Case summary
On a sweltering, rainy night in an old pavilion, Amamiya — always in long sleeves — begins to tell a story from her childhood. In fifth grade, Otoko, a small, quiet transfer student, stood his own hand-carved bamboo chopsticks upright in the middle of his rice every lunch and pressed his palms together — the way rice is offered to the dead.
He called it Lord Chopsticks: carve a pair of chopsticks from wild bamboo, stand them in your rice and make a wish, every day for eighty-four days without a break — and never let Lord Chopsticks find you. Then the wish comes true. Soon Otoko smiled and said “the notice has come.” From then on he wore long sleeves and kept guarding his left hand.
Then she began making a wish of her own. Night after night she dreams of the same large dormitory room where nine children sleep, and on the wall hangs a little ladder of chopsticks tied with rope. Each time someone dies, one chopstick is gone.
The Ninth Chopstick is a 50-minute eerie story puzzle game set in rural Shōwa-era Japan: carve the chopsticks, stand them in the rice, make the wish — and step by step walk into a dream that keeps getting closer. Free to play in your browser.
