Well, then. Would you mind if I told you something?
It concerns Sakuragichō Station.
I never looked into it myself, but apparently there was a terrible accident there once. A long time ago, from what I understand. A train caught fire. Caught fire while it was still moving, and the passengers couldn't get out — they burned alive. Many people died, they say. Not far at all from where the station stands today.
And yet, even though all of that was more than seventy years ago, strange things are still said to happen there.
I heard this from an acquaintance of mine, who had it from a friend of his — let's call him K. K used to pass through that station on his way home from work. Late at night, close to the last train. He came down onto the platform and there was almost no one left, and the fluorescent lights looked somehow too white, too sharp.
He sat down on a bench to wait for the next train.
That was when he felt it — a faint warmth brushing against his cheek. Like a breath of warm air.
A station platform at night tends to be cold, the kind of cold that settles into your bones. But for some reason, the air around him was lukewarm. He thought it strange and looked up — and there, toward the far end of the platform where the light grew thin, he could make out a man standing.
Wearing a coat. Head bowed. Perfectly still.
Waiting for the last train, K thought. At first. But something nagged at him, and he glanced over again — and the man hadn't moved. Not a fraction. There was something wrong about the way he was standing. None of that faint, unconscious swaying that a person has when they're simply standing somewhere. No shift of breath. No movement at all.
K felt a creeping unease and quietly looked away.
Then the train came, and as he was stepping aboard —
He heard a voice from somewhere behind him.
*Hot.*
Just that one word.
He turned around. The man was gone. The far end of the platform, every corner of it — empty. K didn't stop to think. He threw himself onto the train, and it wasn't until the doors had closed behind him that he noticed he was drenched in sweat. In the middle of winter.
He looked into the accident afterward, and that was how he learned what had happened there. He read about the people who had been trapped inside the burning carriages with nowhere to go, and he understood at last what that single word had meant — and after that, he said, he couldn't sleep for some time.
Among the station staff, apparently more than a few have had unsettling experiences during the night shift, but no one will say exactly what. And I suppose that's only natural. I rather think it's not that they won't say — it's that they can't.
Perhaps, even after all these decades, that heat has never gone cold.
But the one thing I can't stop thinking about — the thing that stays with me — is this: when K was going through his photographs afterward, he found something strange in a picture he'd taken without thinking on the platform. A man's back. Wearing a coat. Head bowed.
Reflected in the window of the train K had boarded.
The photograph, it turned out, had been taken after the train was already moving.
