……This is something I heard from an acquaintance, not so long ago.
I can't vouch for every detail, but it came from someone I trust, so I thought I'd pass it along just as I heard it.
On the border between Nara and Osaka, there is a mountain pass called Kuragari-tōge — the Pass of Darkness. It follows National Route 308, an old road of laid stone, and even in daylight the trees overhead twist together so thickly they nearly blot out the sky. They've said for generations that darkness lingers there even at noon. The name, as you can see, suits the place perfectly.
Sometime last autumn, a man tried to cross that pass by car — around one or two in the morning. He had business taking him through from the Osaka side into Nara. The road is narrow, barely wide enough in places to pass another vehicle. That night there was a thin fog, and his headlights scattered against it, turning everything ahead into a pale, formless blur.
On either side of the road: pure darkness. The roots of the trees, the slopes dropping away below — nothing visible at all. Only the reach of the headlights held any white, and beyond that the black was absolute, as though ink had been poured across the world.
The man came around a bend, and there in the beam of his lights stood a figure.
Standing in the middle of the pass.
The road being so narrow, he stamped on the brake. Through the windscreen he could see the shape had turned to face him. He couldn't make out the face, he said — but the outline of the body was unmistakable. He couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. Just a thin, gaunt silhouette.
He thought, perhaps a hiker who'd lost their way. He reached over and began to ease the window down, meaning to call out — and in that very instant.
The figure ran.
It slipped past the side of the car like smoke.
If that were all, it might have ended as nothing more than a story about a strange person on a lonely road.
But the man said the way it ran was wrong.
It didn't swing its arms. Both arms hung straight down at its sides, perfectly still, while only the legs moved. And it was terribly fast. It tore through the white fog caught in the headlights and vanished into the darkness in an instant.
He did hear footsteps. A sound like bare feet slapping against the old stone paving — pat-pat-pat-pat-pat.
The man crossed the rest of the pass and came down on the Osaka side. He pulled over to collect himself, and that was when he noticed.
He had begun to open the window, as I mentioned.
Only a crack, for just a moment.
……He said there was a smell when the air from the pass came in.
Not the smell of earth. Not the smell of trees.
The smell of wet hair.
Mixed into the night air of that mountain pass, the faint, lukewarm smell of a person's wet hair had drifted into the car.
What had that figure been?
He asked someone from the area, and the person laughed it off — oh, that's nothing new, there's always been talk of something running strangely up there at night, probably just some eccentric. That seemed to settle it.
But then the local, still smiling, added one more thing.
"Mind you," he said, "everyone who's ever come across it up there at night — anyone who opened their window, even once — they all started feeling poorly afterward."
……The man still wakes in the night sometimes, he says.
He doesn't know why. Only that he can't stop thinking about the windows.
He can't sleep until he's checked that they're closed, even when he knows they are.
That's the story.
