Hey, can I tell you something?
In Aichi Prefecture, around Shinshiro — there's a mountain called Hōraiji-yama. Did you ever hear about the person who climbed it alone last autumn?
It came to me through a friend of a friend, so I have no way to verify it. But ever since I heard it, I haven't been able to get it out of my head.
He was a man in his thirties. His name — well, let's call him Yoshikawa. He liked hiking alone, and he'd been to Hōraiji a few times before. That day he had no particular reason for going; he just felt like seeing the autumn leaves and wandered up. He'd arrived early in the morning, but he was taking his time, stopping for photographs, and before he knew it the afternoon had crept past three o'clock.
He'd gone all the way out to the inner sanctuary. That area has more than fourteen hundred stone steps, and the trees grow so thick and close that even in full daylight you can only see the sky in thin slivers above you. Rows of cedar trunks standing for decades, for centuries, and almost no light reaching the ground. Every step stirs up the damp, heavy smell of fallen leaves, and the air turns cold in a way that feels sudden — that kind of place.
So Yoshikawa turned around and started back the way he'd come — and that's when things began to feel wrong.
He knew the path. He was sure of it. And yet the same rock seemed to appear twice, then a third time. He told himself it was just his imagination and kept walking. But the light was fading around him, faster than it should have been. October days are short, yes — but not that short, he thought.
He was just beginning to feel the first edge of panic when —
He heard a sound.
A flute.
At first it was distant, and he thought it might be the wind. But it didn't fade. If anything, it drew closer. A high, thin sound — hyu, hyu — with a pitch that felt slightly wrong for a human mouth. And then beneath it, a low, drumlike sound began: don... don... striking at long, measured intervals.
Yoshikawa said his body simply stopped. Not that he chose to stop — his feet stopped on their own.
The flute and the drum were coming from above, from somewhere beyond the trees along the ridge. But each time the sounds struck, he had the sensation that the ground beneath his feet was trembling, just barely — as though the roots of the trees were resonating with it.
Shaking, he looked up anyway.
And there, among the tops of the cedars, something was there.
A large, dark shape. Not a bird. It was standing upright. It had the form of a person, but far too large for any person. It was perched on a branch — and yet the branch wasn't moving at all.
It was looking down.
Looking at him.
He couldn't make out a face. But he knew with his entire body that he was being watched. A coldness poured down from his back to the nape of his neck, as though ice water were being run along his spine, and he found he couldn't draw breath.
Then, in an instant, the sounds stopped completely.
Yoshikawa half-stumbled, half-ran down the mountain and somehow made it back to the car park. He said he couldn't really remember how he got there.
It was only when he was home that he noticed it — a single thin scratch across the back of his hand. He had no memory of falling.
Hōraiji-yama has been known since ancient times as a mountain of tengu; the whole mountain is said to be their territory. Those who show disrespect are shown none in return — that's what they say. But Yoshikawa hadn't done anything wrong, the person who told me the story kept saying. He hadn't done a thing.
I don't know what to make of it.
But there's one part of the story that stayed with me more than anything else —
The shadow in the treetops was looking down at him, I said.
And at that moment, the flute was still playing.
The shadow wasn't the one playing it.
So then — where was the one with the flute?
