…This is something I heard from someone else, you understand.
It concerns a back street in Aoyama. Just off Omotesando, down one of those narrow alleys where tourists never venture, there was apparently an antique shop. I say *was* — but that comes later.
The shop dealt in all manner of things. Furniture, trinkets. Old kimono, vases that could have belonged to anyone or no one. No display window — if you peered in from the street, you'd see these things heaped and crowded together in the dim interior. The locals, well, they made a point of not touching anything. No one could say exactly why, but it was the sort of shop everyone simply walked past without stopping.
That's where a young woman — a university student — went in. I'll call her Misaki. She was on her way back from shopping with a friend, and it was probably just a lark. The two of them pushed through the noren curtain, laughing.
The friend stopped near the entrance and said it smelled strange. Old wood, and something else — a damp, earthy smell, like wet soil. The air felt thick and close, though it wasn't even summer. The friend stepped back outside almost immediately, but Misaki kept going, deeper in.
Pushing her way through the piled-up objects, she made her way to the very back of the shop, to a spot where the light didn't reach, and there she found a small glass case. Inside it sat a single ring. A silver band set with a deep crimson stone. Everything else in the shop looked dull and faded, but that stone alone seemed, somehow, to faintly glow.
The moment she reached for it, a voice came from behind her.
"That is not something you should take."
She turned. An elderly shopkeeper was standing there. She had no idea how long he'd been there — he'd made no sound at all. His eyes were unfocused, fixed on something far away, and he said to her: *That ring chooses its owner. And once it has chosen, it does not let go.*
Misaki was frightened, she must have been. But she bought it anyway. She couldn't even remember afterwards how much she'd paid.
That same night.
She said later that she'd had a dream — though she admitted she wasn't sure it was a dream at all. She simply found herself standing in a dark room. Not her own room. Old wooden floors, and that smell — damp earth, just like the antique shop.
There was a woman standing in front of her.
Long hair, wet, hanging down over her face so that her expression was hidden. She wore something white, and her feet couldn't be seen. Slowly, she began to reach out toward Misaki. On the ring finger of her outstretched hand was the ring. The same finger Misaki was wearing it on.
She touched her.
Misaki described the sensation like this: *Her fingers were cold as stone. But they weren't fingers. Something thin and hard closed around my wrist.*
When she woke, it was morning. She was in her own bed. The ring gleamed on her finger. She tried to take it off. It wouldn't move. She tried soap, she pulled with all her strength — but it held fast, as though it had put down roots between bone and skin.
Within a few days, her friend was in a motorbike accident. She lost consciousness. Misaki's cat died, cause unknown. Nothing happened to Misaki herself. Only this: every night, she had the same dream. And each night, the woman in it was a little closer than the night before.
She went back to the antique shop. She wanted to return the ring.
But the shop was gone.
When she found the alley, there was nothing there but an empty lot. Weeds growing, a concrete block wall standing alone — the kind of place that looked as though no one had used it in years. She asked someone nearby. *There's never been anything there,* they told her.
What became of Misaki after that?
It depends on who you hear it from — the story changes slightly. One version has her returning the ring in a dream, and waking to find it gone from her finger. But another version, from someone else entirely, says the ring never came off, and that she simply never goes near Aoyama anymore.
What is certain — if anything can be called certain — is this.
The stone in that ring apparently had a name engraved on it. The original owner's name. When Misaki bought it, that name was still there. But when she looked at it the morning after the dream, the name had changed.
It was her own.
