The Chrysanthemum Woman

The cobblestones of Gion seemed to grow wetter the deeper the night became. Even when it hadn't rained, the ground always held a dull, seeping gleam — as though something were leaching upward from within the stone itself.

Tanaka Shin'ichi had been transferred to Kyoto at the close of that autumn. Reassigned from an Osaka publishing house to its affiliated Kyoto bureau, he rented a room in an aging apartment building a ten-minute walk from Shijo-Karasuma. The structure was forty years old — low ceilings, dim corridors, no elevator. But the rent was cheap, and the location, within walking distance of Gion, suited his work covering regional culture.

For the first week, Shin'ichi kept to Gion's main thoroughfares. The cobblestones of Hanamikoji, the latticed facades of the teahouses, the sight of a maiko hurrying past at dusk — all of it could be neatly framed as magazine copy. It was beautiful, formal, the Kyoto everyone already knew.

The trouble began the night he wandered into the back streets.

In the second week of November, after finishing an evening assignment, Shin'ichi took a wrong turn trying to get back to Shijo-dori. The alley he found himself in — one block east of Hanamikoji — appeared on no tourist map. The streetlamps were spaced far apart, and moss had worked its way deep into the joints between the stones. The buildings on either side bore no signs, and the interiors behind their latticed doors were dark. Not a tourist in sight, nor even a local.

He walked on for a while. The alley was longer than he'd expected, curving gently to the right as it went. The air changed, he thought. He couldn't have been thirty meters from the bustle of Hanamikoji, yet the sound had vanished — the traffic, the laughter, the shamisen drifting from some restaurant — all of it muffled, as though cotton had been pressed against his ears.

At the far end of the alley, a woman was standing.

She wore a kimono — dark fabric printed with a small, subdued pattern. The obi was a pale, near-white color, and her hair was gathered low at the back. She was dressed not as a maiko or geiko, but in the plain, everyday manner of an older woman. She stood facing the wall, her back to Shin'ichi. Simply standing there, turned away.

Shin'ichi stopped. The woman did not move.

Nothing strange about it, he told himself. She might be a local resident. Out for a cigarette, perhaps, or taking a phone call. And yet there was something unsettling in her posture. She was utterly still. Not even the rise and fall of breath moved her shoulders.

"Excuse me," Shin'ichi called out. He had meant to ask whether the alley continued through.

The woman did not turn.

He waited a moment, then retraced his steps. The instant he emerged onto Hanamikoji, sound came flooding back — the murmur of tourists, the click of heels on stone, laughter spilling from somewhere inside a restaurant. Shin'ichi stopped and looked back. The mouth of the alley was dark; the far end was invisible.

That night, back at his apartment, he wrote in his journal. There was no particular reason. He simply felt the need to set something down. *Saw a woman in the alley. Her back was turned. She didn't look around.* That was all he wrote, and then he slept.

The following night he passed the alley again — not deliberately, or so it seemed; he simply found himself walking that way. The alley was empty. The woman was gone. A single streetlamp burned far at the end, and nothing else. Shin'ichi felt a small relief, and then noticed in himself a small disappointment, and found the strangeness of that feeling curious.

Three nights later, the woman was there again.

This time she stood in a different spot — some ten meters before the far end, pressed against the left-hand wall. The same kimono. The same posture, back turned, not a fraction of movement in her body.

Shin'ichi stopped and stared. She was close enough now that the lamplight fell directly on her, and he could make out the pattern on the fabric clearly: white chrysanthemums scattered across a black ground. The knot of her obi was immaculate. Not a single hair was out of place. In itself that was unremarkable — and yet for a person standing outside at night, something was too perfectly arranged. There was a doll-like completeness to her that did not belong to a living body.

Shin'ichi approached quietly. Five meters. Four. Three. He could see her shoulder, the nape of her neck, the two vertical tendons running beneath the white line of her collar.

Then the woman's head tilted, very slightly, to the right.

Slowly. As though yielding to its own weight. Soundlessly, smoothly. That was all. She did not turn. Only her head moved, the way a person's does in the last moment before sleep takes them.

Shin'ichi stepped back. His heel caught between the cobblestones and he nearly fell. He made his way out of the alley and back to Hanamikoji, where he stood still, breathing. His heart was hammering. He drew a long breath.

When he thought about it, nothing had really happened. A woman had tilted her head. That was all. She might have felt unwell. She might have been drowsy. And yet there was a leaden weight at the bottom of his stomach that no reasoning could account for. It was the *quality* of that movement — the way her head had tilted — that was the problem. As a movement belonging to a living creature, something about it was fundamentally wrong. The angle of the joint, just slightly, was not the angle of a human joint.

The next morning, Shin'ichi mentioned it to a colleague at the bureau. Kishimoto Sakura, a Kyoto-born editor, listened to the whole account and was quiet for a moment.

"Which alley?" she said.

Shin'ichi described the approximate location. Kishimoto said, "Ah." And then nothing more.

"Do you know something about it?" he asked.

"I think you shouldn't go there either," she said. She gave no reason, and it was clear she did not want to say anything further.

From that night on, Shin'ichi took deliberate detours. He avoided the back streets of Gion and kept to Shijo-dori. A week passed that way. The woman receded gradually to the edges of his memory. Kyoto's autumn deepened, and the autumn foliage season kept him busy with assignments.

But toward the end of November, Shin'ichi had a dream.

In the dream he was in the alley. It was night. Lamplight lay wet on the cobblestones. At the far end, the woman stood — in the same place, in the same posture. Shin'ichi moved toward her. In the dream his feet would not stop. He did not want to approach, but his body walked on of its own accord.

When he was one meter away, the woman turned.

Shin'ichi woke.

He could not remember what came after. He had not seen the woman's face. But the outline of her profile, glimpsed in the instant before she turned, was burned into his retinas. The outline alone was enough. It had the shape of a human face — but where the eyes should have been, there was nothing. Only smooth skin, unbroken.

He went through that day with a heaviness behind his eyes that would not lift.

On a night in early December, he found himself standing at the mouth of the alley again. He had not noticed himself going there. He stood at the entrance and looked in. The woman was not there tonight. The cobblestones reflected the light, and the far wall was dim and still.

Shin'ichi walked into the alley.

As he walked, he could not have said what he was doing or why. Perhaps he needed to confirm something. Or perhaps there was something in this alley that made it impossible not to come. The moss in the joints of the stones gave a faint, slick resistance beneath his shoes with each step. With each pool of lamplight he passed through, the sounds behind him grew more distant.

Halfway down the alley, Shin'ichi noticed something.

Tonight there was one extra lamp burning. No — that wasn't right. The number of lamps was the same. But the intervals between them were different. Closer together than before. Which meant the alley was shorter.

But that was impossible. The alley's length didn't change.

He stopped.

He counted the lamps. Six. Last time, he was certain, there had been four. The alley was the same length, but there were more lights — meaning the lights were more closely spaced. That would imply not that the distance between the two ends had changed, but that lamps had been added. Yet the lamps were fixed to the walls. They could not have been added overnight.

Shin'ichi looked toward the far wall.

The woman was standing in front of it.

But tonight she was not facing away.

She was facing him.

The distance between them was perhaps twenty meters. She stood where the lamplight did not reach, in a region of thin shadow. The same kimono — black ground, white chrysanthemums. The same pale obi. Hair gathered low. And she was facing him.

Shin'ichi could not move. His feet had taken root in the cobblestones.

The woman's face was too dark to see clearly. Or rather — it was not that he could not see it. He could see it. But his mind refused to resolve what it was seeing into any coherent image. There was a face where a face should be. But what that face was, his consciousness would not process. Only one thing was certain: that the *face* was turned toward him.

The woman took one step forward.

There was no sound. The hem of her kimono did not sway. Her feet made no sound on the stone. Her shadow did not shift. Though her body had moved forward, her whole figure simply *was* there — suddenly, as though a still photograph had been imperceptibly recropped. One step closer.

Shin'ichi's body moved. He ran. He ran back down the alley without looking behind him, stumbling again and again on the cobblestones, and burst out onto Hanamikoji.

People were there. A couple of tourists walked past, talking happily. Laughter came from inside a restaurant. Shamisen music drifted on the air. The world had returned. Shin'ichi put his hand against a utility pole and steadied his breathing.

His heart was in his throat. His hands were shaking. He looked back at the mouth of the alley. The dark passage lay open and quiet. There was no one inside.

That night, back at his apartment, Shin'ichi called Kishimoto. It was eleven o'clock, but she picked up immediately.

"I saw it," he said. "It turned its face toward me."

On the other end of the line, Kishimoto was silent for a moment.

"Did you make it back?" she said.

"I made it back."

"Then you're all right," she said. Her voice was low. "There are some who didn't."

Shin'ichi found he had no voice.

"Something has been there for a long time," Kishimoto continued. "The old families in Gion avoid that alley. They don't give it a name. If you name it, it calls you."

"What is it?" Shin'ichi asked.

"I don't know," said Kishimoto. "But I think it's waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

Kishimoto was silent again. This silence was longer.

"It waits for the people who have seen it," she finally said. "Once you've seen it, you'll see it again. That's what I've been told. So please — don't go back to that alley. Not ever."

After he hung up, Shin'ichi looked out the window. From the fourth floor of his apartment, Kyoto's nightscape spread before him. In the distance he could see the lantern light of Yasaka Shrine. Before it, the rooftops of Gion lay in rows.

Shin'ichi could not sleep.

The next morning, he began packing. He intended to ask his supervisor to transfer him back to Osaka. He could give any reason — poor health, a family matter. Something would do.

While packing, he glanced out the window.

Across from his apartment building, there was a narrow alley. In four months of living here, he had never once noticed it. A single streetlamp burned faintly within it.

At the entrance to the alley, a woman was standing.

Her back was turned.

Shin'ichi stepped away from the window. His breath stopped. He pressed his back against the wall and kept his eyes away from the glass.

The woman was there. At the mouth of the alley. Directly across from his own building.

He thought carefully. Kishimoto had said: *Once you've seen it, you'll see it again.* He had taken that to mean the alley. But it didn't mean the alley. The woman was not bound to a place. The woman was bound to *the one who had seen her*.

Shin'ichi turned back toward the window. Not out of courage. He simply could not keep from looking.

The mouth of the alley was empty. The woman was gone.

He felt relief wash through him. Perhaps he had imagined it. Or perhaps she had truly been there. He could not decide which.

The day after he finished packing, Shin'ichi returned to Osaka. On the bullet train, he watched the scenery through the window. His own face looked back at him from the glass.

As Kyoto fell further behind, the tension drained from his body. *It's over*, he thought. Once he was back in Osaka, it would be finished.

But some time after the train had left Kyoto Station, Shin'ichi saw something in the window — beyond the reflection of his own face, out in the darkness of the passing landscape.

Between two houses along the tracks, there was a narrow alley.

In it stood a figure, back turned.

Black kimono. White obi. Hair gathered low.

The train swept past in an instant. Shin'ichi doubted his own eyes. The speed was too great. It might have been a trick of the light. At that velocity, through a night window, it was impossible to make out the pattern on a figure's kimono.

And yet Shin'ichi had seen it clearly. The white chrysanthemums.

After arriving in Osaka, Shin'ichi returned to his family home. For several days, nothing happened. Ordinary life reasserted itself. He went out drinking with friends, handled the handover of his work, slept, woke. The memory of Kyoto grew distant, dreamlike.

A week later, on an evening walk through his neighborhood, he moved through streets he had known all his life. Streets he had walked since childhood.

Around a corner, there was a narrow alley.

A single streetlamp burned faintly within it.

Shin'ichi stopped.

Deep in the alley, in the darkness beyond the reach of the lamp, something was facing him. There was a face where a face should be. What that face was, his mind could no longer process.

The woman had not taken a single step.

She was simply waiting.

Behind Shin'ichi, around the corner, the lights of the residential street burned softly. From somewhere nearby came the smell of an evening meal. The sound of a television. The sounds of ordinary life, right there, within reach.

But Shin'ichi's feet were turned toward the alley.