This is something I heard from someone else.
How much of it is true, I really can't say. Only — the face of the person who told me was a strange, pale shade.
Yasaka Shrine, in Kyoto.
Those who have visited late at night may understand what I mean. The place becomes something else entirely after dark. Once the tourists have gone and only the lantern-light remains, the very weight of the air seems to change — it presses close, clings to the skin, they say.
On this particular night, a man named Yusuke had gone there alone.
He was in his late twenties. A friend had told him, "Yasaka at night is something else," and for no particular reason his feet had carried him there. By all accounts he was a perfectly ordinary person — not especially fond of frightening things.
It was past eleven o'clock. The stone path through the shrine was nearly deserted, and the sound of his own footsteps on the paving seemed unnaturally loud, he later said.
He passed alongside the main hall and moved a little deeper in. At the far edge of the grounds there is a small wood — the kind you wouldn't give a second glance to in daylight. The trees grow dense there, and almost no light from outside reaches through. Yusuke found himself walking into it, drawn forward as though by something. "Whether I chose to go in, or simply came to my senses already inside — even now I'm not sure," he apparently said afterward.
Inside the wood, he said, it wasn't so much dark as it was darkness made solid.
As his eyes adjusted, the outlines of fallen leaves at his feet became faintly visible. But when he stepped on them, they made no sound.
Strange, he thought, and stamped down deliberately. Still nothing.
His own footsteps had vanished.
From that moment, Yusuke began to sweat. It was a November night, cold enough that his breath misted in the air, yet perspiration ran down the back of his neck.
Somewhere nearby, water was dripping.
Drip. Drip. At a steady, even rhythm. But he could not tell where the sound was coming from.
He stopped walking and tried to locate the direction of the sound — and his gaze happened to fall to the ground.
Something was hovering above the soil at the base of one of the trees.
In a thin, bluish light — moonlight, perhaps, or something else entirely — lines were being drawn. As though someone were writing there. But it was not writing. Not any symbol he recognized. Shapes he had never seen before, moving slowly.
It was then that Yusuke first tried to cry out.
Nothing came.
His mouth opened, but only air escaped — no voice.
When he raised his eyes, he saw someone standing between the trees.
A woman.
She wore a kimono. Her head was bowed. Her hair was long. No more than three meters away, he thought.
What was wrong — what was truly wrong — was her feet.
She was standing on the fallen leaves, yet the leaves beneath her were sunken. The leaves where her weight should have rested had been pressed down deep, deep into the earth — as though something heavy had been bearing down on that same spot for a very long time.
The moment he saw it, the words that rose in Yusuke's mind were: she has been standing here all along.
Not just tonight. All along.
He had no sense of how much time passed. When he came to himself, he was standing on the stone paving in front of the main hall. It was just before dawn, and the sky had begun, barely, to lighten.
The soles of his shoes were wet.
There had been no rain in the wood, yet his socks were soaked through, he said.
No one asked him what, exactly, had made them wet. And Yusuke did not say.
There is only one postscript.
A few days later, Yusuke asked a friend whether there were any photographs from that night. He must have taken some on his phone, he said.
When he looked, the photos were there — taken inside the wood.
Dark. Almost nothing visible in any of them.
Except for one.
At the base of one of the trees, a pair of feet had been captured.
They were not Yusuke's feet.
They were bare. And the nails were long.
