This is something I heard from an acquaintance. There's no way to verify it, so take it for what it is.
You know the Sendagaya tunnel? It's in Shibuya ward — short, unremarkable, the kind of tunnel you forget as soon as you've passed through. By car, it's gone in under a minute. In daylight, there's nothing to it. Just a dark concrete tube with a circle of light at the far end. But they say strange stories have clung to that place for as long as anyone can remember.
Apparently there's a temple directly above the tunnel. And the story goes that when they built it, they bored straight through the ground beneath the temple's cemetery. Whether that's true, I honestly don't know. But if it is, it does make a certain grim sense of everything that's happened there.
The person this happened to was a friend of my acquaintance — or rather, someone that friend knew. I'll call him K. He lived in the city and often drove through that tunnel on his way home from work. Late nights were common for him — one, two in the morning — but it was a familiar road, and he never gave it much thought.
One night — I don't know the exact date, but apparently it was during the rainy season — the air was thick and muggy, and K had his window cracked open as he drove. The moment he entered the tunnel, that warm, damp outside air shifted. It turned cool. And with it came a smell — earth, he said. The smell of wet soil deep underground. He thought nothing of it at the time. Just assumed it was a welcome bit of coolness.
He was about halfway through when his eyes drifted, almost without thinking, to the rearview mirror. He'd half-expected to see headlights behind him.
Instead, he saw a face. Upside down.
A woman's face, inverted — chin at the top, hair hanging downward. She was pressed against the ceiling of the car, peering in at him. Her eyes were open, he said. In the dim blur of the tunnel, her eyes were the one thing that came through sharp and clear.
K floored the accelerator and didn't stop until he was out the other side. He pulled over under a streetlight, hands shaking, and looked at the mirror again. Nothing. The back seat was empty. The windows were clean. There was no one. Only that smell of earth, still lingering inside the car, slowly fading.
On its own, he might have talked himself out of it. Exhaustion, a trick of the dark, the mind playing games.
But when he mentioned it to a colleague a few days later, the man's face went pale. "I saw it too," he said. And when they compared notes, it turned out his colleague had been driving through that same tunnel on the same night.
At almost exactly the same time.
I've also heard it said that there are hours in the dead of night when not a single car passes through that tunnel. Whether something is blocking the way — or whether cars simply stop coming because something else is using the road — I couldn't tell you.
There's just one last thing that stays with me. Ever since that night, K has stopped looking at his rearview mirror. Doesn't matter where he's driving. He just can't bring himself to do it.
