This is something a friend of mine told me… there are parts I have no way of verifying, so please keep that in mind as you listen.
It's about the caves at the far end of Enoshima — the Iwaya.
Anyone who's been to that island will know what I mean. Once you pass through the great torii gate and make your way around to the back, it takes a good while. There are flights of stairs, crowds of people, stretches where the footing is treacherous. Walking at a normal pace, you're looking at an hour, sometimes more. That's just the nature of the path.
Now, the person in question — let's call him K. K had gone to Enoshima one autumn evening with two friends, a couple.
They'd been in high spirits, half sightseeing, half swapping urban legends, and the conversation had turned to a rumour that your sense of time goes strange near the caves. That time disappears, somehow. The sort of thing you hear all the time. K said he'd been half-laughing when he first heard it.
That's when the three of them decided to run an experiment.
They set off at four in the afternoon. At the torii gate, all three turned their phones face-down and agreed not to check the time — not once, not until they'd walked to the caves at the back of the island and returned. Body-sense only. They would each record how much time they felt had passed.
And so they started walking.
Up the stone steps, down again, shouldering through the crowds toward the caves. The sun was already tilting low, and the wind off the sea had that particular cold that belongs to that hour. The shadows on the stone stairs were growing long, and the faces of the other tourists were slowly turning the colour of embers.
They went inside.
It was dark. Each of them was handed a single candle and led deeper in. The ceiling was low, the ground underfoot was wet, and a chill pressed steadily against their cheeks. Every time the candlelight wavered, the shadows on the rock walls seemed to shift — not quite move, but slide. K said he found himself not wanting to speak. That's the only way to describe it, he said. A feeling that he mustn't make a sound. That silence was somehow required.
All three of them went to the back in silence, and came back out in silence.
When they reached the torii gate again, they each said aloud how much time they thought had passed. K said a little over an hour. The man in the couple said around an hour and a half. The woman said she was certain at least an hour had gone by.
Then they checked their phones.
Thirty-two minutes.
All three of them went quiet. They couldn't laugh. Because physically — that distance, over that terrain — a round trip in thirty-two minutes simply isn't possible. K knew that, which is why it frightened him all the more. He said it didn't feel like time had been compressed. It felt like something had been… taken out. That was the word he used.
But there's one more thing that's stayed with me.
When K looked back through the photos he'd taken inside the caves, there was one that wasn't right. It showed the backs of the other two walking ahead of him — and between them, exactly in the middle, something round was visible. Like the top of a head. At the height of an adult's waist, roughly.
There had been only the three of them inside the caves.
Whose it was, he still doesn't know.
What happened inside those missing thirty minutes… no one knows that either.
