Inside the Lattice

Asami Ritsuko arrived in Kanazawa on a late afternoon at the end of October. The sky over the Hokuriku coast hung low and grey, and the trees of Kenroku-en had already shed half their leaves, baring their skeletal branches to the cold. She was thirty-four years old, a folklorist, and she had come to survey the Higashi Chaya district for a paper she was completing on the architecture of pleasure quarters from the Edo through the Meiji periods. She had taken a small inn in Kazuemachi, where, she had been told, the sound of the Asano River could be heard throughout the night. Unpacking her bags, she looked out at the surface of the river below and thought that a place this quiet would suit her work well.

She decided to visit the Higashi Chaya district the following morning, and that evening ate a bowl of jibu-ni at a nearby restaurant and went to bed early. In the brief interval before sleep, lying still with the sound of the Asano River filling the room, she thought she heard the distant sound of a shamisen. But when she strained to listen, the sound did not repeat, and only the river remained. She told herself it was an auditory hallucination brought on by the fatigue of travel, and closed her eyes.

There was fog the next morning. She crossed the Naka-no-hashi bridge over the Asano River and found a narrow lane of stone paving stretching ahead of her, lined on both sides with the latticed facades of old teahouse buildings. The mushiko-mado windows of the ground floors and the kinkira lattices of the upper stories gleamed dully in the flat morning light, as though wet. There were almost no tourists, and only the occasional movement of a shopkeeper arranging wares behind a lattice broke the stillness. Ritsuko took out her camera and notebook and walked slowly along the street, documenting the exteriors. She lost track of time attending to details — the pattern of the latticework, the curve of the eaves, the lean of the pillars.

At the northern end of the street, set slightly back from the others, stood a house that differed in character from the rest. Its lattice was darker than any of the others, a charred brown that was nearly black, and the rain shutters on the second floor were closed despite the hour. There was no nameplate of any kind. On the threshold stood an old ceramic flower vase, but the flowers inside had long since withered to brown fiber. Ritsuko stopped in front of the building and noted its dimensions and features in her notebook. She tried to see inside through the lattice, but the interior was too dark. She thought she caught the faint smell of incense from within, though she could not be certain.

She visited the local historical archive that afternoon. The elderly male attendant at the reception desk was happy to produce old maps and photographs when Ritsuko explained her research, and she asked him about the dark-latticed house at the northern end of the street. He was quiet for a moment, leafing through a bundle of photographs, and then showed her a single old black-and-white print. It appeared to have been taken in the early Showa period, and showed the same building in the same location. "That place has been treated as vacant for as long as anyone can remember," the attendant said. "Whether it has an owner or not, no one knows exactly. There is a story, though, that someone comes to burn incense there from time to time." When Ritsuko asked who, he only shook his head.

Back at the inn that evening, she spread out her materials and worked on the draft of her paper at her laptop. The sound of the Asano River continued to fill the room, but late in the night a wind came up and the window frame began to creak faintly. Just past one in the morning, Ritsuko suddenly stopped typing. She heard a shamisen. As on the night before, it came from far away — but tonight it was unmistakable. The same simple phrase repeated itself over and over. She opened the window and looked toward the river, but there was no figure visible in the darkness on the far bank. The sound continued for a while and then vanished. The moment it did, the noise of the river seemed to grow suddenly louder.

The following day, Ritsuko returned to the Higashi Chaya district. Wanting to see inside some of the buildings, she entered one of the teahouse structures that now operated as a museum. The attendant there was a talkative woman in her fifties who, upon learning that Ritsuko was a researcher, guided her enthusiastically through the rooms. From the second-floor parlor, the lattice windows looked out over the whole length of the street. Ritsuko located the dark-latticed house at the northern end. The rain shutters were closed as before, but today a single fresh white chrysanthemum had been placed in front of the vase on the threshold. "Do you know anything about that house?" Ritsuko asked. The attendant glanced briefly out the window, said only, "Ah, that one," and changed the subject.

While the attendant moved to another room, Ritsuko studied the dark-latticed house again from the second-floor window. She thought she saw something white between the slats of the ground-floor lattice. She looked more closely. It appeared to be a human hand — five fingers resting lightly against the inside of the lattice. But in the next instant it was gone. She blinked and looked again. The interior behind the lattice was simply dark. She told herself her eyes were tired, and hesitated before writing anything in her notebook. In the end, she wrote it anyway: "Something resembling a white hand on the inside of the ground-floor lattice, for a moment. Likely an illusion."

On the morning of the third day, Ritsuko asked the innkeeper about the dark-latticed house. The innkeeper was a small woman in her sixties who had run the inn for more than thirty years. She stiffened slightly before asking, as if to confirm, "You're here for research?" When Ritsuko said yes, the woman lowered her voice. The house was known locally as the Koshi-ya — the Lattice House — and no one knew its proper name. In the early Showa period, a geisha who had worked there disappeared one winter night without a trace. The following morning the house was empty, but a shamisen had been left on the alcove floor with one string broken. Ever since, it was said, everyone who went near that house heard the same melody at night.

Ritsuko felt two things pulling at her from within — the curiosity of a researcher, and something else, something more primal, for which she did not want to find a name. If she had to name it, she would have called it fear. Even so, she went back and stood before the house again that afternoon. The white chrysanthemum was still there, its head tilted a little further than the day before. The interior behind the lattice was dark and unreadable. She took a deep breath and touched the lattice. The wood was cold and damp, with the feel of something that had been kept from sunlight for a very long time. At that moment she felt, from the inside, the faintest pressure pushing back against her hand.

She let go. Stepping back into the street, she noticed someone looking down at her from the second floor of the teahouse opposite — a pale face in the shadow of the window frame. The moment their eyes seemed to meet, the face withdrew. Ritsuko crossed to the building and peered through its lattice, but it appeared to be a closed shop, and the interior was dark. The street was empty. On the stone paving, a few autumn leaves were turning in slow circles, though there was no wind.

From that night, her dreams changed. She had rarely dreamed before, but that night she dreamed vividly. She was walking the stone-paved lanes of the Higashi Chaya district. It was night, but the moon was bright, and lights burned behind the lattices. She could hear shamisen music, laughter, the clatter of wooden sandals on stone. It was the kind of lively night this place must once have known. But she realized she was not alone. Someone was walking beside her — a woman in a white kimono, facing forward, keeping pace with her. In the dream Ritsuko tried to look at the woman's face, turning her head as far as she could, but the face remained just beyond her sight.

The next morning she wrote down the dream in her notebook. As she wrote, she noticed something. When she had been walking in the dream, she had heard only her own footsteps. The woman beside her had made no sound at all — had walked across the stone paving in wooden sandals without producing a single noise. This fact did not frighten her inside the dream, but when she recognized it with her waking mind, something cold moved up her spine.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Ritsuko steeled herself and visited a secondhand bookshop some distance from the Higashi Chaya district — a narrow-fronted place whose owner was a white-haired old man. When she asked whether he had any materials relating to the Koshi-ya, he walked slowly among his shelves and returned with a thin pamphlet bound in the traditional Japanese style. It appeared to have been compiled privately in the 1940s by a local amateur researcher, and contained transcribed oral accounts of Kanazawa's flower districts. Ritsuko read the relevant pages on the spot. The geisha's name was Koito (小糸). She was said to be beautiful and accomplished on the shamisen, but she had become deeply attached to a certain patron, and when that patron vanished without warning, Koito disappeared on the same night. The account, however, contained one further line: "There are those who say Koito did not disappear, but returned. Where she returned to, only the lattice knows."

That night, Ritsuko did not go back to the inn. More precisely, she had intended to, but while passing through the Higashi Chaya district at dusk she found herself standing in front of the dark-latticed house without being able to clearly recall how she had come to be there. The door, which she had never once seen open, was ajar — drawn inward by a few centimeters. Through the gap came the smell of incense. And, faintly, the sound of a shamisen. Tonight the sound was not distant. It was coming from just inside.

Ritsuko pushed the door. It opened smoothly, without a creak. Inside was darkness, but there was a pale light deeper in. There was an earthen-floored entryway, and beyond it a tatami room, and in the center of the room an old shamisen. There was no one there. Yet the sound of the shamisen continued. Ritsuko stepped forward, one step and then another, onto the earthen floor. As she drew closer to the instrument, the sound grew louder. She crouched down before it. One string was broken. The severed end was still trembling faintly, as though it had just been cut.

At that moment Ritsuko became aware that someone was in the corner of the room. When she turned, she did not cry out — not because she could not, but because for an instant she did not know whether what was there warranted a cry. Seated in the corner was a woman in a white kimono. Her face was turned toward Ritsuko. Their eyes met. Ritsuko asked, her lips trembling, "Are you Koito?" The woman shook her head slowly — not in denial, but in the manner of someone setting aside a question as beside the point. Her gaze passed through Ritsuko and fixed on something far away.

When Ritsuko found she could move again, she was standing on the stone paving outside. The door was closed. There was no smell of incense. There was no sound of shamisen. The sky was fully dark, and the sound of the Asano River came from the direction of the water. Ritsuko took out her notebook. Her hands were shaking, but she knew she had to record what had happened. When she opened it, however, she found that something had already been written on that day's page, in her own handwriting: "I have returned. Only I do not yet know where it is I have returned to."

She had no memory of writing it.

The following morning, Ritsuko left Kanazawa. On the Shinkansen, she read back through the draft of her paper. She had all the data and photographs she needed; the paper could be written. But as she reviewed her files, she noticed something wrong. Of all the photographs she had taken over four days, every single image of the dark-latticed house had come out completely black. The data was intact, but the images themselves were pure darkness. And there was one more thing. Among her photographs was a single selfie taken in front of the lattice house — one she had no memory of taking. Yet there she was in the frame, standing before the lattice, smiling. And beside her, from the shoulders down, a woman in a white kimono had been captured in the shot.

The face was outside the frame.

The train accelerated beneath the overcast Hokuriku sky, and the grey cityscape of Kanazawa receded from the window. Ritsuko put her earphones in and tried to play music. But when she pressed play, no music came — only the sound of a shamisen, repeating the same monotonous phrase, threaded through with the sound of a broken string, an incomplete melody. She pulled the earphones out and checked her phone. The music application was not running. There was no file playing, nothing at all.

She looked out the window. Her own face was faintly reflected in the glass. Just beside the outline of her face, she thought she could make out another outline, translucent behind her own. She narrowed her eyes. She told herself it was a reflection of the carriage lights. She tried to believe that. But when the train entered a tunnel and the window became a perfect mirror, she saw it clearly. The seat beside her was empty. It had been empty the whole journey. And yet in the glass, unmistakably, two women sat side by side.

When the train emerged from the tunnel, the window became a window again. Only Ritsuko's face looked back at her.

Three months later, her paper was finished. It passed peer review and was accepted by an academic journal. The acknowledgments at the end thanked the staff of the Kanazawa archive and the innkeeper in Kazuemachi, among others. But at the very end of the acknowledgments, in a line that neither the editors nor the reviewers appeared to notice, there was one final sentence: "I also wish to express my deepest gratitude to Koito, whose generous insights proved invaluable to this research."

Ritsuko had no memory of writing that line. But the characters on the screen were, unmistakably, in her own hand.