Can I tell you something?
There's a story that's been whispered around Kanazawa for a long time. Whether anyone has ever verified it — I honestly don't know. But the same account has come from more than a few different mouths. So I think there must be something to it.
It's about a certain candy shop, they say.
A small candy shop tucked at the end of an old alleyway somewhere in the city. Whether it's still there, I can't say for certain. But starting one particular evening, a woman began coming to that shop.
Around eight or nine at night. Always at the same hour, as if she were timing it for just before closing.
The owner said the first thing he noticed was a sound — or rather, not a sound. Not the door opening, but a presence that was already there before the door opened at all. She would be standing on the other side of the counter, and he could never tell when she had come in.
Every time, the woman said the same thing.
"One piece of candy."
Nothing more. She would set down the coins, take the candy, and leave without turning around.
Her face — the only word anyone seems able to find for it is pale. Not so much pale as drained, as if the color of blood had simply left her. But her eyes were strangely vivid. Intent, like someone whose thoughts were fixed entirely on a child.
The owner was frightened, but she never did anything wrong, and she always left the right amount of money, so he kept serving her.
Then came the seventh night.
She came again that evening, bought her single piece of candy, and left. The owner — without quite knowing why — found himself following her. He couldn't explain it himself, he said.
She passed through the alleyway, climbed a slope, and made her way toward a temple. She walked the stone-paved path without a sound. No footsteps. Only his own footsteps rang out against the stones in the dark, and the sound of them frightened him so much he nearly stopped several times.
But he couldn't stop.
The woman entered the far end of the cemetery and vanished. Not like smoke dissolving — more that he simply looked and she was no longer there. She had been visible a moment before.
All that remained was the smell of earth.
Fresh earth, raw and immediate.
The owner returned the next morning, in daylight, to look again.
Deep in the cemetery there was a grave with soil still freshly mounded over it, the ink on the grave marker barely dry — it was that recent. He stood there uncertain whether to tell someone, but then he crouched down beside that mound of earth and held very still, listening.
And then.
He heard it.
From beneath the ground — crying.
A baby's cry, muffled, but unmistakably there.
He called for someone from the temple, and when they dug down, they found a woman lying inside. A young mother, not long dead. And in her arms, a baby — alive.
The mother's body was cold. The baby was warm.
And beside them, seven pieces of candy.
Seven days' worth, laid out neatly in a row.
I've heard what became of the baby. It was taken in and raised by someone. That part, at least, is a relief. But what I can't get out of my head — what stays with me — isn't that.
It's what the owner said at the end.
That night, as he followed her and watched her from behind, she never once looked back. But just before she entered the cemetery, she stopped for just a moment.
And pressed the candy tightly against her chest.
That was all.
She said nothing, and was gone.
Even now, people say that if you pass near that temple at night, you catch the smell of earth. Rain or shine, it doesn't matter.
The smell of fresh earth, they say.
