This is something I heard from someone, you understand, so I can't vouch for any of it — but I'd like to tell it all the same.
It comes from deep in the mountains of Aomori.
Have you ever heard the rumour — that there is a village which appears on no map? It's called Sugisawa Village. In terms of present-day landmarks, some say it lies not far from Aomori Airport, somewhere around the Kobatasawa-Kosugi area — though I'm told that only those who have actually gone there know the true location.
In that village, long ago, a man went mad.
Without warning. No one knows why. A man who had been living an ordinary life until the day before — one morning he took up an axe, and killed the villagers one by one, from one end of the village to the other. Not one was spared. Not the children, not the elderly. Afterwards, the man took his own life as well, and the village was left with no one in it.
From that time on, the village fell to ruin, and was erased from the maps. That is the story.
Now, if it ended there, one might simply call it an old tragedy and leave it at that. The trouble is that something, apparently, still remains in that place.
A few years ago — a friend of a friend of mine, I should say — three young men decided, half for the thrill of it, to go looking for Sugisawa Village. It was a night at the end of summer, I'm told, when the air had just begun to cool.
They drove up a mountain road until the pavement gave out and turned to gravel, and then the gravel gave out too, and there was nothing left but something like an animal track. They got out of the car there and set off on foot with a single torch between them.
After a while, they came upon an old torii gate. Wooden, the lacquer nearly all peeled away — a terribly ancient thing. And at its base, they said, there was a stone. A rounded rock, about the size of a human head, with two hollow depressions like eyes, facing toward them. Whether it was a natural stone shaped that way, or whether someone had carved it, they couldn't say.
The three of them passed through the torii.
A little further on, there was a sign — a piece of board with writing on it. "Those who proceed beyond this point are not guaranteed their lives." The characters were handwritten, blurred by rain, but still legible, they said.
Anyone with sense would have turned back there. But young men are sometimes the sort who, upon seeing a thing like that, find their feet carrying them forward all the same. The three of them went on, deeper in.
There were several derelict buildings. Structures with their roofs caved in and only the walls remaining, half-swallowed by weeds, scattered here and there. When they swept the torch across them, the shadows of fallen beams stretched long, and one of the men said afterwards that it put him in a state he couldn't quite describe. He also said the smell of damp leaf-rot clung to the back of his nose the entire time.
And then.
The man walking at the rear of the group suddenly stopped.
The other two noticed and turned around. He was standing motionless, the torch trained on the ruined building to the left. Not a sound from him.
They went closer to see what he was looking at — and there was a person standing inside the building.
A figure, caught in the beam of the torch.
Small in stature, the size of a child — but with a head too large to belong to any child — standing on the other side of the broken wall, facing toward them, simply standing there.
The three of them ran. They made it back to the torii, back to the car, and drove straight down the mountain.
Some days later, one of the men thought to check the digital camera he'd had with him. He looked at the shots of the ruined building.
The figure was not in any of them.
But there, in front of the broken wall, lay a single shoe — the size of a child's palm — just one, with no pair.
When asked what kind of shoe it was, the man wouldn't say.
After that, his wife mentioned that he had taken to waking in the night, sitting up, and staring at his own hands for long stretches of time.
No one knows why.
