Hey, are you listening?
This is about Ueno Station. There's been a rumour going around for years — about a strange woman who appears in the ladies' toilet on Platform 13.
I heard this from someone I know, a woman whose office used to be in Ueno. I can't verify any of it, so I honestly don't know if it's true.
Apparently she used to use that toilet on her way home every evening. The one at the far end of the platform — old-looking, a bit worn. She said she'd been in there plenty of times during the evening rush, just to touch up her makeup, that sort of thing.
Then one day, she was standing at the sink and saw her in the mirror. A woman, sixty or so. Small, slightly stooped, wearing a coat — a dull, faded navy.
This woman was muttering to herself, over and over, while she pulled at her own white hair.
With her fingers. From the roots. One strand, then another.
Along the edge of the sink, there were already several lying there. Fine white hairs, gathered into a small, loose bundle.
My acquaintance was startled and instinctively looked around. The rush-hour crowd was there, it should have been packed — but somehow, within about a metre of the woman, the space had quietly emptied. As if everyone was steering clear without quite knowing why. Passing by without getting too close, without looking directly, without saying a word.
The woman kept murmuring. You couldn't make out what she was saying, but the way her lips moved — it looked like the same words, over and over, looping without end.
My acquaintance slipped out quickly. But a few days later, she went into the same toilet again — and she was there.
Same spot. Same posture. Still pulling at her hair in the same way.
This time their eyes met in the mirror. The woman's gaze shifted, just slightly, and settled on my acquaintance's face.
There was no expression. Not angry, not smiling — just a hollow, unfocused stare. But her lips never stopped moving. The same words. On and on.
Shaken enough to do something about it, my acquaintance spoke to a station attendant. He wasn't surprised at all. "Ah, that lady," he said, with the ease of someone who'd heard it before. "She's not harming anyone, so there's nothing to worry about."
What exactly there was nothing to worry about — that, he didn't explain.
Later, through someone else, she heard the story. Apparently the woman had lost her only son in a railway accident, and had never been the same since. After that she came to Ueno Station every single day, performing some kind of ritual to reach him. The hair, the muttering — all of it was for that. All of it.
To see her son one more time.
But when my acquaintance was away from Ueno for a while and eventually came back — the woman was gone. She had simply stopped coming, one day, without warning.
When she asked the station attendant about it, he said "Ah," and nothing more.
Just that.
I keep wondering — what were the words she repeated every day, there in that mirror, moving her lips without a sound?
Do you think she found him? Her son?
Or —
