Hey, can I tell you something?
It's a story from Kyoto — a bit of a… unsettling one. I can't say for certain any of it's true, so take it as a rumour, alright?
I can't give you the exact location — somewhere in the city, that's all I can say — but it's about the courtyard of an ordinary apartment block. From the outside, apparently it looks like any other. A few shrubs, a single bench, tiled ground. Completely unremarkable. But then… one of the residents started saying some strange things.
Let's call him Tanaka. A man in his thirties, the logical type, by all accounts. About six months after he moved in, one night he stepped out into the courtyard with a rubbish bag. Around ten o'clock. He closed his door behind him the same as always and started toward the bin area — and that's when something felt off.
It started in his body, apparently. A lightness in his feet, a slow heaviness spreading through his head. He thought it might be a dizzy spell, but it didn't quite feel like one. The air was… how did he put it… not still, but stopped. The leaves weren't moving — not because there was no wind, but because the world itself had ceased. That's what he said. I know it's hard to explain, but there is a difference, isn't there — between no wind, and time standing still.
So he just stood there, rubbish bag in hand.
And then, all at once, the colour of the sky changed.
…Ten o'clock at night, mind you. The sky, which should have been dark, turned a deep, deep blue. Deeper than any pre-dawn sky, and yet not a single star. Vivid blue and pitch black at once. You've never heard of a colour like that, have you? Neither had Tanaka. Apparently he wrote about it afterwards: "There is no name for this colour."
And then came the smell.
Something he'd never smelled before. He couldn't tell if it was sweet or scorched — only that it was pressing itself into the back of his nose. Like wet stone, like the inner reaches of an ancient temple, yet nothing like either of those things. Strong enough that his body stepped back on its own.
He turned around — and this is the part that really gets to me.
There was a piece of paper on the notice board.
The kind of board where the building management posts announcements. And among all the usual notices, there was one sheet he'd never seen before. White paper, handwritten in Japanese. But he couldn't read it. It was Japanese — hiragana, katakana, kanji, characters he knew — and yet the meaning wouldn't enter his mind. No matter how many times he read it, the words were just shapes.
He tried to photograph it. He held up his phone — and the paper wasn't there on the screen. The board showed up fine. But that one sheet simply wasn't there.
He went back inside, frightened, and the moment he closed the door — the feeling vanished. Just like that.
The next morning he went to check the board. The paper was gone. He asked the other residents; no one had seen it. He contacted the management company; they said there was nothing unusual. And that was that.
Tanaka wrote about the experience online, and here's where it gets interesting — another resident from the same building left a comment. "I've felt ill in that courtyard too." "There was a night the sky looked wrong to me as well." But the comment that sent a real chill through him was just one line from someone else.
"Doesn't it get worse when you close the door?"
…Tanaka knew, of course. That night, it had all begun the moment he closed his own front door. But the person who wrote that comment lived in a different wing of the building. And Tanaka had never mentioned the door in his post.
So how did they know?
Is the courtyard itself a strange place — or is it that somewhere in that building, there are people who already know? People who have always known?
No one found out the truth. All I can tell you is that Tanaka no longer lives there. But apparently he still has the dream, every now and then.
A blue sky with no name, and words he cannot read.
