…This is a story I heard, quite some time ago, in Yokohama's Chinatown.
I can't vouch for any of it. Only that someone claimed to have heard it directly from a person who was there, and it reached my ears through that someone — so how much of it is true, I really couldn't say. Even so, having heard it, I find I simply cannot forget it.
Tucked a little way back from one of the streets in Chinatown, there was apparently a tattoo parlour. Set apart from the bustle of the main thoroughfare, it faced a narrow alley where even the red glow of the paper lanterns couldn't quite reach.
Someone who worked at that shop once told this story — or so I'm told.
It was past nine o'clock at night. Outside, the lively noise of Chinatown would still have been carrying on, but inside the shop it had grown quiet, and this person had a single client lying on the table, working a design into the skin around the shoulder.
Deep in concentration, something at the back of the shop drifted into the corner of their eye.
There was no particular reason to pay it any mind. Only a vague sense that something shaped like a person was standing there.
A woman, in a white yukata.
She was standing near the far end of the room, right around where the full-length mirror was kept. The thought crossed their mind that perhaps the next appointment had arrived early and let themselves in — but there was no next appointment. Still, if a customer was waiting, they'd need to say something; yet they couldn't very well stop mid-work, so they carried on.
A little while later, they glanced over again. The woman was still there, in exactly the same spot, in exactly the same posture.
It was only then that something began to feel wrong.
Just as they raised their eyes to call out to her, the woman turned slightly — turning her back toward them.
And the back that came into view…
The fold of the yukata must have slipped a little, because the upper part of her back was faintly exposed. And there, on that skin, were traces of ink.
A tattoo left unfinished. Lines only, no colour filled in yet — something raw and incomplete pressed into the flesh. Like a fish, or perhaps a flower; whatever it was had been stopped partway through, left there, suspended in the skin.
The person who saw it described that moment in a single word.
Cold.
In the middle of a summer night, a sudden chill had come from behind them. Not the dry breath of an air conditioner — something damp, and heavy, and cold.
They spun around. No one was there. The client on the table had, at some point, fallen asleep. The woman in the white yukata was gone.
…To this day, no one knows who she was.
But afterward, for quite some time, the person found themselves unable to let it go — kept searching for that design. Like a fish, or like a flower. A feeling that they had seen it somewhere before.
And eventually, they heard that long ago, when that place had been something other than what it is now, a woman had once come in to have a tattoo done — and had stopped coming partway through.
No reason was recorded.
Even now, people say, there are moments in that shop when a gaze seems to fall on you from a direction where no one should be.
…Something left unfinished, I suppose. Perhaps it simply waits — until the work is done.
