This is a story I heard in Dotonbori, down in Osaka.
Well, I heard it from a friend of a friend, so there's no way to verify any of it. But it's a strange enough tale that I thought you might want to hear it all the same.
His name was Kenji (健二). Second year of university, apparently. It happened at the end of autumn, on a rainy night.
He'd been out drinking with friends in Namba, and on the way home they came to one of the bridges over the Dotonbori canal. Around Ebisu Bridge. One of those nights where the neon signs — the ones with the athletes on them — bleed and dissolve into the surface of the water. Raindrops tapping the river, one by one, in the dark.
He was drunk, and for no particular reason he stopped and leaned his elbows on the railing, peering down into the canal.
There was no reason for it. His feet simply stopped.
The reds and yellows of the neon lights swayed beneath the water. And among them, there was one thing that gave off no light at all. Something the shape of a person, black as if it were swallowing the light whole, hovering just beneath the surface.
"What's that?" he said to his friends. No one turned around. They walked on ahead, tilting their umbrellas against the rain.
Kenji was left alone on the bridge.
The shadow was moving slowly. Against the current, heading upstream.
He knew something was wrong, he said — and yet his legs moved anyway. He followed it. Along the bank of the canal, without even opening his umbrella. He could feel the rain running down the back of his neck and soaking into his shirt.
After a while, the shadow left the water and slipped into a narrow alley. A place just off the main stretch of Dotonbori, the kind tourists never find.
At the end of the alley, there was a building.
Wooden, two storeys. Long abandoned. Several of the windowpanes were broken, gaping open like dark mouths. The front sliding door was open — just slightly, just enough.
That was the first moment Kenji said he felt genuinely afraid. His legs were trembling, and yet his body kept moving forward.
He touched the sliding door. He felt old wood beneath his fingers, and then a smell reached him — not incense, not mildew, but something else. Something sickly sweet. Not quite like flowers. More like people, he said. The smell of a place where people had gathered for a very long time.
He went inside. A corridor stretched away into the darkness.
No electricity. He lit the way with his phone, and the walls came into view — covered in floral wallpaper, peeling in places, black stains spreading beneath. Every step he took, the floorboards cried out beneath him. Creak. Creak.
At the far end of the corridor, there was a staircase.
And that was when he heard it.
It wasn't crying. Crying would have been easier.
It was humming.
A woman's voice, toneless and frayed, humming something with no recognizable melody. He couldn't tell what song it was. Only that it kept repeating — the same passage, over and over.
Kenji couldn't move.
He raised the light toward the staircase. At the top of the stairs, a woman was standing.
A white kimono. Long hair hanging down, her face tilted toward the floor.
Slowly, she turned to face him.
She had no eyes.
Where her eyes should have been, there was only skin.
And yet her mouth kept moving, the humming continuing without pause. The same melody, the same passage, repeating and repeating.
Kenji said he couldn't even scream. He came to his senses outside, running through the rain. One of his shoes had come off somewhere. He didn't notice.
He looked into it afterward, and apparently there had once been several buildings in that area where women were put to work. Most have been torn down by now, but he heard from a few people who had heard from others that one building was said to still be standing somewhere.
No one had gone to check, of course.
But there was one thing that stayed with Kenji. The humming — even after he got outside, it wouldn't leave his head. He went home, bathed, got into bed, and still the same melody kept turning and turning inside his mind.
After about three days, it faded.
He thought it was gone. But when someone ran into him recently, he said: "Lately I think I can hear it again."
Only on rainy nights, he said.
