Hey, are you listening? There's something I want to tell you — and I want to say it quietly, almost in a whisper.
You know the story about the swan boats at Inokashira Park? If you've lived in Tokyo any length of time, you've probably heard it. Couples who ride together will break up. It gets passed around like an urban legend. But lately I've started to think this might not be the kind of story you can just hear and forget.
I got this from a friend of a friend, so there's no way to verify it. Take it however you like.
It happened last autumn, apparently. A couple who'd been together two years came to Kichijoji for the day and stopped by Inokashira Park on a whim. The foliage along the pond is beautiful that time of year. When they passed the boat rental, the girlfriend said she wanted to go out on the water. The boyfriend laughed and tried to beg off — said something about the breakup jinx — but she teased him, asked if he was scared, called it superstition. So he gave in. They climbed into the boat still laughing.
The reflections of the autumn leaves on the water were lovely, and she took a lot of photographs. They laughed as they rowed, and then, just as they drifted past the little Benzaiten shrine, she let the oars go still.
"Does the water feel cold to you? Like, strange cold?"
It was the end of October, so of course the water was cold — but what she felt wasn't the ordinary cold of the season. That was what she said afterward. A chill that crept up from her fingertips without her hands even touching the water. As if it were rising from just beneath the surface.
That was when he noticed.
Her eyes, fixed in the direction of the Benzaiten shrine, looked as though they were focused on something very far away. When he called her name, her response came a half-beat late. She smiled back at him, but the smile was somehow off — misaligned with the moment. She was right there beside him, and yet she wasn't. He said he couldn't quite explain it, but that was the feeling he had.
They returned the boat, sat on a bench, drank coffee, and went home. Nothing in particular happened. Only — on the way back, she turned around once and stood staring at the pond for a long moment. He asked what she was looking at. She said, nothing. But her eyes weren't smiling.
About three weeks later, they broke up. The reason was some small argument, trivial really. But he says he still wonders. When they passed in front of the Benzaiten shrine that day — whether something climbed aboard. Not onto her, exactly. But into the space between them. Quietly.
Benzaiten is said to be a jealous deity. A goddess of water, of art, of beautiful things. And when she sees a couple too happy together, they say she wants to take it apart. How much of that is true, I honestly don't know.
But — and this is still just something I heard, something I can't verify — that pond has been there for a very long time. Decades. Centuries. And if there are things that have sunk into it, dissolved into it, things still drifting just below the surface —
Those boats move slowly, don't they. Quietly. Every stroke of the oars pulls through the water, and the ripples spread outward.
What if those ripples are waking something up.
Whether you believe it is up to you. But the next time you find yourself at Inokashira Park with someone, stop for just a moment in front of the boat rental and look at the surface of the water.
Something might be looking back.
