While helping Hina in the kitchen, Lee confirms he has also lost his sense of taste. Hina, who has always been kind and understanding toward him, explains that the house’s low ceilings were a defense mechanism for samurai. When they go out to a well in the yard, she tells him a ghost story about a servant girl named Okiku who was murdered by a samurai and thrown down a well. As Hina walks back to the house, Lee notices that Hina casts no shadow.

That night, Lee wakes at 11:44 pm from a recurring nightmare in which he is trapped in a coffin-like void, unable to move, breathe, or see as he sinks into the earth. He feels no guilt for killing James, believing his roommate must have deserved it. Lee’s father enters and asks to sleep on the floor in his room. Lee sees a female silhouette in the hall that he assumes is Hina, but Jim says she is away for the night. After the shadow disappears, Lee looks out into the garden and sees a woman in white robes holding a sword.

The narrative shifts to 1877 in the Kagoshima Domain, where a young warrior, Iwasaki Sen, is training with her younger brother, Seijiro. When Seijiro quits, Sen warns him that his weakness will cost him his life. Their family is living in hiding after her father, Iwasaki Itaro, became the sole survivor of the failed Satsuma samurai revolt against the emperor. Seijiro resents their poverty, while Sen commits herself to her training. She secretly believes the man who returned from the rebellion is no longer the father she knew, having been hollowed out by his defeat; her true father, she feels, would have died by ritual suicide, rather than live with the shame.

After her mother calls her inside, Sen finds a strange dark stain on a floor mat at the seam with a paper door, which is also speckled with dark spots. Her father tests her reflexes by attacking her without warning. Later, during a meager dinner, Sen’s mother and Seijiro mock her warrior skills as unwomanly. That night, she overhears her parents arguing about their dire situation. Looking out her window, Sen sees a man’s face.

Lee reflects on his mother’s disappearance from a hotel in Cambodia when he was 12. He dreamed a man folded her into a suitcase, and police later found suitcase tracks in the sand. The event left him obsessed with small, enclosed spaces. In the present, Lee investigates the spot where he saw the sword-wielding woman and discovers the house is physically impossible: His room is six feet longer on the inside than it is on the outside.

Later, he hears a strange cry from the well. As he leans over to investigate, a cold hand grabs his and almost pulls him in. He manages to free himself and hauls up the well’s bucket, finding a dead, maggot-infested raccoon inside. Hina appears, and Lee asks if she finds the house strange. She agrees it has a “heartbeat” and, when pressed about its history, claims to know only what the walls say. When Lee jokes that she should leave the haunted house, Hina grimly tells him that no one ever leaves the house.

Waking before dawn in 1877, Sen senses an unnatural silence in the forest. By the river, she experiences a vision of her face covered in blood, which triggers a memory of watching her uncle get killed during the rebellion. In the forest, her father ambushes her from behind, pressing a blade to her throat. He scolds her for her inattention, pulls her to her feet by her ponytail, cuts off a stray lock of her hair, and quotes the Hagakure. As punishment, Sen is denied dinner. This reminds her of a past famine when her father, as part of a brutal plan of austerity, withheld food from her younger sister, Kura, leading to her death.

Later, while hunting in the forest, Sen inexplicably finds she has walked in a circle back to the house. That night, a flickering light and a silhouette with curly hair appear behind the closet door in her room. The door is supposed to open onto a solid cement wall. Recognizing the figure as the man from the window, she prepares her sword to attack the spirit.

After four days with no news of James’s disappearance, Lee begins to believe he may have committed a perfect crime. That night, his sedatives wear off, leaving his mind uncomfortable and sharp. A light appears behind his closet door, and his heightened perception reveals details he’d previously missed: sword marks on the ceiling and other inconsistencies that prove the house is more than what it appears to be.

He crawls to the closet and presses his hand to the paper door. Instead of cement, a warm hand meets his from the other side. The contact triggers a memory of James helping him up after Lee had dropped a can of Coke and slipped in a puddle. Lee is pulled back to the present when he hears a sword being unsheathed. He throws himself backward just as a katana blade stabs through the door, slicing his arm. The reality of the wound exhilarates him, proving the ghost on the other side of the door is real. Believing this door is a bridge between death an life, which will allow him to find his mother, he flushes his pills down the toilet. He then uses a marker to write a mirrored question on the door in Japanese, asking the spirit how it died. He falls asleep and wakes to find an answer written in reply.

After stabbing through the closet door, Sen knows she has missed her ghost target. She shoves a dresser in front of the door just as the maid, Youna, brings her crying baby brother, Kotaro, into the room. While soothing him, Sen is reminded of her dead sister, Kura. Later, she sees a strange light in the forest but finds nothing. The narrative flashes back to a childhood training exercise in which her father buried her alive in a box to teach her to conquer fear; while trapped, she had a vision of Kura’s decomposing ghost speaking to her.

The next morning, Sen discovers the ghost’s question written on the door. Annoyed, she writes back, “I will tell you tonight,” (85) resolving to end the ghost’s game. Later, she overhears her father telling her mother their only ally, Maeda, has disappeared, placing them in imminent danger as he may have revealed their location if threatened.

That night, the shadow with curly hair appears again. With her sword ready, Sen opens the door.

This chapter recounts the first part of a classic Japanese folktale. A fisherman named Urashima Tarō saves a giant, black-shelled turtle from being tormented by children by chasing them away. The next day, a different, smaller turtle appears. It reveals that the first turtle was the daughter of Ryūjin, the Emperor of the Sea. As a reward, Urashima Tarō is invited to the emperor’s palace at the bottom of the ocean. He accepts the offer, climbs onto the turtle’s back, and descends into the water.