Hey, can I tell you something?
There's a strange story going around about one of the office buildings right in front of Hakata Station. I heard it secondhand, so I can't say for certain how much of it is true.
I'll call the person K. K was an ordinary office worker, the kind you'd never look at twice, commuting every day to a company near the station. Morning and evening, K walked the same route through that busy stretch in front of Hakata Station, the same path, day after day.
It started in late autumn, from what I was told. Around six or seven in the evening, the station plaza was packed as usual with the after-work crowd — and yet K felt it. A gaze, coming from a specific direction. Not from behind. From above. Somewhere just overhead, a feeling of being watched, steadily, without blinking.
Just my imagination, K thought at first. This is Hakata Station — there are people everywhere. But the feeling didn't go away after one day. The next day, and the day after that, every time K passed the same spot, the back of the neck went cold. It was November, the wind had started to bite, and K tried to blame the chill — but apparently K kept saying it wasn't that kind of cold. It wasn't the weather.
Then one day, K finally looked up.
Third floor of the office building across from the station.
A woman was standing there.
She stood with the light of the room behind her, looking down. Just looking down. K couldn't make out her face — whether it was the backlighting or something else about that part of her that was unclear, no one seems to know. But her silhouette was solid, and she wasn't moving. The curtains were shifting in the wind, but she was perfectly, completely still.
K froze. A coldness crept up from the ground, and the voices of the crowd, the station announcements, all of it fell away into the distance. Only the window felt close. K couldn't look away.
A moment later, someone bumped into K from behind, and the spell broke. K turned back to the window. The woman was gone.
If it had ended there, it would have been fine.
But a few days later, walking the same road at the same hour — she was there again.
Same window. Same position. Same stillness. Watching.
That was when K finally felt afraid. Not a sudden fright — something worse than that. K said it felt like wanting to cry. A sadness, a heaviness, a desperate need to run, for no reason K could name. K's legs were shaking. That evening, K never made it back to the office.
K tried to look into it afterward. Apparently the third floor of that building was unoccupied at the time. What that means, nobody knows. It's just the story that's been going around.
K quit the company not long after, and left Fukuoka. Never told anyone the reason for moving. But there was one colleague K was close to — and to that person alone, K said one thing.
"The woman in that window was smiling."
Whether she had been smiling from the very beginning, or only smiled at the end — that part, no one ever thought to ask.
Hakata Station is packed again today, same as always. I can't help wondering sometimes — whether someone is still up in that window, quietly counting the people who pass below.
