This is something I heard from someone else.
There's no way to verify it — it came to me through a friend of a friend — but if you have any connection to Muroran, you may have come across it yourself.
It was early spring, 2001, they say.
That in-between season in Hokkaido, when dirty snow still clings to the edges of things. A girl who lived in Muroran, a second-year high schooler at the time. I won't use her name, but by all accounts she was cheerful, the kind of girl who noticed things about people — well-liked in the neighborhood.
That day, she told her mother she was heading to the bakery where she worked part-time. Said she'd made arrangements to be shown how to brew coffee. Nothing out of the ordinary — just an ordinary Saturday afternoon.
Her mother saw her off at the door, expecting her back by evening.
But evening came and went. Then night. She didn't come home.
When police reviewed the security footage afterward, they found she had stopped in at a large shopping center in the city. What she bought, who she may have spoken to — none of that was ever determined. After that, she boarded a bus and was seen getting off at the stop nearest her workplace. That was the last confirmed sighting.
Somewhere around that bus stop, a friend called her.
The friend said the call went through without any trouble, and her voice sounded completely normal. She just said, "I can't really talk right now — I'll call you back later," and hung up. No trembling in her voice, no hint of fear, nothing like that at all. It sounded exactly like someone who was simply a little busy. That kind of call.
And that was it.
Her phone went out of range and never came back. She never arrived at the bakery. She never came home.
Police searched. Local residents spread out and looked. Nothing turned up — not her belongings, not her shoes, not a single thing. More than twenty years later, no one knows where she went or what happened to her.
There is one detail, though, that has always stayed with me.
An elderly person who lived near the bus stop said that on the evening in question, they saw a girl standing at the side of the road. She was wearing a coat, carrying a bag, and she was perfectly still. Each time a car passed, she stepped back slightly — but she made no move to go anywhere. They thought she might be waiting for a bus, but it was already past the last one.
They were about to call out to her when something else drew their attention, and by the time they looked back, she was gone.
That's all there is to it.
But I can't stop thinking about those words — "I'll call you back later."
If she could say that, then in that moment, everything was still ordinary. Her voice was calm. She ended the call quickly, like someone with somewhere to be. And then, in the very next moment, she was gone.
What could have happened in those few seconds between?
Even now, people apparently call that number sometimes. Knowing perfectly well it won't connect.
But there's a story — just the once — that someone got through.
No one spoke. There was only the sound of someone, on the other end, breathing.
