Hey, can I tell you something?
It's about Nanko.
If you've ever used the pedestrian bridge over there, you probably know what I mean — that particular atmosphere it has. A corridor of concrete and steel, like some artificial walkway suspended in the air. Even in the daytime there's hardly anyone around, and your footsteps just echo and echo, and the whole place feels somehow… unmoored from the world.
Apparently, something strange has been happening in the Nanko connector passage.
I heard it from a friend of a friend, so I can't verify any of it.
The person — I'll call them K — had work in Nanko and walked the same route several times a week. From the ferry terminal, over the usual pedestrian bridge, through the connector passage, out to the building entrance. A route so familiar their body just carried them through it without thinking.
Then, one autumn night, late.
Coming home after overtime, past eleven o'clock. Almost no one around. From the moment K stepped into the passage, there was nothing but the unbroken white of fluorescent lights stretching ahead. The sound of their own footsteps — click, click — bouncing off the walls. Nothing else.
K was walking with their eyes on their phone. And then… their feet just stopped.
No reason. Just a sudden feeling of: wait.
The air in the passage had changed.
That smell — the cold, faintly mouldy smell particular to concrete — had simply vanished. In its place came something else. Not the sea. Something thicker, rawer. Not the smell of the ocean but the smell of older water. Trapped water, K apparently said. Water that had been shut away somewhere for a very long time.
K looked up from their phone. At the end of the passage, there was a door.
But something was wrong.
The usual exit was around a right-hand bend. This door was straight ahead, directly in front of them. And it was nothing K had ever seen before — old, made of iron, rust-pitted, with a vertical handle.
K turned to look back the way they'd come. The passage was still there. The fluorescent lights were still on. But the distance was wrong. The length of corridor K had just walked through was clearly, impossibly shorter than it should have been. As though the passage had contracted around them.
K said they were terrified. But going back felt just as frightening. So they reached out and pushed the door.
Cold, K said. The cold of the iron soaked into their palm — an unnatural, penetrating cold.
The door opened.
Beyond it was outside. But nowhere K had ever been.
A dark place, like the back of some building. Weeds pushing up through cracked asphalt. The sea visible in the distance. But beyond that sea — no lights. In Nanko you can always see the lights of the far shore, that chain of artificial brightness across the water. There was none of that. Just black sea, spreading into nothing.
The moment K saw it, their body stopped working.
Not fear exactly — something deeper than fear, something at the root of things, saying: no. You cannot be here.
And then K was back in the passage.
The door was gone. The old iron door — gone, as though it had never existed. K was standing in the ordinary fluorescent corridor, and ahead, right where it should be, was the familiar exit. The glass-fronted doors around the right-hand bend.
K ran.
Afterwards, K checked on a map. No matter how you tried, there was no way out of that passage that could lead to a view like the one K had seen. Nowhere in the area around Nanko has a shoreline with nothing beyond it. Nothing like that exists.
After that, K stopped using the passage entirely.
But there's one thing that has never stopped nagging at them.
The cold K felt when they pushed that door.
It was iron, yes. But mixed into it was something else — something softer. As though, alongside the door, K had been pressing against a thin membrane of some kind.
K still doesn't know what it was.
…If you ever find yourself walking through the Nanko connector passage alone, late at night — you might want to keep your eyes off your phone.
Because by the time you notice, you may already be standing in front of a door you've never seen before.
