A man's muffled voice came from beneath his hands. "I don't know when this change began. Probably one day, sometime over a year ago, I suddenly realized that Grandma and the others hardly ever wrote to me anymore. People I'd been in touch with for a long time had stopped sending letters. Back then, I was busy with work. When I noticed, I wrote to Grandma.
"She never replied. So I wrote to everyone I'd been in touch with. Every letter vanished without a trace... After that, I started to worry. I had a bad feeling.
"Meanwhile, I was encountering more and more ghosts in the human world. It wasn't that the streets were full of them. Before, I'd struggled to meet even one or two in my entire life, and I wasn't even sure who one of them was. Then, all of a sudden, I started running into one every week or two. I'd come into contact with quite a few dead people through my work, and it seemed like all of a sudden, they were turning into ghosts. People who'd been murdered became ghosts, people who'd died of illness became ghosts, and people who'd died in sudden accidents became ghosts, too. They all remained in the human world."
The man lowered his hands, his expression unbearably heavy. "Some of them were at a loss, too. I mean the ghosts. They didn't know what to do. The ones who'd been murdered had it a little easier. They wanted revenge, so they went after it. But some had died in accidents, even accidents caused by their own carelessness, and they became ghosts all the same. They didn't know what to do, and little by little... they changed. They grew irritable, gloomy, and unreasonable."
The man gave a bitter smile. "At