This is a story I heard from someone up in Sendai.
I never verified it myself, but it has the feel of a place that actually exists — the kind of place certain people know about, yet no one ever wants to discuss in any detail.
Apparently, in Taihaku Ward in Sendai, there is a bridge called the Taihakusan Second Bridge.
Just hearing the name, you'd think nothing of it. A perfectly ordinary bridge over a river. Except — the road on the other side doesn't exist.
There is no road.
The bridge is there. The railing is there. Solid concrete, wide enough for cars to pass. But the moment you finish crossing, the asphalt simply stops, and beyond it there is nothing but dense, overgrown forest.
The person who told me this said that the first time they went, it was late in the evening. They'd driven up a narrow mountain road and stopped just before the bridge. Something made them not want to cross right away.
They got out and walked across slowly. The concrete gave a dull echo underfoot. When they rested a hand on the railing, it was cold — strangely cold for that hour of the evening. No sound of a river below. Almost no wind. And yet the bridge itself held a peculiar, settled silence.
They crossed to the other end.
The forest was right there.
The pavement had ended. Just like that. Not crumbling, not broken — simply finished. As though it had always been designed to stop precisely there.
They decided to step in. Lifted one foot forward.
And then they smelled fallen leaves.
It was early summer. Not autumn, not winter.
The leaves on the trees were still a deep, vivid green — and yet from inside that forest came a smell of damp humus, the wet, rotting smell of late autumn, of the very bottom of the season. It pressed itself against the back of the nose and stayed there. They stepped back without thinking. The body moved before the mind did, they said.
Afterward, they looked into it and found mention of a plan to extend the road further — a project that had apparently been halted partway through for some unspecified reason, and left that way for decades.
But whatever that reason was, it appeared nowhere in writing.
The reason the construction stopped. The reason no one speaks of it.
And the reason the bridge alone was left behind, finished so neatly, in such perfect condition.
What stayed with them, though, was the drive home.
They crossed back, got in the car, and had driven some distance when an uneasy feeling made them glance up at the rearview mirror.
The bridge was still visible.
It stood there at the edge of the forest, alone.
And at the far end of the bridge — the end they had just come from —
someone was standing there.
