Where the Truth Lies
For all my intelligence, and all my rationality, and all my skepticism, I must confess to you, Dear Reader: I am cursed.
I think we are all afforded some level of superstition. One that a lot of people in my life hold is that I had been blessed with an incredible amount of luck.
It’s probably true.
It started at an early age. Although I was generally considered a “smart kid”, there were quite a few tests and exams in which I – unexpectedly – had incorrect answers marked as correct; even when people who had given the same wrong answer did not. In my teenage years, I passed my driver’s exam, in spite of not being asked to do any parking, 3-point turns, or really anything besides driving around streets for 10 minutes. I got my first job ever by, on a whim, showing up to a meetup hosted by my university and – quite randomly, by sheer chance – checking my inbox months later and seeing that one of the people I met there had sent me an e-mail asking me to come along (in spite of having no real qualifications). This, incidentally, is the job I am still at, five years later.
One time, an electrician showed up and informed me that one of the outlets in my bathroom was not properly grounded – possibly for years. The fact that neither I nor my roommate had ever been electrocuted was nothing short of a small miracle.
You could trace my luck even further back: after all, I was born in a stable home, had good education, am not in debt, and am surrounded by friends and family who love me. Even something as this – being able to post online and having a small enough audience that reads is something worth considering lucky.
I was born under a lucky star, as they say.
It’s only natural, then, that I’m cursed.
The person cursing me being none other than the hit popstar The Weeknd and his 2020 song, Blinding Lights.
The curse is very simple – shortly upon hearing Blinding Lights, my general good luck would temporarily turn around, and something bad would happen to me.
I will say that this is not the first time I’ve suspected I was cursed by a song – it’s just that, in the case of Blinding Lights, the evidence feels overwhelming.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the curse’s effects:
- The first instance of the curse struck way back in 2020. It was the peak of COVID era. I was playing Risk of Rain 2 – absolutely dominating that shit, for the record – and innocently, unsuspectingly, listening to the Weeknd’s album, After Hours. That was when I heard the song. Immediately afterwards, I started experiencing some difficulty breathing. Fearing it was COVID, I had myself checked out. But it wasn’t. I just had… difficulty breathing, for some reason. The mysterious affliction went away a week or two after. I had no reason to suspect any kind of curse.
- In 2021, shortly after spending a day listening to Blinding Lights on repeat because I was too lazy to switch the track on Spotify, I had entered into a years-long rivalry with another coworker that continued to haunt me for quite a while.
- On two separate occasions, after listening to Blinding Lights, my production environment crashed.
- While discussing this strange phenomenon with my therapist, I played him the song, since he didn’t know it. The next session, I was telling him how I’d gotten a massive bill from the electric company due to a years-long filing error on their end.
- This year, in an attempt to prove to myself there was no curse, I listened to the song. My girlfriend broke up with me shortly after.
- In another attempt to disprove the curse and listening to the song again, I later ended up spraining my ankle while hiking.
For the record – the curse maintains its force even while listening to the Japanese cover.
Now, you, the outsider, my Dearest Reader, can easily explain this as basic human nature: assigning meaning to external events. Misfortune can never come alone – there must be cause and effect. In the same sense that Christianity brings meaning to suffering, I am assigning meaning to my suffering to the man who starred in the 2023 bomb of a TV series known as The Idol.
And I happen to agree: it is human nature. We seek cause and effect. Even a nihilist will inevitably stumble and assign meaning to the meaningless.
There’s a certain comfort in that sense in mystery stories, where we have the knowledge that an explanation behind misfortune must exist – there is always the culprit, there is always a reasonable explanation behind there actions, and there are always clues leading to both. There’s an unspoken promise that the world, when all is said and done, makes sense.
But what happens when there’s a novel that makes you doubt that? When the characters themselves are not sure if the clues they’re following are really clues at all? When the world they live in doesn’t make sense – much like ours – but they actively force it to?
Those are the main themes of Hideo Nakai’s Offering to Nothingness (or, if you will, Offering to the Void). I’d briefly talked about it before. It is one of the infamous Three Occult Mystery Novels , alongside the Black Death Hall Murder Case and Dogra Magra.
The book revolves around a family seemingly plagued by a Serpent’s Curse, inflicted due to crimes committed by their ancestors. The youngest of the three brothers is convinced he’s being stalked by a suspicious man of the tribe wronged by their family. One of the family’s friends even sends a warning from France warning that a tragedy is likely to occur.
Inevitably, it does: family’s middle child is found dead naked in the bathroom – the doors and windows were locked from the inside. All of the residents of the house appear to have a solid alibi in the 30 minutes when the murder had to have occurred. The death is soon ruled a heart attack caused by the unexpected flickering of the lights. Obviously, however, the death is tied to the cur–
Oh, wait a minute. But, uh, the brother was actually writing a mystery novel at the time he died. It’s about four madmen – A, B, C and D. The novel’s trick revolves around B killing A, C killing B, D killing C and D finally being killed by a trick A had prepared before his death. Could reality be mimicking the novel? Obviously, then, th–
Oh, hang on. There’s also more. Apparently the family had experienced a great loss in the Hiroshima blast. Could one of their relatives have survived and decided to exact vengeance upon the family?
Or, wait. No, no. There’s something going on with the strange uncle staying with the three brothers. He appears to be trying to get a hold of the family fortune – a collection of emeralds – through his newborn child. His plan must be to pick the brothers off one by one.
Or, hm. Actually, now that I think about it, there was a strange mark on the brother’s back in the shape of a cross. It appears he was into masochism and that he might’ve been killed as part of a secret rendezvous with his lover.
Or, uh, wait. The entire house is based around colors. If I… hm. Yes, yes – if you put the colors in a certain way, and cross-reference with certain shrines… And then there’s this strange poem… And what’s the deal with the Mad Hatter’s tea party and Alice in Wonderland being referenced? And why do all of the rooms in the mansion have a color assigned, reminiscent of Poe’s Red Death, but some colors are excluded?
Given all these possible trains of thought, it’s no surprise that our protagonists – a pair of amateur detectives – all begin formulating their own theories. Each veers off in their own direction, each one attempting to disprove the other’s.
There’s a certain sense of absurdity to everything. Early on, an argument is made that the trick used by the culprit to create the locked room must be entirely original – after all, a trick lifted from mystery novels would be easily discovered by someone just reading the novel; a risk the culprit wouldn’t have taken. As a result, a condition was given that all tricks had to be original. One of the characters even frequently applies the Knox’s decalogue in his arguments and counter-arguments to the characters.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Other mysterious deaths start occurring, and the amateur detectives consistently create and recreate their theories to accommodate these new incidents.
One of the most fascinating elements of the book is that, early on, you fear that the story will just outright conclude by saying “everyone who died actually died by natural occurrences, there’s nothing strange going on, people are just enforcing their interpretation, detectives bad lmao” but the book actually consistently lampshades this from the get-go. And what’s more interesting is – after a certain point, you yourself find that more believable than what the detectives are putting out.
I think this is a remarkable achievement. The reader is always positioned on the side of the detective – the all-knowing, the person always one step ahead. The book flips this on its head – the amateur detectives consistently seem either overconfident or just flat-out deluded. There are numerous points where you just want to slap the entire cast and tell them to stop; that they’re going too far, that they’re making too many leaps in logic and assumptions. It perfectly captures the phenomena seen in modern true crime, where people obsessively speculate over real-life tragedies. As you read this, you genuinely feel like they’re trampling on the dead.
But the worst part? Even with all these absurd theories, even when the characters begin making conclusions they have no right making, even when they start dramatic confrontations with what feels like no real ammunition – you have to keep going. It’s not just because the theories are still undeniably interesting, but because all these occurrences are still too strange for you to completely accept the detectives are just wasting their time. Even though our detectives are terrible, the story still calls for a detective. There must be something going on – you just can’t see it through all the noise.
Even worse – some of the crazy theorizing does yield new discoveries and information, confirming the fact that not all is as it seems.
That, I think, is the beauty of Offering. It’s a critique of the mystery genre while still, at its heart, being a mystery story – just one that uses the genre’s absurdity as its main driving force of the story.
I like it a lot.
In general, this was a story I’ve wanted to experience for years. I think just trying to imagine what the story could be has frequently been a source of inspiration for my own stories. Until you open the covers, after all, it could be anything. When you hear about one insane thing happening in the book out of context, your imagination runs wild – you start to think about the circumstances which could lead to such a thing, and you start putting together a whole new story around that particular element.
Even without reading a single word of it, this book has been an indirect inspiration. A part of me now feels a little emptier, now that I’ve finally opened the, uh, metaphorical Schrodinger’s Catbox, but the world is still filled with creative ideas and mysteries. This novel likely being one of the direct inspirations for them.
So, yes. I’m probably not really cursed – but there’s a part of my brain that hasn’t seen enough concrete evidence to the contrary to be talked out of it. Like any good theory, it conveniently ignores any aspects that might contradict it.
Actually, the reason I’m even writing about this is because, the other day, I was driving with my roommate, and a certain song came on his playlist…
Oh, well.
What’s the worst than can happen, right?
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