……Would you care to hear it?
This is a tale I have come across many times, serving as I do within the grove of Ueno. I cannot vouch for its truth. And yet, when the same story emerges from the lips of different people, in nearly the same form, one cannot help but feel that something lies behind it.
It happened on an autumn night, so I am told. The last trains had long since gone, and a fine drizzle was darkening the cobblestones. A man who kept photography as a hobby had gone out alone to walk the park after dark, camera in hand. He entered from the direction of Shinobazu Pond, passed through the lantern-lined approach, and made his way toward the slope.
Are you familiar with the name Chikemuri-zaka — Blood-Smoke Hill?
It is a quiet wooded path now, but it is said that in the summer of 1868, during the Boshin War, the men of the Shōgitai stood their ground there until the very end, rifles in hand. Through the relentless bombardment of the Imperial forces, how much blood must have soaked into those stones. Blood-smoke — the name means exactly what it says.
When the man reached the foot of the slope, he noticed something strange.
The leaves were moving. There was no wind.
That alone might have been enough to unsettle him. But then, in the next moment, there was a smell. A scorched, metallic smell — sharp and acrid, like gunpowder — that struck him deep in the back of the nose. It was a rainy night. No bonfires, no construction, not a soul in sight. And yet that smell came drifting slowly down from somewhere above.
The man stopped where he stood, camera still raised.
He said afterward that it was not so much fear as an inability to make sense of what was happening. Along with the smell came a sound. Not footsteps — something heavier. A dry, rasping friction. Metal grazing metal. Like the sound of armour, moving one step at a time, descending the slope toward him.
He could not take his eye from the viewfinder.
And then — near an old stone lantern partway up the slope — he saw it.
Something white was standing there. It had the shape of a person. But its outline was not blurred or indistinct; if anything, it was unnervingly clear. There was a face. There were eyes. And they were turned toward him.
Those eyes, he said, were wet.
Not weeping — the eyes themselves glistened, the way wet stone glistens. Not the light of living eyes. They simply held him in their gaze, still and unblinking.
In that moment, he could not make a sound. He could not move his feet. He could not even say whether he pressed the shutter or not. He only knew that he found himself running down the slope, and that he did not look back once until he was outside the park.
When he later checked the photographs from that night, every frame taken on the slope was completely black. Not a matter of exposure — the data itself was black, solid and featureless, as though nothing had ever been there.
……What I wish to tell you comes after this.
The following month, the man returned to that slope. He could not explain why. He was drawn back, he said, as though by something pulling at him. He went in daylight — and the moment he stood at the foot of the hill, the same smell reached him again.
That smell. Gunpowder.
What became of him after that — I have not heard with any clarity. What I do know is that the slope remains as it always has: on autumn nights, the drizzle falls, and the lantern flames sway in silence.
Perhaps those who rest here have not yet left the battlefield. Perhaps for some of them, even after a hundred and fifty years, that summer has never ended.
……If you should ever visit, do pause for a moment at the foot of the hill.
If you smell nothing, you may count yourself fortunate.
