This is something I heard a little while ago from a driver I know — I can't say for certain it's true, so please take it with that in mind.
Up in the northern part of Kyoto, there's a place called Midorogaike. During the day it's an ordinary enough pond, but at night, when you pass by, something about it shifts. The water comes right up to the edge of the road, the streetlights are few and far between, and there's a darkness there that's difficult to describe.
The driver — I won't use his name — had been working taxis in Kyoto for nearly twenty years. The fact that it happened to someone that seasoned, someone long accustomed to the night shift, is part of what makes it stay with me.
It was around two in the morning. He was cruising along the road beside the pond when he spotted a woman in white, standing there with her hand raised. No question she was looking for a ride. But something about the way she was standing struck him as wrong — she wasn't at the roadside, she was at the very edge of the pond, her feet almost in the water.
Still, a fare is a fare. He pulled over and rolled down the window.
That's when the smell reached him — a waft of mud, but not ordinary mud. Something rotten underneath it, a smell like the bottom of still water drifting into the cab. He didn't think much of it at the time. Near a pond like that, he told himself, you'd expect as much.
The woman got into the back seat. Her white clothes, he noticed now, were soaking wet — drenched through, though it hadn't rained. He thought maybe she'd slipped and fallen somewhere near the water's edge.
"Where to?" he asked. She kept her head down and said nothing, only raised one hand and pointed east. Toward Yamashina.
He was about to confirm — "Yamashina, is it?" — and glanced up at the rearview mirror.
There was no one there.
The woman he'd just picked up was gone. He thought maybe the back seat was too dark to see clearly, so he looked again. Still no one. He pulled over to the shoulder and turned around to look with his own eyes.
Nobody.
Only the seat, soaked through.
The water had seeped along the stitching of the upholstery, and when he touched it, it was cold. Cold enough to hurt his fingers, he said — and this was the height of summer.
He might have found a way to explain that away, to talk himself down. But he told me that wasn't the part that frightened him most.
It was the shape of the wet.
Not the impression of someone sitting. The seat was wet in the shape of a person lying down — the outline of an entire body, stretched full-length across the upholstery.
He still refuses night fares near Midorogaike to this day, though he's never told his company why. I've heard there are a few other drivers who've had similar experiences — but apparently, none of them like to talk about the seat. About the shape of the wet.
I suppose none of them want to think too hard about whose shape it was.
