The Hinakira Murders

Starting on January 26&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 2006, a series of queer, peculiar deaths occurred in a small village, named Hinakira, just inside of Nagano Prefecture, Japan. The victims of the murders were often found mangled almost beyond all recognition, buried feet first under piles of snow, their heads propped out, bloody and lifeless. On most of these occasions, a note was found besides the bodies of the victims. Governmental workers were able to decipher some of the code that was present on the notes they had discovered, but no one could figure out the nonsense on the paper beyond the fact that there were several mahjong symbols as well as a few unrelated items amongst the hieroglyphic-like symbolism - among those unrelated symbols included a basketball and what seemed like a pair of dice.

The first victims of the brutal murder spree were a young teenage couple, walking home from a restaurant on the night of January 26&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 2006. The couple's names were Kazuo Kuzimari and Mizuko Sera. Their bodies were found on the morning of January 27&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 2006, their heads both respectively sticking out of large mounds of snow on a sidewalk. The authorities were quickly called into the scene, and upon further inspection of the corpses, it was almost instantly clear that there death was of no natural cause. Sera's corpse was mangled badly, her right arm twisted until the joint holding it together was nothing but a thread. Her breasts had been removed, presumably sliced off, and her eyes were missing. Her ribs had been fractured, and her skull smashed.

Kuzimari, her boyfriend, got it even worse, however. His left leg was twisted around the right leg, tied in a fleshy knot. A few ribs protruded from his sides. The back of both of his hand's were busted open, split apart down the middle, spilling out drying crimson and pus. His head was nearly decapitated, hanging on only by a few strips of flesh. As expected, both of the couple were declared legally dead.

The authorities also discovered another important aspect of the crime scene, however - the peculiar, near-completely indecipherable notes that were discovered buried in snow nearby the scene of the killings. Upon them were many symbols - some of them resembling mahjong tiles - while the rest were either entirely unrelated symbols such as a pair of dice, a basketball, and what appeared to be a baseball cap. The rest however, was when symbolism ended and sheer fantasy began - a collection of what appeared to be letters, numbers, and markings that read in no known human language. From Japanese to English, from French to Bulgarian, none could discover what peculiarly indecipherable language this could have possibly been. Even after heavy studying, authorities and citizens alike could not discover what language this strange, seemingly un-crackable code was meant to symbolize, and temporarily gave up the chase to unveil the mystery.

Their break did not last as long as they had hoped for, however. Three weeks after the first killing, on the morning of February 18&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 2006, an elderly man named Kaku Jizuhi - whom was also one of the people who discovered the bodies of the young couple those three weeks ago - was found dead in his back yard, hanging by his neck on the back porch of his house, dangling lifelessly from a garrot wire which ended in a deadly sharp hook that had apparently pierced his jugular vein. His stomach was split open, entrails spilling out onto the snow, becoming glazed in ice. His groin area was unclothed and cut open, his penis missing until one officer discovered the disembodied organ in a gutter in the man's house. The authorities again discovered many symbolic notes left behind at the scene of the crime - this time, more glaringly left out in the open right underneath the dangling corpse of Jihuzi. Similarly undecipherable jumbles of letters and symbolism were found on the notes, and once again the authorities returned to research in hopes of finding out what these unknown codes were supposed to be, and how to crack them. One of the notes had a familiar English word on it - &quot;SMELL&quot;, which was a penny symbol with the word written in small font - though no other decipherable incantations could be or were found. Whatever this murderer was, it was now certainly human as proven (perhaps ironically) beyond the anecdotal evidence on the symbols.

On March 2&lt;sup&gt;nd&lt;/sup&gt; (subsequently following no such succession or luck in the government cracking the rest of the notes' codes), another corpse was discovered. This time around, it was a young girl named Fiji Kazamagura, an 11 year old. Her corpse was found in a gutter in a small, enclosed alleyway, being picked at by flies. Her death looked considerably less gruesome than the other ones this unknown maniac had committed, though it was made even worse as this time it had been done to a child. Her jugular vein was split open, and blood had clearly pouring out, now drying in a few cracks in the gutter. She was naked from the waist up, her breast-less chest removed of nipples, which seemed to be sliced clean off. No other major damage was found on her body, though once again, the authorities discovered notes wedged into the cut open slit in her neck. Strangely, however, it seemed that the notes had been placed in the girl's corpse after the blood had dried - which implied that the murderer, whomever he or she was, had placed the notes inside her corpse following a full drying of the blood (which, at least, would take a few hours to fully come into play).

Understandably, the murder of this young, innocent girl triggered an uproar amongst the small town of Hinakira, and citizens and civilians began to take to drastic measures in order to keep safe from whatever beast was committing these horrible crimes. Police lines were boarded among a few houses, enclosing some of the richer, more luxurious mansions of the small village.

The authorities would not have nor tolerate anymore more of these gruesome, wanton acts of violence. The mayor of the town, Kakuzi Kerimuru, joined in a private meeting with about fifteen other members of the town's council, some of those being policemen, in one final attempt to unravel the mystery behind the codes of the notes that they had found nearby all of the corpses in this horrible serial killing outbreak. Kerimuru's supercomputer, which was designed and created solely to help decipher what was known of confusing incantations, began to scramble all of the letters, all of the symbols and markings on the notes that they had found at the postmortems.

The meeting room was tense and deathly quiet, awaiting for the computer to make its final decision. Finally, in a horrible, intimidating click and clack, the supercomputer began to automatically type out the words to the men before it, and the sixteen authoritarians watched in sheer, inescapable horror as the words finally finished manifesting on the screen:

&quot;This is the story all about how my life got flip-turned upside down...&quot;