“I’m getting bogged down with names here,” said Daeng. “So Hiro a.k.a. Toshi fancied himself as . . . ?”

“Minamoto Yorimitsu,” said Kyoko. “The slayer of the head devil, Shuten Doji.”

“Who walked the earth under the name of . . .”

“General Shosen Umiji,” said Kyoko.

“But all through the diary Toshi’s a friend of the yokai,” said Daeng. “How could he live with them if his mission was to defeat them and overpower their leader?”

“I believe we have to look at this as Toshi living in three worlds,” said Siri. “There was the peaceful world in Sawan with his friends and his lover. Then there was the fantasy world he wrote about in his diary. But there was another darker world that he was repressing all the time; the evil world of the devils into which he’d been dragged in China. His hadn’t been a simple madness. He had been possessed. He managed to subdue the yokai for several years. But then something must have happened to reopen a portal into that world.”

“There’s only a hint at the end of the diary and we don’t have the missing pages, but it seems that Toshi was becoming unsettled,” said Kyoko. “We think there may have been an incident. Something caused the yokai to reveal their true identities and Minamoto Yorimitsu, the slayer, was awoken from his ignorance. We think this might have taken place during the parade of the hundred devils, which is the only time the yokai become visible.”

“Sounds like a meeting of the Central Committee,” said Siri.

“Siri, we’re being serious here,” said Daeng.

“Sorry, dear.”

“When was that?” asked Daeng.

“It happens quite often,” said Kyoko. “Yokai are restless. They need exercise. I have a feeling Toshi’s so-called friends let slip who they really were on one of those nights. The professor in Thailand said the nearest parade date to Toshi’s disappearance was August ninth, 1945.”

“That would have been six nights before the Japanese surrender,” said Daeng.

“Exactly,” said Kyoko.

“So the events of those last six days were the cause of Toshi’s disappearance,” said Daeng.

Siri got to his feet and walked to the window. He adjusted the louvers so he could see the garden.

“I think I understand,” he said. “The diary wasn’t therapy.”

“What do you mean?” said Kyoko.

“What happened in that diary was real,” said Siri, turning back to the women. The louver glass was spotless but he instinctively wiped dust from his fingers. There were no clean louvers in Laos.

“How could . . . ?” Kyoko began.

“It was real in another dimension, Kyoko-san,” said Siri. “When Hiro was writing, he was in the same plane as the ghosts and the spirits. It was every bit as real as his life here with the one he loved. I know all this because I’ve been there.”

Kyoko looked at Daeng, bewildered.