……Well, this is something I heard from someone else, so I can't say how much of it is true. It came to me through an acquaintance of an acquaintance, and it's such a well-formed little story that I thought I'd pass it along to you, if you'll lend me your ear.
In Kyoto, over the Horikawa River, there is a bridge called Ichijō Modori Bridge. Some of you may know it. It's been rebuilt into a neat, modest little thing — the sort of bridge tourists stop to photograph without giving it much thought. And yet that place, they say, has been the boundary between this world and the next since time immemorial. Cross it and you can return. Or rather — whatever lies on the other side can return to this one.
The story goes back to the Heian period. A certain scholar died, and as his funeral procession was crossing that very bridge, his son — who had been deep in ascetic training in the mountains of Kumano — came running, wild-eyed and breathless. He threw himself upon the coffin and prayed until his voice gave out, and the father, already cold, let out a faint breath and came back. That, they say, is how the bridge came to be called the Bridge of Return. A legend, nothing more.
Then there is the more famous tale: a samurai crossing the bridge late at night found a woman standing by the railing. Her face in the moonlight was unnaturally pale, and beautiful in a way that unsettled him. He drew his sword and cut off her arm, and she vanished without a sound. The next morning, back at his estate, the old wet nurse who had served the household for years approached him, saying, "Young master, please give this back," and reached into her sleeve to produce something. Well — that one belongs to the realm of old stories.
There is also the tale of that famous onmyōji, the celebrated sorcerer, who kept his shikigami hidden beneath the bridge. Shikigami are something like familiars — invisible to ordinary eyes. He kept them concealed there in the darkness under the bridge, always. That is the kind of place it is.
……All of that, of course, is well-known.
But recently I heard something else.
Two or three years ago, a young woman was walking alone near that bridge, somewhere around ten or eleven at night. She had just arrived in Kyoto and didn't know the area, and she was making her way along with her smartphone open to a map. Just before she reached the bridge, her phone rang.
She looked at the screen. It was her mother.
She answered, and her mother's voice said, "Where are you right now?" She said, "Near Ichijō Modori Bridge." There was a brief silence, and then her mother said, "Don't cross it." "Why not?" she asked. "Because that's the kind of place it's always been. They say if you cross it, you can't come back."
She thought, oh, so there's a legend like that — and then she hung up and crossed the bridge anyway, because she was in a hurry. A little while after she had crossed, she went to call her mother back and found that the incoming call wasn't in her history.
When she got home, she asked her mother about it. "You called me earlier, didn't you?"
And her mother said, "What are you talking about? I've been home all day. I never called you."
……That's the story I heard. Whether it's true, I couldn't say. It might have been a glitch in the phone, or she might have misheard something.
But the woman herself said this: the voice on the line had been her mother's voice, without any doubt. There was only one thing that struck her as strange.
Her mother had lived in the Kansai region her entire life. But the voice on the phone that night carried no trace of that accent — no regional colour at all. It was a perfectly neutral voice, from nowhere in particular, smooth and strangely composed.
