In Kamakura, in the district of Fukasawa... you may know the area. There is an unremarkable little sports ground there — a perfectly ordinary facility where children run about during the day and parents come to collect them in the evening. Yet in one corner of that ground, I am told, stands a single stone pagoda, ancient and out of place, as though it belongs to some other world entirely.
The local people call it, in hushed voices, the Weeping Tower. No one seems to know with any certainty how it came by that name. But I will tell you what I have heard, as faithfully as I am able.
It was several years ago, apparently. When development in that area moved forward, the stone pagoda was deemed an obstruction, and it was decided to relocate it a short distance away. A crew of workmen gathered, lifted the heavy tower, and set it down in its new position. The day's work ended without incident. Everyone went home. Night came.
A resident living nearby described what happened the following night. She woke sometime after two in the morning — she could not say why. She simply found herself wide awake, her mind strangely clear, sleep refusing to return. She lay still and listened toward the window. There was no wind. And yet something seemed to reach her. At first she told herself it was nothing. A car passing in the distance, perhaps. But the longer she listened, the more certain she became that it was nothing of the sort.
Hih — hih — hih.
The sound of breath drawn in sharply, shoulders trembling. The sound a woman makes when she is weeping without a voice — stifling it, holding it inside. That sound. Coming straight to her from the direction of the sports ground, through air that was perfectly still. She lay in her futon and could not move, she says. Not from fear — or so she herself insists — but from something that seized her deep in the chest, a tightening she could not name. She could not tell whether what she felt was grief or terror. She could not tell at all.
By morning it emerged that others nearby had heard the same sound. After some deliberation, those responsible for the construction work arranged for the pagoda to be returned to its original position.
The night after it was moved back, I am told, was quiet.
...And yet. Had the story ended there, perhaps it would never have been passed on at all.
Even after the tower was restored, the sound comes still — once or twice a month, in the depths of the night. If that were all, one might wrap the tale up neatly enough: the tower had simply wished to go home.
But there is one more thing that people who pass by have spoken of.
On an autumn night, a man walking his dog came along the path beside the sports ground. It was around eleven o'clock. A streetlamp near the tower seemed oddly dim, he said — darker than it should have been. The bulb may have been failing. He thought nothing of it and walked on, dog in tow, until the dog abruptly stopped. All four legs planted, body turned toward the tower, a low and steady growl rising from its throat.
At that moment the man felt something cold. It was October, and the night air had a chill to it — nothing unusual in that. But this coldness was not the wind. It came with the smell of wet earth, and it crept upward from the ground beneath his feet, slowly, as though seeping through the soles of his shoes.
He looked toward the tower. The surface of the stone was wet. It had not rained. The day had been clear from morning to night. And yet the tower alone was damp — dark and glistening, as though hands had been pressed against it, again and again.
After that night, the dog refused to walk that path.
What dwells within that stone pagoda, I cannot say. Whether it is the spirit of someone displaced by the encroaching development, or something far older that has stood in that place since long before living memory — I cannot say with any certainty. Only this.
The elders of this land have long held that a pagoda must never be moved. A stone set down with its roots in a place becomes bound to whatever is there. Tear it free, and something is disturbed.
The tower still stands in its corner of Fukasawa. In daylight there is nothing to hear. It is simply an old stone, nothing more.
But sometimes, on the wet surface of the stone, there are what appear to be the marks of fingers.
So I have been told.
