about it, that they were just rude people, who had moved in during the day when I was out for work. So I knocked loudly twice on the wall as I lay on the bed.

For a brief moment, the voices ceased. But then they started again and I heard them say, we've been caught, we've been caught, we must kill. It became like a meeting of old men as the voices began to increase in number.
But I was a laid back sort of person and even then all I thought was, now I can finally go back to sleep.
However just as I turned over in the bed, one voice rang out in the next door. This boss of the voices*2 screamed out,  "Man? Or Beast? You are man! Aren't you!?" and he bashed himself against the wall making a terrible bang.
My body was suddenly rendered immobile and I passed out. When I came to I was lying next to a well behind a shrine.

The priest who nursed me, after offering me some tea, said, "There's no need for gratuity but you must have yourself purified here today," and starved to death.



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*1"yama no kansan...." The original Japanese text is the following: 山のかんさん　もうおらんじゃろ　猿どまぜせな、たたるぞう。Althought it's in dialect some bits of it is still translatable: for example, "yama" means "mountain."  But I thought transliteration would be better here, because I feel it fits well with the rest of the story. (This is obviously the part that gave me the most trouble, because I cannot translate a dialect like that.)

*2 "boss" of the voices : a weird expression, but "boss" is the exact word the author used in the original text, so I left it there.