This is a story I heard from an acquaintance who lives in Fukuoka. There's no way to verify it, but something about the details kept nagging at me, and that's why I wanted to share it today.
You know Tenjin, of course. During the day the place is absolutely teeming — the underground mall, the department stores, salarymen and students everywhere you look. But come two or three in the morning, all that noise vanishes, as though it never existed. It was during those hours that a friend of my acquaintance — let's call him Tanaka — was walking through Tenjin alone.
It was late spring, from what I was told. He'd been out drinking with coworkers and before he knew it he'd missed the last train. He thought about hailing a cab, but his wallet was looking thin, and it wasn't an impossible distance on foot, so he decided to walk home. The alcohol had loosened something in him, and for whatever reason the narrow back alleys felt more appealing than the main road, so he drifted off into the side streets.
The only streetlights were scattered here and there, and the only sound in that alley was the echo of Tanaka's leather shoes against the pavement. It was so quiet that even that sound felt intrusive.
The first thing he noticed was a smell, he said. Flowers — but flowers just beginning to rot. He couldn't imagine what would smell like that in a spring night alley, and he'd stopped and was sniffing at the air when he heard the voice.
…help me.
Not from behind him. Not from ahead. It seemed to come from inside the wall of the alley itself.
He was drunk, Tanaka told himself. He kept walking. He did keep walking — but then he heard it again, and this time it was unmistakable.
…I'm here. Help me. I'm right here.
It was a woman's voice. Young. But something was wrong with it. There was no breath in it. The words were there, but the rise and fall of inhaling and exhaling — that was completely absent. Tanaka said that when he thought back on it afterward, it made him feel deeply, persistently ill.
As if drawn by the voice, he found himself moving deeper into the alley. He couldn't explain why he did it, even to himself.
Near the dead end, there was a small shrine. Old and small, its stones thick with moss, a thin thread of incense smoke seeping through the crack where the doors met. A shrine where someone had only just burned incense, at nearly three in the morning.
A woman was crouching in front of it.
She was wearing white. Not quite white — more of a yellowed white. She was crying. Her shoulders trembled as she wept without a sound. Her face was hidden; she was looking down. Tanaka instinctively moved to call out to her, and at that exact moment the woman slowly raised her head.
Her eyes were swollen.
Not swollen from crying — the eyelids themselves were distended, as though something else were pushing up from beneath them. But that wasn't what frightened Tanaka most.
The woman's hands were pressed against the shrine doors. From the inside.
Five fingers reached through the gap at the edge of the doors, out into the open air. White, slender fingers, pressed flat against the wood as though she were sealed inside, desperate to get out.
And yet the woman was plainly sitting outside.
Tanaka says he couldn't make a sound. His legs wouldn't move. The woman smiled softly and spoke again.
…let me out.
His memory of what followed is unclear, he says. The next thing he knew, he was running down the main road.
When my acquaintance looked into it afterward, he found that there had indeed been an old shrine in that alley for as long as anyone could remember. The details were murky, but apparently there was a story that before the war, a small house had stood on that spot, and several people had died in a fire there. None of it was confirmed, so the truth of it remains unknown.
What I can say is that even now, every time Tanaka goes to Tenjin, he smells flowers. Flowers just beginning to rot. Even in the middle of a crowd, the scent will brush past him without warning.
And only when that smell comes does he feel it — a slow, spreading dampness across his palm. As though something has quietly closed its hand around his.
