Hey, can I tell you something?
There's this story about Inokashira Park that's been bothering me. I can't say for certain it's true, but… I just need to tell someone.
It was last autumn, I think — that's when I heard it, anyway. A friend of a friend's story. A couple in their twenties, together about six months, still happy with each other, who spent a weekend afternoon riding one of the swan boats out on the pond. You know the ones — those pink and white things that bob along on the water.
They were laughing at first, apparently. The pedals kept spinning them in circles instead of going straight, and they were both shrieking with laughter. The autumn air was clear, the water was sparkling — it really did sound like a lovely afternoon.
But then they drifted toward the middle of the pond.
And suddenly, the smell of the water changed.
Not a river smell, exactly… more like something rising up from deep in the mud. Cold and dark. Not quite rot, not quite anything living — just this indescribable smell, like the bottom of the earth itself, seeping quietly into their lungs. The girl noticed it first. "Does something smell strange to you?" she asked her boyfriend, and he turned to her with a look on his face that made her stomach drop, and nodded.
That was when something appeared in the water.
Their reflections… but not quite.
There were three of them.
Right alongside the boat, in the water between their two shadows, a third shadow stretched downward — thin, still, elongated. The girl pointed at it and said, "What is that?" — and in that instant, the air went cold. Sharp and sudden. Midday, a clear October afternoon, and every hair on the back of her hand stood straight up.
The shadow didn't move. The boat kept drifting slowly forward, but that shadow stayed exactly where it was.
Her boyfriend pedaled hard for the shore. By the time they climbed out, neither of them was laughing anymore. They couldn't seem to find anything to say to each other. Everything felt stiff and wrong. "I'm tired," she said, and he said "Yeah," just the one word, and that was all. The train ride home was completely silent.
They broke up less than a month later.
No big fight, nothing dramatic — it just sort of dissolved. "I don't feel it anymore," was what the boyfriend said, apparently. But she still can't stop thinking about that shadow in the water. Even now.
You know Benzaiten is enshrined right there on the bank of that pond, don't you. A beautiful goddess. A goddess of the arts. But there are old stories — very old stories — that say she is also a jealous goddess. That she drifts close to couples who are laughing together, happy together…
I can't say whether any of it is true. There's no way to know.
But here's the part that stays with me.
Three shadows, she said.
Two people, and one more.
And that third one — she mentioned it almost as an afterthought, right at the end — it was thin, and long, and something like hair was drifting around it.
As though it were looking up at them from beneath the water.
…………
It's just a rumor, of course. Whether you believe it is up to you.
But if you ever find yourself at that pond with someone you care about… I'd think twice before leaning over to look at the water.
