Hey, can I tell you something?
It's about Sannomiya. That area between Kitanozaka and Higashimon-dori… I heard there's someone who actually went and checked it out.
The person — I'll call them M — had lived in Kobe for over ten years. Knew every back street by heart, the kind of person who'd say they could walk Sannomiya blindfolded without a map.
One autumn evening, after work, M had some business up near Kitanozaka and set off alone. Just past nine at night. Not many people around, but the streetlights were on. Nothing frightening about it — just the usual route, or so it was supposed to be.
A little way up Kitanozaka, turning right off the slope… that's when something felt off.
The sense of having turned several times, and then — there was the same utility pole again. Same torn sticker on the side, same frayed edge. "Oh, I passed this a moment ago," M thought, and kept walking. And came back to it again.
Like a loop, almost. Except the road clearly continued, and M was walking in a straight line.
Laughing it off as strange, M opened the map on a phone — and the GPS made no sense at all. The little blue dot was drifting and circling like something lost, impossible to pin down. On the map, it looked as though M had barely moved from the same spot the whole time.
And yet at least ten minutes of walking had passed.
It was around the time the unease started to sharpen that M's feet simply stopped.
… There was a woman standing at the far end of an alley.
Even in the dark, her outline was perfectly clear, M said. Tall. Her back turned this way, completely still. She was deep enough that the streetlight didn't reach her — and yet somehow the white of her clothes seemed to float there, too bright, too visible.
M tried to call out. "Excuse me, do you know the way around here…"
And then.
The woman turned around.
… Whether M actually saw the face — that part can't be said. Maybe yes, maybe no. What registered in that moment wasn't a face at all, but a smell.
Like fabric that hadn't quite dried. That heavy, stale smell of cloth left wet for days with nowhere to air. There in the cold autumn night, it slipped into the nose, quiet and sudden.
The next moment, M was standing at the entrance to Higashimon-dori.
No memory of how. The alley from before — M went back to look for it the next day, and couldn't find it anywhere.
… I have heard that even a TV investigation show sent a Kobe-born presenter into that area, and she genuinely got turned around and came out quite shaken. The explanation given was that the streets intersect at odd angles and the tall buildings cut off your sightlines, so your sense of direction goes wrong.
But listening to what M described, it feels like that's not quite all there is to it.
Even now, M still wonders what that smell actually was.
Just above Kitanozaka, in the stretch between there and Higashimon-dori. If you're walking alone at night and you see something white at the end of an alley — it might be better not to call out… That's what M said.
As for the face, the one that turned toward M — that part, no matter how many times I asked, M wouldn't say.
