The Face Beneath the Water

Otaru in October smelled less like the "nostalgic port town" described in tourist pamphlets and more like something far older. Stone warehouses lined both banks of the canal, and the yellow light of the street lamps reflected on the water stretched and contracted with every ripple, over and over. Watching that repetition, one could lose all sense of which era one was standing in. Kirishima Masaya (桐島雅也), a photographer, had always been fond of that feeling. At least, until the night it came for him.

Masaya had come to Otaru on assignment from a publisher — a photography collection themed around the Meiji and Taisho architectural heritage remaining in Hokkaido's port towns. He had three weeks before the deadline, and planned to work out of a guesthouse along the canal, chasing the morning and evening light as he photographed stone warehouses and old bridges. The guesthouse was called Soukosou, and was in fact a converted stone warehouse built in the late Meiji period. Its walls were over fifty centimeters thick, its windows small, and at night the sounds of the outside world barely reached inside. The proprietress, an old woman named Sakuma Tome (佐久間トメ), looked to be in her late seventies, but her movements were strangely quiet, and whenever Masaya noticed her she was already standing just behind him.

The first three days went smoothly. He rose before dawn, walked the canal promenade, and photographed the warehouse district in the blue-tinged light before sunrise. He took lunch near Asakusabashi, then spent the afternoons walking from Chuobashi toward the north canal, framing stone-paved alleyways and old brick walls. In the evenings, as the sun tilted low, the water turned orange and gold and the shadows of the warehouses dissolved into it. That moment was why he had come, Masaya told himself. Looking through the camera's viewfinder, the world arranged itself into order. Only what fit inside the frame was real; everything outside it was as good as nonexistent.

On the fourth night, Masaya went for a walk after dinner. The gas-lamp-style streetlights along the canal promenade cast a dim glow over the cobblestones. The October night air was cold, and his breath rose in white clouds. Almost no tourists were about; only the distant voices of a young couple taking photographs of each other. Masaya stood on Chuobashi and looked down at the canal. The black water shifted quietly, and the stone warehouse wall on the far bank wavered in its reflection. It was then that he noticed a human shadow in the water. He was alone on the bridge. Yet on the surface, alongside his own reflection, another shadow swayed — thin and elongated.

He turned around. No one was there. Only darkness pooled at the foot of the bridge, beyond the reach of the streetlights. The wind crossed the canal and the image on the water broke apart. When he looked again, the extra shadow was gone. He told himself he had imagined it — an illusion conjured by refracted light and ripples. He felt a small pang of regret at not having brought his camera. It was exactly that kind of accidental image that made a photograph, he thought, as he walked back to the guesthouse. That night he could not sleep deeply. He did not know why. Only that just before he finally drifted off, he thought he heard the sound of running water — from somewhere beyond the stone wall, quiet and perfectly rhythmic.

On the morning of the fifth day, returning from his early shoot, Masaya spoke to the proprietress, Tome. "Was anyone out by the canal last night? Near the bridge?" Tome answered without pausing in what she was doing. "No one goes out at night this time of year. Too cold." The words were reasonable enough. But the look she gave Masaya as she said them was strange. Her eyes met his, and yet did not — as though she were looking at something just behind him. Masaya turned around. At the end of the corridor was a small window, and beyond it, the stone wall that faced the canal. Nothing was reflected in the glass.

That afternoon, Masaya walked toward the north canal. Unlike the area around Chuobashi, which was well-maintained and busy with tourists, the northern stretch was rougher — cobblestones half-pried loose, stretches of broken streetlights leaving patches of darkness. Moss clung to the warehouse walls, and some of the iron doors had rusted half-open. Masaya preferred such places. Time-eroded things gave photographs a depth that tended beauty could not. He was setting up his tripod in front of an abandoned warehouse when he heard footsteps behind him — steady, deliberate footsteps on the cobblestones. He turned. No one was there. The footsteps had stopped. He listened, but heard only the distant sound of a passing car and the water of the canal lapping against the embankment.

Back at the guesthouse, reviewing the day's images, he noticed something in one of the shots of the abandoned warehouse wall. In the surface of the stone, amid the patterns of moss and rust, there was a shape that resembled a human profile. At first he thought it was a coincidental arrangement of stains. But when he enlarged it, the shape looked less like a profile and more like a face in the act of turning toward him. Where the eyes should have been, the moss had peeled away in two round patches. Where the mouth should have been, a vertical crack ran through the stone. Masaya moved the photo to a separate folder and looked away from the screen for a while. He knew, intellectually, that the brain constructs such faces from random patterns. But knowing a thing and feeling it are not the same.

On the sixth night, Masaya stood on the bridge again, this time with his camera. Not to photograph the reflections on the water, but to document it — if the shadow from two nights before should appear again. The canal was still and black, the gas lamps swaying gently. He stood there for nearly half an hour. Nothing happened. When the cold had nearly taken the feeling from his fingertips, he raised the camera and took one last shot, then lowered it and began to cross the bridge. At that moment, a sound rose from beneath the embankment — not the sound of water being struck, but something muffled, like movement beneath the surface. Masaya leaned over the railing and looked down. The water was dark; he could see nothing. Yet just below the surface, no more than a few dozen centimeters down, he thought he saw something white, wavering.

The following morning at breakfast, Masaya spoke with another guest — a man in his thirties named Kato (加藤), who said he was a historian. Kato knew the canal's history well: how it had been built on reclaimed land and completed in 1923, how it had originally been wider, with flat-bottomed barges carrying cargo back and forth, how part of it had been filled in during 1986. Then, almost as an aside, he added: "Apparently quite a few things were left under the water when they filled it in. Not just cargo, either." Masaya did not ask him to elaborate. Kato said nothing more. The two men drank their coffee in silence. Outside the window, the surface of the canal caught the light.

On the seventh day, between shoots, Masaya stopped at the Otaru library. He looked through old harbor records and microfilmed back issues of local newspapers, searching for materials about the canal reclamation project, when a different article caught his eye. It was from a local paper in the 1950s, with the headline: BODY DISCOVERED ALONG CANAL. The article was brief — an unidentified woman's remains had been found near the embankment of the north canal. Her distinguishing features were described as follows: the body had absorbed water and was severely swollen, making identification of the face impossible. Masaya photographed the page and left the library. Walking back to the guesthouse along the canal, he could not quite explain to himself why he had taken that photograph. Only that he had been unable not to.

On the evening of the eighth day, the light was good, and Masaya shot intensively in the block east of Chuobashi, where the warehouses stood close together. The setting sun stained the stone walls red, and the iron window grates threw long shadows across them. Standing in those shadows, looking up at the face of one of the warehouses, he thought he saw a human shape in a second-floor window. It was an abandoned building — no one should have been inside. Yet behind the glass, there was a darkness in the shape of a person. He raised his camera and shot the window. When he checked the LCD, the window was empty — only the evening sky reflected in the glass, and the glare of the light. He looked up again with his naked eye. Something still seemed to be there. But the camera would not capture it.

That night, Masaya dreamed. He was at the bottom of the canal. The water was black and cold, and when he looked up, the surface was far above him, a faint light filtering down. His body was heavy and he could not move. He turned his head and saw a woman standing beside him — or not standing, exactly, but hanging upright in the water, suspended. Her face was invisible. Her hair had spread out in the current and covered it entirely. But she was facing him. That much he knew with absolute certainty. He tried to scream and the water filled his mouth. When he woke, his throat ached. The room was dark, and from beyond the stone wall came the sound of water.

On the morning of the ninth day, Masaya told Kato about the dream. Kato was quiet for a moment, then said in a measured voice: "Do you know what this building was used for, originally?" Masaya did not. Kato continued: "From the late Meiji period through the early Showa years, it was a fishing equipment warehouse. But there's a story that during part of the war, it was used for something else. The records, unfortunately, don't say what." He set down his coffee cup. "The absence of records is the most frightening thing of all, isn't it." Masaya did not ask what he meant. If he asked, an answer would come. And if an answer came, it would become real.

On the tenth night, Masaya could not sleep. Sometime after two in the morning, the smell of water entered the room. The smell of the canal — mud and salt and something else, something that resisted being named. The window was closed. The door was closed. Still the smell was there. Masaya sat upright on the bed and did not move. After a while, one corner of the room seemed to grow darker — not that it was dark already, but that it became darker still, a darkness with a shape inside it. A human shape. The shape of the woman he had seen at the bottom of the water. Masaya closed his eyes. He kept them closed for a long time. When he opened them, the room had returned to its ordinary darkness. The smell was gone.

On the eleventh day, Masaya sorted through his accumulated photographs. Going through more than three hundred images one by one, he began to see things he had not noticed before. Several of the shots of the canal's surface contained shapes in the water that were not ripples — white, indistinct forms. The photographs of the abandoned warehouse wall showed not just the one face-like shape he had first noticed, but multiple such shapes, in different angles, on different walls. And in the shot he had taken on the sixth night, just before leaving Chuobashi — in the space between the bridge railing and the water's surface — something was there. A white, blurred, elongated shape. Like the upper half of a human body. Like something that had risen from the water and laid its hands on the railing.

Masaya looked at that photograph for a long time without moving. His hands were trembling. When he enlarged the image, the shape became more ambiguous, and he could not say with certainty what it was. It might have been a reflection. There might have been mist. But he knew. He knew that on that night, as he stood on the bridge, something had risen from the water and gripped the railing and looked up at him. And he knew that the impulse he had felt in that moment — to lower his camera and cross the bridge — had not come entirely from himself. He had stared too long at the surface. He had looked too deeply into the bottom of the canal. Something from the deep had been drawing him toward it.

Masaya decided to leave. The shoot was unfinished, but he had had enough. As he packed his bags and told Tome he would check out the following morning, the old woman nodded quietly, then looked just past him — that same look — and said: "Please take care. The canal at night is not something to be looked at." He thanked her and returned to his room. If she had known from the beginning, why hadn't she said so at the start? But Masaya no longer had the will to pursue the question.

He left early the next morning, before dawn, the sky a deep indigo. To reach the station, he had to pass along the canal promenade. The detour would have cost him too much time. He walked quickly. As he approached Chuobashi, he saw a figure on the bridge — a woman, standing with her back to him, facing the canal. Her black hair moved in the still air, though there was no wind. Masaya stopped. The woman did not move. He turned and took the long way around. It cost him an extra ten minutes. On the train, he sat with his camera bag held against his chest and kept his eyes on the window. His own face looked back at him from the glass.

Back in Sapporo, in his apartment, he resumed sorting through the photographs. He went through everything he had shot in Otaru one more time. On the morning he had left the guesthouse, he had apparently taken a few shots out of habit, without thinking — the canal promenade, the dark cobblestones, the glow of the gas lamps. In one of them, Chuobashi was visible. The bridge was empty. The woman was not there. But beneath the bridge, in the darkness between the embankment and the water's surface, beyond the reach of the streetlights, there was a white shape — like something gripping the railing, like something trying to pull itself out of the water. Masaya closed the photograph. He moved every file from Otaru into a folder and dragged it to the trash. He emptied it.

Two weeks passed. When the publisher called to press him for the work, Masaya told them the shoot had failed. The editor was taken aback and asked if he could go back, but Masaya refused. Since then, he has not worked. He does not open his camera. When he looks through the viewfinder, the world arranges itself inside the frame, and only what is inside the frame becomes real. That is what frightens him now. If something that should not be there were to appear inside the frame — or worse, if something that should be there were not.

One night, Masaya washed his face at the bathroom sink. He raised his head and looked in the mirror. His own face looked back at him — wet, tired. Nothing more. He exhaled. He kept looking. The sound of the water draining into the basin reached him, steady and quiet, and it resembled, in its rhythm, the sound of the canal in Otaru. He turned off the tap. The water went silent. His reflection was still there. Slowly, he looked away. As he did, something caught at the edge of the mirror — something white, elongated, wet. But when he turned around, there was nothing near the sink. Nothing at all. Only the floor, which was slightly wet. Whether it had been wet before he washed his face, he could not remember.