Hey, are you listening?
So there's this place in Kyoto called Hanayama Tunnel — apparently it used to go by the name Higashiyama Tunnel, the old one. I've heard the locals still call it that more often than not.
This is a story that came to me through a friend of a friend, so… I can't vouch for any of it, so just keep that in mind while you listen.
Right next to that tunnel, there's a crematorium. Has been for as long as anyone can remember. So maybe that place has had certain things soaking into it, over the years.
Anyway, there's this man. No name, no real details — just that sometime last autumn, he was driving home late at night and passed through that tunnel. Just past one in the morning. It was raining, he said. Not a gentle rain — the kind that hammers the windshield, heavy and relentless.
He had the wipers going when he entered the tunnel, and the sound of the rain just — vanished. Which makes sense, of course, being inside a tunnel. But he said the silence felt wrong somehow. Quiet, yes, but the air felt… compressed. Stopped up. He couldn't quite explain it.
The tunnel isn't supposed to be that long. But that night, he said, it felt like it went on forever.
When he reached somewhere around the middle, the engine sound changed. A low, grinding rumble. He had his foot on the accelerator but the car was slowing down. And then the engine died.
In the middle of a dark tunnel, the engine just died.
He put on the hazard lights and tried to restart it, but nothing happened. Tried again and again. And then he noticed — there was moisture on the windshield.
Now, you might think, well, it was raining outside, of course there's water. But he was inside the tunnel.
Small, fine droplets. Forming on the inside of the glass.
Seeping through from the inside of the windshield, he said.
At first he thought it might be condensation from the air conditioning. But the shape of it — it wasn't a general spreading fog. It was round, each one about the size of a palm. One. Two. Three.
He touched them, he said.
They were cold. Like they were drawing the warmth straight out of his hand. Glass is cold, sure, but he said it wasn't that kind of cold. It felt alive, he said. A living cold.
And at that moment, the horn went off.
He hadn't touched it. His hands weren't even on the wheel. But it blared — not once, but in broken, stuttering bursts, over and over.
He was half in tears trying to get out of the car. He reached for the door handle — and the engine started.
No warning. No reason. Just started, after refusing to all that time.
He floored it and got out of the tunnel.
Once he was outside, the rain came back, loud around him — but he said he felt no relief at all. Because those droplets on the inside of the windshield, the ones he'd never wiped away, were completely gone.
Where did they go, I wonder.
He mentioned it to someone local afterward, and all they said was, "You don't go through there at night. Especially not in the rain." And then nothing more. Wouldn't say another word.
…Whether something lives there, or whether it's something that seeps out from the crematorium, I really don't know.
But apparently, even now, whenever he drives on a rainy night, he finds himself checking the windshield.
The inside of it.
