“It’s true,” said Daeng. “Ridiculous but true. You should try living with him.”

“Toshi was troubled and confused,” said Siri. “His mind had been twisted out of all proportion by what he saw in China. And somewhere along the line he had become broken and had opened a connection into the spirit world. For me it’s usually a door through which I pass in order to switch dimensions. For him it was the diary. It was there in this diary world that he met the devils that had driven otherwise sane, rational men to madness. It was there he met the yokai who threatened to once more spill over into this world of ours. But through his diary he had been able to keep the yokai content by befriending them. It was his way of keeping the lid on a bubbling pot. But the arrival of the wicked overlord and his demons stacked the odds against Toshi. Everything terrible was coming together. The yokai were revealing themselves. There was heavy troop activity in Thakhek. Japanese soldiers were out of control the way they had been in China. There was cross-dimensional chaos. Hiro was afraid for his friends in the village. He had to go on a second mission to protect them.”

“And that mission had to involve General Shosen Umiji, whom he believed to be the incarnation of Shuten Doji the demon,” said Kyoko. “Or why else would Hiro have taken on the name of Minamoto? Perhaps Hiro moved away hoping the yokai might follow him.”

“I don’t see him running,” said Siri. “Neither metaphorically nor literally.”

“This is getting creepy,” said Kyoko.

“But this doesn’t take us any closer to the treasure,” said Daeng, who’d had enough spirit talk for one day. “Did the professor shed any more light on the text?”

“There was a reference we almost missed,” said Kyoko. “We ignored it at first because it was . . . well, it was very Western. We’d only been looking at Lao transcriptions of Japanese names. But the professor is a very thorough man and he returned to it. The name was Hal.”

“That was the name of the cat that left because of the arrival of the dog,” said Siri.

“Nicely remembered,” said Daeng.

“In the earlier pages we learned that Hiro was very fond of the cat,” said Kyoko. “But the cat left because it couldn’t stand the new arrival. The new arrival was Taigou, or Senbiki Okami, one of the yokai in dog form. The professor made a list of possible versions of ‘Hal,’ its Japanese pronunciation being ha and ru, and with a little juggling he came up with the name: baku. I suppose one of the reasons we missed it is because, like ‘Minamoto,’ it isn’t the name of a yokai.”

“Then what is it?” said Siri.