It was early summer in the human village the day that hope was lost. It wasn't a subtle thing, but it was a strange one. A series of events so bizarre that, at first at least, no one suspected they could have been linked together or be the result of any outside force's meddling. It simply happened that one morning people woke up to find the faces of their friends and neighbors drawn by weariness and their own thoughts clouded by a persistent pessimism that could not be lifted, no matter the circumstances. At the same time an unusual number of youkai were spotted milling around the borders of the village and while no one was attacked or threatened directly, the presence of so many hungry beings at the periphery of civilization gathered like tanuki around a trash heap only contributed to the sense of impending doom looming over everyone. Overnight, the future of the village seemed to have vanished and a feeling that all of our lives might soon be cut short pervaded.

Not long after that happened, fights began to break out all around the village. Some of the fights were between humans, often of different religious faiths. Some were between humans and youkai, fought outside the village's walls or occasionally directly above the streets or in the village square. Some were even directly between youkai, who clashed in the air like gangs of unsupervised hooligans, brawling and carousing with reckless abandon.

When that started to happen, the feelings of pessimism and hopelessness disappeared. Instead the emotions of the people who gathered to watch fights overflowed like a rice cooker that someone had forgot to put the lid on. All at once the passion and emotion that had drained out of the villagers returned, new and magnified, resulting in a sudden explosion of religiosity among the citizens of the village. Melancholy was lost, but it was replaced by a near-universal season of ecstatic zealotry as the villagers, vacillating between periods of fervor and listlessness flocked to the shrines and temples in the hopes of finding safety and stability in a world that seemed to have lost its balance.

It was the summer of Gensokyo's great religious war. Rumors of upcoming battles and clashes between the representatives of one faith or another passed from mouth to mouth in the village, and the people forgot their business for the day, or leaned out of the open windows of their houses in eager anticipation, eyes peeled as they watched for the arrival of their favored or reviled representatives of various factions. Man fought beast that summer, humans fought immortals and Buddhists, Taoists and Animists all fought eachother. Every faction struggled with its foes for influence and popularity, all of them revolving around one another in a swirl of passion, emptiness, melancholy and madness, the shapes of their faiths drawn out across the sky in whirling patterns of fiery danmaku.

-.-.-.-.-

My initial instinct was to compare the events of the summer to Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, but doing so without first explaining a wealth of background information necessary to understand that story would be the same as any of the culturally blind subculture references that Sanae drops on a regular basis. So let me instead say that just like the events of that novel, Gensokyo's 128th summer was a time in which different visions for how a civilization ought to conduct itself clashed explosively. It was a summer of madness, in which spiritualists of all sorts competed with eachother for popularity and acclaim, each of them claiming to hold the answers to life's questions and each presenting a disparate vision for the future. The faith they gathered and squabbled over was the sole source of refuge for many villagers who, without the structure and promise of an eventual reward for all of their toil and suffering, would have been crushed by feelings of hopelessness. As suddenly as the spate of pessimism had begun, or had transformed into a burst of sudden religious interest, however, it eventually left as well. When it was gone all that remained of the villager's sudden devotion to faith was booming interest in Noh theatre, of all things.

What exactly were all of these sudden and intense fads about?

What brought misery and a loss of hope to the human village?

Why did the religious wars that resulted from this pessimism come to a sudden and abrupt end?

This casefile of the Hifuu Detective Agency will explore exactly those mysteries. Even now, as I am recording this manuscript, the events of the summer are fading from people's minds. Looking back on them, even I can't place myself in the state of mind that pervaded back in those days. It was as if everything that happened that summer was an illusion seen through the haze of summer heat -the events can be remembered, but in reflection the motivations behind them seem patently irrational. None of us can truly claim to have been in our right minds at the time, and the wild fights that broke out all over are the proof of this widespread summer madness.

-.-.-.-.-

Of course, as always, this casefile will also serve as a record of the my partner, Renko Usami's unique personal brand of madness in the form of yet another megalomaniacal delusion regarding the true motivations of the parties involved in this Incident and how she came to discover them. By chance we made a number of discoveries during the summer and from them we found our way to an ever greater mystery, one of exactly the sort that my partner could never ignore.

What we discovered in the strange places our investigation took us were the sorts of things I never could have imagined and even now, having seen them, I wonder for the first time if even Renko's imagination is vast enough to have truly encompassed the wonder and mystery of it all. As mysteries go, this will be a proper 'whodunnit' style caper, with a truly expansive cast of heroes and villains and no limits across the breadth of Gensokyo or any of the worlds connected to it as to who could be the true mastermind responsible for these events. If the daunting prospect of identifying a hidden mastermind amidst the vastness of this entire world sounds imposing, well I wouldn't blame you from shying away from this book. Even a great detective like my partner couldn't have expected the truths that we would find or be sure about the conclusions she drew from them.

If, however, your mind truly craves a mystery like no other, then I invite you to follow along with me. The culprit may be someone you already know, or someone you never expected. But to discuss the mastermind now is getting ahead of myself. Let me first relate the story of the strange events of this past summer and the even stranger goings-on occurring behind the scenes. This is the story of Gensokyo's great religious war.