This account… I cannot vouch for its truth. I can only pass along what has reached my ears, nothing more.
I have heard that within the grounds of Nagoya's Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Garden, there is a road that ordinary visitors can no longer travel. A narrow, winding road that leads to the car park inside the grounds. I cannot say precisely when it was closed off, but it is said that once, not so long ago, ordinary vehicles could pass along it freely.
According to what I was told, in the evenings young people would gather on that road. They would use its succession of curves to practice sliding their cars through the bends. There are those who say that laughter and the smell of exhaust fumes used to echo through the night trees.
But… there were deaths. Several of them.
Whether they failed to hold a curve, or whether something else was involved, I cannot say. Young people lost their lives on that road. That much remains constant, no matter where the story is heard.
Many people speak of what came after, using those very words — after that.
I heard about a certain man from someone I know. I was never told his name. Only that, sometime in his twenties, he had gone with a friend to that car park — shortly before it was closed off.
It was a night at the end of summer, he said. Strangely quiet, with not even the sound of insects. He had parked the car and happened to glance at the passenger-side window — and there, reflected in the glass, was a human face.
At first he assumed it was his own reflection. But it was not.
The face was slowly turning toward him.
It was not a face looking out from inside the car. It was a face peering in from outside. The mouth, he said, was slightly open. Open in the way of someone about to speak — or perhaps of someone who no longer had any words left. That is what I was told.
The man said he could not make a sound. His body simply moved on its own and pressed down on the accelerator. The sound of the tyres scattering gravel rang out, absurdly loud.
His friend had sat rigid the entire time, staring straight ahead. When asked about it afterward, the friend said he had seen nothing. Only that, just before the man suddenly drove off, he had felt something near the back seat — something like a faint, warm breath.
Whose face it was, and what it had been trying to say, remains unknown to this day, or so I have heard.
Some say the road was closed because supernatural occurrences grew too frequent to ignore. Others say it was simply a matter of safety. The truth of it, I cannot tell. Now, apparently, only maintenance vehicles are permitted through.
There is one thing, however, that stays with me.
That car park is still in use, I am told. For the management of the gardens. During the day, staff park there without incident and go about their work quite normally.
…At night, I was told, they make sure no one remains there.
When asked why, the person who told me this was given no answer.
But whenever I find myself thinking of that face in the window, I always come back to the same thought.
What was it trying to say?
