Hey, can I tell you something?
It's about Ikebukuro… just hear me out for a minute.
So, apparently there's a stone monument called the "Shimentoson" — the Four-Faced Tower — just a short walk from Ikebukuro Station. Old, and small. Did you know about it? I didn't, until recently, but when I looked into it, I found something that made my skin crawl.
Back in the Edo period, that whole area was notorious for tsuji-giri — you know what that is? Samurai who would cut down strangers in the street at night, for no reason at all, just to test the edge of a new blade. People who'd done nothing wrong, just walking home, and that was it for them. The tower was supposedly built to comfort the souls of those victims… but some people say the comfort was never quite enough.
I heard this from a friend, so I can't swear to any of it — just keep that in mind.
She was passing by the tower late one night. Past eleven, coming home from work, the alley nearly empty. Stone monuments have their own atmosphere, don't they — even in daylight the air around them feels slightly different. That night, she said, her steps slowed on their own, and she found herself stopping to look at it.
That's when she noticed the ground at her feet was wet.
It hadn't rained. There were no pipes nearby. But the stone paving was dark and slick, gleaming with moisture. Strange, she thought — and then she looked more carefully, and saw that the wetness wasn't spread evenly. It came in drops. Spaced out, trailing. Like someone had walked through bleeding. Dot, dot, dot.
Growing denser the closer they came to the tower.
And then she understood. The stains weren't spreading outward from the tower's four faces. They were converging on it. Coming from every direction, from all around — drawn in, as if the tower were drinking them.
She said it was cold. It was October, but in that single moment the temperature dropped one degree further. Not down her spine — at the very back of her neck, that narrow strip of skin, a thin thread of cold. And when she looked up, almost without meaning to… there was a handprint on the upper part of the tower. Not carved into the stone. Pressed there, wet, flat against the surface. Just the one.
She ran home.
But that's not where the story ends. There used to be a department store near the Four-Faced Tower, and apparently it suffered break-ins repeatedly — and once, a plate-glass window fell without warning and badly injured a pedestrian below. It might all be coincidence. But things do seem to keep happening there.
The strangest part is the story about an old stationmaster at Ikebukuro. Apparently he urinated beside the tower one day. Not long after, he died of uremia. People tell it like a dark joke, but if you really listen, it isn't funny. To stand beside a monument built for the dead, to turn your back on them and do that… well.
And it's not just the past, is it. You remember what's happened in that neighborhood. A car plowing into a crowd. Someone with a blade, attacking at random. People who'd done nothing wrong, who simply happened to be there, swept up in it. Every time something like that happens, there are people who think of that tower. Who murmur, quietly: *another one added.*
There's no way to prove any of it, so I can't call it a curse. But still.
That tower was built for people whose deaths made no sense. No names recorded, no one to mourn them, lives used up like a whetstone. How many of them were there, in the end.
Even now, every so often, someone says they've seen those stones wet on a night when it hasn't rained.
…I wouldn't go looking to see where the trail leads.
