Hey, can I tell you something?
It's about Yoyogi Park. I can't say for certain any of this is true, but… there's this rumour that's been sitting with me for a while.
I heard it from a friend of a friend. I can't give you a name, but apparently, last autumn, this person tried to cut through Yoyogi Park alone, late at night.
Just past eleven, they came in through the Harajuku entrance and headed toward the trees at the far end. You know how big that park is, right? Lively enough in the daytime, but at night the streetlamps are few and far between, and the deeper you go into the trees, the darker it gets underfoot. They'd chosen a narrow path that ran along the fence, thinking it would be a shortcut.
At first, nothing. Just the sound of their own footsteps through the fallen leaves, and the distant hum of traffic.
But after walking for a while, they noticed something.
Their footsteps had… become two.
At first they thought it was their imagination. Maybe the dry leaves rustling in the wind, or something like that. But when they stopped, the sound stopped a beat too late. A soft crunch. As though someone had taken one more step, then caught themselves.
They turned around.
No one was there.
Except — the way they tell it — it wasn't that there was no one. It was that they couldn't see anyone. In the gap between two trees, in a patch where the streetlight didn't reach, there was something like a thickening in the air. A dark mass. It had the shape of a person, but the edges were blurred, and there was no way to tell where its face was. And yet they knew, without any doubt, that it was facing them.
They knew they were being watched.
They were too frightened to make a sound. Their legs — they said their legs genuinely stopped working. We've all heard that expression, haven't we, frozen with fear? They'd always assumed it was a figure of speech. But the feeling drained out of them from the knees down, and they could not take a single step.
But that's not even the worst part.
The dark mass didn't come closer. It didn't disappear either. It simply… tilted, quietly, toward them.
The way a tree sways in the wind — slow, gradual. Its faceless face still turned their way.
And in that moment, something reached the back of their nose. Not the smell of earth. Something older. Damp paper, something rotten that had dried out and grown wet again. They said that smell is the one thing they still can't forget.
The next thing they knew, they were running. They have no memory of which way they went. They just found themselves out at the Meiji-jingumae intersection.
… And that would have been enough, wouldn't it. If it had ended there.
But they found out later. That part of Yoyogi Park — it's near where the American military facilities used to be, and going back even further, it's land where all sorts of things happened during the war. I can't go into the details, but there are stories that say the place has absorbed things. That certain things have soaked into the ground there.
When they got home, they took off their coat.
And on the back, near the right shoulder, there was a smear of mud.
… They hadn't touched anyone in that park. No one had come near them.
They still don't know what it means.
A whole year has passed now, and they still don't know.
