This is a story from Nagasaki.
Kōgenji — perhaps some of you have heard of it. It is an old temple in Nagasaki City. And it is said that a tale has been passed down there, the tale of the candy seller's ghost.
Similar stories exist throughout the country — they are called kosodate yūrei, the ghost that raises a child. But in Nagasaki, it is this particular story, tied to Kōgenji, that has been told and retold. I heard it quite some time ago, yet the details have stayed with me in a way I find difficult to explain.
It is said to have happened in the Edo period.
In a district called Kōjiyamachi, there was a small candy shop. One night, past the ninth hour, when the owner was just thinking of closing up, a woman appeared at the doorway.
When he looked up, he saw she was a woman with a pallid face, her hair appearing soaked through, as though drenched. Yet it had not been raining. She set a single copper coin quietly on the earthen floor, bought one piece of candy, and left.
She came again the following night. The same hour. The same woman.
At first, the owner assumed she must be someone from a nearby tenement. But after she came six nights in a row, something began to trouble him. There was something wrong about the coins she left. They were the right shape for copper mon, yet when he touched them they were strangely cold, and damp — as though they had been pulled from the earth. That is how they were described.
On the seventh night, the woman stood at the doorway as always, but this time she carried no coin. She pressed her hands together and bowed her head, asking if he might give her the candy as a kindness. The owner said nothing, and handed it to her.
As he watched her retreating figure, he realized for the first time — only then — that she made no sound when she walked.
He followed her, quietly.
He kept his lantern low and moved without noise. The woman passed through Kōjiyamachi and turned onto a narrow path that led around to the back of Kōgenji. It was an old stone-paved lane, thick with moss, the kind of path that almost no one walked at night. The owner felt the damp earth through the soles of his sandals as he came to the edge of the graveyard and stopped.
The woman had crouched before one of the gravestones and placed the candy there.
And then she simply vanished.
Without a sound. Not like smoke — more as though she had never been there at all. She was simply gone.
The owner stood there for some time, unable to move. Not from fear, he would later say. It was only that everything had gone strangely quiet — the insects had fallen silent — and all he could hear was the sound of his own breathing. That was what frightened him.
The next morning, he asked the head priest to accompany him, and they dug up the grave.
Inside the coffin lay a woman. Dead. But beside her, an infant was crying. Alive, and crying.
The six mon coins that had been placed in the coffin were gone. All six.
The woman had died while with child, and had given birth beneath the earth. Each night she had crawled out, spending one coin at a time to buy candy for the child, until the coins were spent. On the seventh night, with nothing left, she had bowed her head and asked. That is all she had been doing.
The infant was afterward taken in by its father.
Then, a few nights later, the woman appeared once more before the candy shop. She had come to give her thanks, she said — to thank him for saving her child. The owner mentioned that the neighborhood had long been troubled by the lack of a well. The woman said, "Tomorrow morning, dig where you find a comb lying on the ground," and then she was gone.
The next morning, they dug at the place she had named, and water came welling up.
A mother's love became a well. That is how the story is usually brought to its close.
But there was one thing the elderly person who told me this story added, quietly, at the end.
The coins the woman had left over those seven nights totaled six. One copper coin each night, for six nights. On the seventh night she had none. The six coins are accounted for by the six mon placed in the coffin with her.
But the candy the owner gave her on that seventh night — the last piece.
What had the woman intended to use to pay for it?
That is what the old person said, in a quiet voice.
And no one, it seems, has ever found an answer.
