What the Mirror Does Not Reflect

At the end of April, Nao Sasaki bought a full-length mirror through a resale app. It was a hundred and eighty centimetres tall and fifty wide, with a wooden frame in an antique style and a fine arabesque pattern carved into the wood — she liked it the moment she saw it. The seller's profile said only "looking to let this go quickly while sorting through things," and the comments section was empty. The price was three thousand yen. Three thousand eight hundred including shipping. When she opened the cardboard box at the front door, the mirror inside its wrapping was heavier than she had expected, and she called her husband Kenji so the two of them could carry it together into the bedroom.

That evening, Nao stood before the mirror. The glass caught the light and was perfectly clear, without a single scratch. There was, however, one small thing that bothered her. Her own reflection seemed to move just slightly — a tenth of a second, perhaps — behind her. When she blinked, there was a thin gap, a pause, before the woman in the mirror blinked back. Nao told herself her eyes were tired, washed her face at the bathroom sink, and went to bed.

The next morning, Kenji dropped his chopsticks at breakfast. Reaching down to pick them up, he tipped forward off his chair. He escaped with only a bruise, and Nao assumed the kitchen floor must have been wet. Two days later, their son Ren, in the third year of primary school, fell from his bicycle and needed five stitches across the back of his left hand. The following week, Nao's mother was rear-ended in a supermarket car park. The damage was minor, and her mother laughed over the phone: "Things just haven't been going my way lately." Nao laughed back. She still could, then.

It was after the Golden Week holiday in May that she began to notice. A major deal at Kenji's company fell through. Ren's homeroom teacher called to say he had been drifting off in class. Nao herself made a string of mistakes at her part-time job and was called in by the store manager. Each incident, taken alone, was an ordinary failure with a perfectly ordinary explanation. But something inside Nao drew a line connecting them. From the end of April. All of it.

That night she went into the bedroom alone and stood before the mirror. She turned off the overhead light and held up her phone as a torch. In that single beam the surface of the glass looked different than it did in daylight — as though, depending on the angle of the light, there were a faint layer somewhere behind it. Like something submerged beneath still water. Nao leaned her face close. Her breath fogged the glass, and in the few seconds while the fog slowly cleared, she saw it. The eyes of her reflection turned, just for a moment, in a different direction — not to the right, but toward the darkness in the far left corner of the room. Nao spun around. There was nothing there.

She tried to contact the seller, but the account had already been deleted. Scrolling back through the comments on the listing, she found one that had not been there before she bought it. The username was "kieta_hi." The message was twelve characters in hiragana. "Please give this back." Nao reported it to the platform, but by the following day both the comment and the listing had vanished. She regretted not taking a screenshot.

By June, the whole family had begun to avoid the mirror. Not deliberately — their paths through the room had simply shifted on their own. Kenji would finish dressing before entering the bedroom. Ren started keeping the bedroom door closed during his morning routine. No one spoke about the mirror. Only Nao continued to look at it each night before sleep, and each time she did, she felt her face had changed a little more. The shadows under her eyes deepened. Her cheeks grew hollow. Her skin dried out. It was not that the mirror was accelerating her ageing, she began to think one night — it was that the mirror was slowly taking her, absorbing her, one fraction at a time.

Ren said it aloud for the first time on the third Saturday evening in June. He came to stand beside Nao while she was clearing up after dinner and spoke quietly. "Mum — is there someone in the bedroom mirror?" She stopped what she was doing. "What do you mean?" "At night it glows. Pale blue. And there's a person standing inside it. Someone I don't know." Nao knelt down and looked at her son's face. His eyes were serious. "Ever since I saw it, I keep having the same dream. I'm running and running but I can't move forward." That night, Nao draped a cloth over the mirror. She stripped the sheet from the bed and tied it around the metal frame.

For three days after the cloth went up, the house was quiet. Kenji said he felt a little lighter somehow. Ren said he had slept properly for the first time in a while. Nao decided to get rid of the mirror. The night she went to arrange a bulk waste collection, the cloth fell. The windows were shut. There was no wind. When she woke the next morning, the white sheet lay spread across the bedroom floor, and at its centre the mirror stood upright, reflecting her.

Nao prepared a cardboard box, wrapped the mirror in a blanket without touching the glass itself, and moved it out into the hallway. The next morning she was about to call the waste collection service when Kenji called out: "The mirror's back." She went into the hallway. The mirror was standing in its usual place in the bedroom. The blanket and the box were still in the hallway exactly as she had left them. Only the mirror had returned. Nao almost laughed. She learned for the first time, in that moment, that when fear reaches saturation it tips over into laughter.

That afternoon she used the seller's information to try to trace the origin of the shipment. The transaction screen in the app still showed the dispatch record, and from it she could make out the name of the city the parcel had been sent from — a city in Kanagawa Prefecture. She searched that city name together with "full-length mirror," "accident," and "strange occurrences." Nothing came up. She tried again with just "full-length mirror" and "looking to let this go quickly," and found two posts on message boards. Both were several years old. Both had gone silent partway through. The final post in each thread was identical: "It's fine now. The problem is resolved."

In the first week of July, Nao placed a chair in front of the mirror and sat down. Eleven o'clock at night. The family was asleep. She held up her phone, opened the camera facing the mirror, and pressed record. In the viewfinder she could see herself and, behind her, the dim bedroom. She sat without moving for ten minutes. Nothing happened. She stopped recording and played it back. At nine minutes and forty-two seconds, her image disappeared for exactly one second. The dark bedroom appeared empty, and there, against the far wall, something stood — a shape that resembled the outline of a person. In the next frame she was back, and everything continued as though nothing had occurred. Nao stopped the playback. She said nothing to Kenji about that one second.

The following morning, she listed the mirror on the resale app. She took three photographs and wrote a description: "Full-length mirror in antique style. Excellent condition. Not a single scratch. Priced low as I'm looking to let it go quickly." She set the price at three thousand yen. Six hours after the listing went up, a purchase request came in. Nao pressed the approve button and began to prepare the packaging. As she wrapped the mirror in the blanket, a thought came to her. Had the previous seller made the same decision on a night just like this one? And at this very moment, somewhere she would never know, was someone else writing the same words, pressing the same button?

The night after she sent it off, the house was noticeably lighter. Kenji's face opened up. Ren laughed out loud after dinner. Nao ran a bath, and afterwards checked her face in the small mirror above the bathroom sink. The shadows under her eyes had faded. A little colour had come back to her cheeks. It was over. Thinking this, she looked at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. She blinked. The woman in the mirror blinked back. One beat late.