Skin Dolls

Nagoro village, located in the picture-postcard Iya Valley, a rural area of Japan. Yuriko, a 20-something Japanese-American, drives through the village and past a bus shelter occupied by human-sized cloth dolls with a space for one more. She parks and wanders through with a sketchpad past doll after a doll, not a living person to be seen. She arrives at the door of Miko, an old lady in her sixties, who welcomes her warmly. Inside, a shrine to the Japanese goddess Izanami and a shrine to her dead husband. A life-size doll of said husband sits in a chair, Miko tells Yuriko she would be so lonely without the dolls. Over tea, Yuriko asks about the documents Miko had mentioned. Yuriko is here for information on her family, as she was adopted as a baby. Before they leave, Yuriko uses the bathroom and discovers Miko’s sewing room, where she makes the dolls. In the evening, at the disused school, Miko switches on the light. A janitor doll gives Yuriko a little jump before the lights die. Miko tells Yuriko to go ahead to the office for the documents while she fixes the power. Yuriko’s shoes echo down the empty halls and she finds a classroom filled with child-sized dolls sitting at their desks. On the chalkboard, a drawing of Izanami sucking the energy out of people. A clink draws her attention, a pen on the floor near her foot. She places it back in a child-doll’s hand and turns to leave. A clink again as the pen falls. Yuriko freaked, rushes out. Her shoes echo again as she walks down the hall, rounds a corner and dumps into a janitor doll, sends it thudding to the floor. It looks the same as the one at the entrance. She attempts to heave it up, heavier than expected. It’s button eye twitches, a spider crawls out from behind it, sending Yuriko off running. Yuriko enters the school hall. A staged wedding off to one side, dolls positioned in mid-dance through the rest of the space. The office at the back. Yuriko makes her way through the dancing dolls, feels a brush as she passes one. The doll's arm extended out. She moves a little faster; the dolls now much closer, they seem to crowd her. She feels another touch, swipes the dolls away, panic sends her reeling forward for escape. A doll grabs her wrist! She yanks her hand free and the doll hand tears off, drops to the floor with maggots and putrid flesh inside. Yuriko fights her way out of the horde of grasping dolls. Yuriko rushes into Miko’s home in search of her, only to find the husband doll missing from its chair! She’s struck from behind. Yuriko wakes in Miko’s sewing room, drugged and unable to move. Miko tells her she is sorry, Izanami needs to feed or she’ll take Miko’s husband. Yuriko is sewn into a “doll skin”, with the stitches through her skin. The button eyes sewn onto her actual eyes so Izanami can see. Yuriko is placed in the space at the bus shelter, still alive but barely able to move as she’s slowly consumed.