Hey, can I tell you something?
Deep in the mountains outside Higashi-Hiroshima, there's a place called Dondonfukkyo Gorge. You know it? It gets written up in tourist guides, and they've put these little kappa statues around, so it looks charming enough at first glance. But I heard something strange about that place. Something that's been sitting with me.
Apparently someone went there near the end of summer. They arrived late in the evening, and by then all the other visitors had gone. It's a gorge deep in the mountains, so the trees grow thick overhead — the sky still held a little light, but down at ground level it had already gone dim.
They followed a stone path down to the edge of the pool. The sound of water was constant, they said. A low, heavy sound — don, don — the kind you'd expect from a gorge with a waterfall. But they felt something was off. Like the sound wasn't only water.
Not leaves rustling. Something else — a sound with gaps in it, they said. Irregular. A pause, then don again. It was buried inside the water noise, so at first they told themselves they were imagining it.
Standing at the rim of the pool and looking down, the water was a deep, dark green, and the bottom was nowhere to be seen. Transparent, but still invisible — strange, isn't it? The water should have been clear, but that green just quietly dissolved partway down into pure darkness.
They'd been watching the water for a while when they felt it — something wet against their ankle.
It wasn't raining. They weren't close enough to the falls for spray. But something cold and slick had touched bare skin. They were certain of it.
They turned around. No one was there.
They looked down. On the stone path beside their shoe, there was a faint wet mark. It could have been the shape of a foot — almost. But the toes, they said. There were too many.
They turned back immediately and didn't look behind them once. All the way out of the mountains, they said, they could hear that sound at their back. Don. Don. Don.
You know what they say the name comes from? In the age of the warring states, a nearby castle fell, and when its lord took his own life there, a drum that no one had touched rolled from the watchtower and was caught by the falls, and it kept sounding — don, don — on and on, beaten by nothing but the water.
No one was playing it. It simply sounded, because it was struck.
Even now there are stone kappa figures placed around the pool, and apparently there's a small shrine nearby called the Yasujuku Kappa Shrine. But I keep wondering — when did the kappa legend actually start? What did the first person to hear that drumming see, standing there in the dark?
That feeling on the ankle. Cold. Slick.
As far as I know, no one's gone back to find out what it was.
