You know Ikuta Shrine, I imagine.
It sits quietly tucked away right beside Sannomiya in Kobe — that bustling, noisy district. They say it's known as a shrine of love and marriage, the sort of place where young couples stroll the approach together on weekends.
And yet… this is something I heard.
They say that couples who visit together will break up.
Some of you might laugh and call it the usual superstition. But what I heard was a slightly different kind of story.
The deity enshrined there is a goddess. One deeply bound to love. And this goddess, so they whisper, is terribly jealous. She cannot bear to see a happy couple. The longer and more earnest the relationship, the higher the chance of parting — that's what people say.
There's no way to verify such things, of course.
Still, I once heard a story directly from a man who had been there.
He visited Ikuta Shrine one early spring with a girlfriend he'd been with for three years. No particular reason — they'd eaten nearby, and thought they might as well stop in. Nothing more than that.
He remembers clearly the moment they passed beneath the torii gate.
A wind came.
Everything had been calm until that very step, the one that carried him under the gate — and then a cold thread of air slipped in at the back of his neck and ran down his spine. April, midday, and yet it felt like walking along a frozen riverbank in the dead of winter, that deep, bone-settling cold. He hunched his shoulders instinctively, and beside him, his girlfriend shrank in exactly the same way.
They looked at each other and said, "It got cold all of a sudden," and laughed.
As they walked the approach, there was a smell.
Not plum, not cherry blossom — something heavier, cloying and sweet, but with a faint edge of rot underneath. He looked around the grounds and saw no flowers. No trees either. And yet the smell clung to the back of his nose the entire time.
They prayed at the main hall, drew their fortunes, and somewhere around the time they decided to head home, the conversation between them had quietly stopped. He couldn't say why. There was no awkwardness, no argument. Only a feeling, whenever he tried to speak, of something catching in his throat — a persistent, wordless obstruction.
On the train home, they were almost entirely silent.
That night, they quarrelled over something trivial. Truly trivial — the kind of argument where, looking back, you can't understand how it started at all. But from that point something began to go wrong, slowly and steadily, and two months later they had separated.
Something he said in passing has stayed with me ever since.
"After we broke up, I suddenly remembered — there was a moment on the approach when she had stopped and was staring intently toward the main hall. I asked her what she was looking at, and she smiled and said it was nothing. But that face… she wasn't really smiling. Her eyes were frightened."
He never found out what she had seen.
A shrine of love and marriage, and yet it tears apart the very couples who come to pray — when you think about it, that's a strange thing. But if it's true that the goddess is jealous. If she truly looks upon two people in love and feels the urge to destroy what they have.
Then perhaps it means she herself was never loved by anyone.
I don't know what flower that sweet, rotting smell belonged to.
But even now, that man says he stops walking whenever he passes a florist.
