Hey — can I tell you something?
This is a story that's been whispered around Machida for a long time now. The kind of story that slips right through your fingers the moment you try to pin it down. So please — take it for what it is. Just something I heard.
The summer of 1999. Around Obon, from what I understand.
A girl, eighteen years old, living near JR Naruse Station. She was preparing for art school entrance exams — always walking around with a sketchbook tucked under her arm, or some thick art book pressed to her chest. That summer, her whole family had plans to go back to their hometown. But she stayed behind. Because of a dentist appointment. She had it scheduled, and she couldn't miss it. *I'll be back in a bit* — that's all she said. Then the door closed.
Jeans and sandals. Her wallet still in her bag. One art book in her hands.
And that was it.
When her family came home a few days later, there was a glass of barley tea sitting out on the kitchen table. The inside of the glass had faint watermarks where the ice had melted down to nothing. But no one had taken a single sip. It was just sitting there — like she'd been about to drink it, right before she left. That detail, of all things. It gets to you, doesn't it. The trace of someone still there, and the person herself — gone.
The police initially treated it as a runaway case. Eighteen years old, the height of summer, Obon, an empty apartment — people change their minds, they said. But she had a dentist appointment. A real one, confirmed. And she never showed up there, either.
From Naruse Station to the dental clinic — whatever road she walked, whatever turns she took.
Nobody knows.
There's one strange detail. I didn't hear this firsthand — it's something a woman who lived in that neighborhood at the time apparently said. Please, take it as nothing more than that.
On a midday that summer, in a narrow alley just off the residential streets near Naruse Station — the kind of short, thin passage that runs between two utility poles — someone reportedly saw a young woman standing there. Holding what looked like an art book, clasped against her chest with both hands. But something was off. She was perfectly still, staring straight ahead in the same direction, not moving at all. It was the middle of summer — the heat should have been shimmering up from the pavement — but the air around her, just around her, was somehow quiet.
When the woman tried to call out to her, the girl slowly turned her face toward her.
Their eyes met.
She looked like she was crying, the woman said. Not that she *was* crying — that she *looked* like she was crying. That's the part I can't stop thinking about. If someone's crying, you know it. But *looked like she was crying* — what does that even mean? That her expression wasn't moving, and yet somehow it seemed that way? That something in her face suggested grief without showing it?
Or maybe — she was trying to tell someone something.
When the woman moved to speak, she blinked, and the girl was gone. She didn't see her disappear. She just looked again, and there was no one there.
Whether that was actually her — there's no way to know. No way at all.
But — and again, nothing about this is certain — that alley is apparently still a little strange in summer. Even on windless days, the air there runs cold. In the middle of August, in full daylight, a sudden chill will pass through. Not the kind that pulls warmth from your skin — more like the air itself is replaced all at once, swapped out for something else entirely. No one says what it means.
More than twenty years, and nothing has surfaced.
I've heard the family is still looking. Still hoping someone will come forward. That much, at least, is true.
No one knows where the girl who vanished that summer is now. Only — I can't quite shake the feeling that somewhere in one of those narrow alleys in Naruse, there's still a girl standing with an art book held to her chest, looking out. Looking toward you.
Maybe I'm the only one who feels that way.
But if she looked like she was crying when your eyes met —
What do you think she was trying to say?
…Hey. Tonight, on your way home. If someone were standing at the bend in an alley —
Could you hold their gaze?
