Sapporo nights grow quieter still in winter — so hushed that one can almost hear the snow as it falls. Yet no one knows the terror that lies coiled within that silence. No one knew, at least, until she lived it herself.
Yumi was an ordinary office worker who called Sapporo home. Her days passed one much like the next, and she had come to find even the smallest change a kind of novelty. One winter night, kept late by work, she boarded the last train on the Namboku Line. The car was nearly empty — the occasional drunk, nothing more — and silence held dominion.
It was a particularly bitter night. The window gave back a pale, indistinct reflection of her face. Then, in one unguarded moment, she saw it: something in the glass, a shadow standing just behind her. She told herself it was an illusion, that tired eyes play such tricks, and she almost believed it.
She got off the train and walked home through Tanukikoji, the snow thick underfoot. Halfway along, a figure appeared across the street, moving toward her. A man. But as they passed each other, she caught a glimpse of his face — horribly, wrongly contorted. A single blink, and it was ordinary again. The wrongness of it stayed with her long after.
Back home, Yumi went straight to the shower and let the warmth seep into her. The sound of water seemed louder than usual. When she looked in the mirror, something in the depths of her own eyes gave her pause — a sense that another consciousness was watching from behind them. Fear moved through her like a slow cold thing.
That night she dreamed. She wandered a city buried in snow while unknown faces pursued her — faces that always seemed familiar, yet whose names she could never grasp. When she ran, her shadow ran too, gaining on her. The breath stopped in her throat, and she woke.
The next morning, Yumi stood before the mirror and looked at herself for a long time. What looked back was no longer quite her. And there, behind her reflection, stood the pursuing shadow from her dream — dim, patient, waiting. Perhaps it was the embodiment of some dread that had always lived in the deepest part of her. In the silence of Sapporo, the shadow had been waiting for her all along.
From that day on, Yumi stopped taking the subway. She searched for some way to escape the thing that followed her. But the city of Sapporo does not let such shadows go unnoticed — and by the time the snow began to melt, they say that Yumi herself had vanished, swallowed up alongside it.
