…Well, just hear me out.
This is a story about Tokyo. About Otemachi — that stretch of soaring towers, supposedly the most expensive land in all of Japan — and one small corner of it.
I heard this from an acquaintance, mind you. I can't vouch for any of it. Only keep this in mind: the story is still out there, still passing quietly from person to person, even now.
The man in question — let's call him K — worked in construction. A few years back, he was assigned to a job site in Otemachi. He was something like an assistant site supervisor, and he'd gone alone to do the initial walkthrough.
It was evening. The sun hadn't quite set, but the towers had already swallowed the light, and everything had gone dim. Right next to the site, he noticed a small enclosure — a modest, self-contained space ringed with stone paving. A single spindly tree stood inside, and at the center, something made of stone had been placed.
K assumed at first it was a minor shrine, a subordinate sanctuary of the kind you sometimes find tucked into large plots of land — a small altar to the local deity. He leaned over the fence for a casual look.
That was when it happened.
The air changed.
Not the temperature. The temperature stayed the same. But the air itself — its density, he said — suddenly felt heavier. And then came a smell. Not the smell of earth after rain. Something older. Damp stone. As though it were seeping up from deep beneath the ground.
K thought it strange, but he rang his supervisor then and there. "That enclosed area," he asked, "does it fall within the scope of the work?"
His supervisor went quiet for a moment.
Then, slowly: "…That's the burial mound. Don't touch it."
Masakado's burial mound. Taira no Masakado — the warlord they called the Lord of the East — and the place where, it is said, only his severed head was interred.
When K looked into it afterward, he found no shortage of stories. After the great earthquake of the Taisho era, the officials sent to redevelop the site died one after another under suspicious circumstances. After the war, when the GHQ brought in heavy machinery to clear the ground, the equipment overturned on its own — nothing there to cause it. Those involved fell ill without explanation. The work was abandoned.
Whether any of that is entirely true, I couldn't say. Old stories have a way of growing.
But K's account doesn't end there.
That night, he had a dream. Or something he couldn't be certain was a dream.
In the darkness, something was floating. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. A head. A man's face. Eyes open. Not angry. Not sorrowful. Simply looking at him — or not quite looking. More like taking stock of him. Confirming something.
K said he was paralyzed, unable to move, able only to stare back.
Then it was gone. Morning had come.
K turned down the job. He couldn't bring himself to explain why, so he told them he wasn't well.
He never found out what became of that site. But the burial mound itself, he said, is still there. Glass towers rise on every side, and suited figures hurry past on the most coveted ground in the country — and yet that small enclosure remains, untouched, in the middle of it all.
…I wonder if the head is still there, quietly taking stock of whoever passes by.
