This is something I heard from an acquaintance who lives in Fukuoka. I can't vouch for it myself, but — well, just listen.
Tenjin. You know it, of course — all that noise and light. Department stores lined up one after another, crowds that never thin even late at night. But step one street behind all of that, and something shifts. Capillary lanes branch off in every direction, and there are places where the city's glow simply fails to reach.
In one of those places, there's a small shrine.
The torii is still standing, but the characters on the nameplate have worn down to almost nothing. The stone path is smothered in moss. The whole place has the feel of somewhere no one has tended in a very long time. When locals are asked about it, they say, "Oh, that place," and nothing more. No one seems to know when it was built, or who — or what — is enshrined there.
This happened last summer, from what I was told.
There was a student at Fukuoka University — I'll call him Shinichi. He talked three friends into visiting the shrine in the middle of the night. I don't mean to be unkind, but young men tend to want to do that sort of thing.
Just past two in the morning. The shrine is less than ten minutes' walk from the heart of Tenjin, yet the moment they turned into the lane, the noise of the city vanished. Not faded — vanished. Shinichi said afterward that it wasn't like the sound grew distant. It was more like something had swallowed it whole.
He remembers clearly the moment he passed under the torii.
It had been a warm, muggy night, but the back of his neck went cold all at once. Not the coolness of a breeze — something that clung, like a damp cloth pressed against the skin.
The grounds were small. The kind of place you couldn't believe existed just behind Tenjin, utterly still. There was an offering box in front of the main hall, threaded with cobwebs. When one of his friends swept a phone light across it, they could see coins inside. Old ones, eaten through with rust.
Someone had been coming here. Even now.
At that moment, one of the friends said quietly, "Wait."
All four of them went still.
From somewhere behind the doors of the main hall, there was a sound.
At first they thought it was the wind. But it wasn't the wind. There was a rhythm to it. The sound of breath drawn in with a tremor, then released with a tremor — the sound that leaks from the throat of someone weeping. It went on and on, from somewhere beyond those doors.
One of the friends moved to call out, to ask if someone was there. Shinichi stopped him. He said afterward that he couldn't explain why — he just did.
I think he was right to.
As they turned to leave, the door of the main hall let out a single sound from within. A slow, dry creak.
That was all. It didn't open. But something had pressed against it from the other side.
The four of them ran. They burst out of the lane onto the main boulevard, and stood under the lights of a convenience store for a long time, unable to move.
It would have been better if it had ended there.
From that night on, Shinichi began to hear sounds in his room. Around three or four in the morning, rising from the floor. Not footsteps. Something moving across it — crawling. It would come to a stop directly beneath his bed.
He thought he was imagining things, until he looked at the floor and found wet marks on the tatami. Round stains, about the size of a palm. In the same spot, every morning.
Similar things happened to the others, but those are each their own stories, and tonight I'll stay with Shinichi.
He moved out not long after. I've heard he left Fukuoka entirely.
There is one thing, though, that I can't stop thinking about.
Those rusted coins in the offering box. My acquaintance went back to the shrine in daylight, some time later, to have another look. The torii was there. The stone path was there. The main hall was there. But the offering box was gone.
Whether it was never there to begin with, or whether someone had taken it away — that, I can't say.
Only this: those coins that Shinichi and his friends saw — who put them there, and when, and for what purpose. That question is the one I simply cannot get out of my head.
