A Ghost Story
Original art: Dao Thao
When I lived in Shimabara, I often went for drives to kill time. I had a little hatchback, and there wasn’t much else to do except read and sometimes go out for drinks. Driving was good for clearing my head, recovering from hangovers, listening to music, and sometimes, thinking.
The roads that bordered the Shimabara peninsula were old, as were the neighborhoods built along and around them. Though newer buildings dotted more popular areas and construction was occasionally present in the town center, by and large the buildings reflected what was left: the old, the aging, the abandoned, and the dilapidated.
On my drives, I often passed a small ryokan hotel overlooking the sea, some 20 minutes from the town center. It was called Akari, and at some time in the past it must have been a place for hot spring baths and relaxation. Now, however, its walls were peeling, the roof was ragged, and through the broken, weathered glass I saw that most of what was inside was gone, save for a few tables and chairs.
When I saw this ryokan, I found myself thinking of a writer sitting on a tatami floor in a hotel-readied yukata, looking over a handwritten manuscript with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a beer on the small table by his bed.
It was this imagined past I saw in Akari that charmed me.
——
I happened to mention this one day to a girl I was seeing; a young Russian who had arrived in town recently and worked nights at a local snack bar.
She told me the place was haunted.
“Haunted?” I said.
“Yes. A customer told me about it just the other day.”
According to her drunken client, Akari had once been a small, modestly successful hot spring hotel. Its claim to fame was a visit by famed author Yasunari Kawabata, who had written a short message on a signature board that decorated the space over the lobby counter.
The ryokan had done reasonably well until the accident. The girl said somebody had been discovered dead in their room, or had died somewhere between the ryokan and the hot spring baths; the details weren’t clear, but the girl knew it had started with a death. And although there had been some mystery surrounding the incident — who it was, how it happened, why — the locals eventually brushed it off, and business continued as usual.
“But then it happened again.”
“Again?”
Apparently, another person died some years later. This time, the details were crystalline: a guest was found hanging from their balcony, having constructed a makeshift noose from the bath towels provided in the hotel room, and tied it to the railing of a balcony overlooking the sea.
He was discovered the following morning as another guest returned from an early morning walk.
The guest’s room — number 4, on the second floor — was closed and made into a storeroom, but rumors circulated faster than the reparations, and soon staff and guests alike were reporting strange occurrences around and inside the room where the guest had died.
“Do you know why he did it?” I asked.
The girl shook her head.
“I don’t,” she said, “but you know what the Japanese say about the number four, right?”
I laughed.
“Connecting a number to the word death is a very strange, very perplexing superstition,” I said.
“Superstition or not, what happened is what happened. It was only a few years ago.”
I found myself thinking of that imagined writer, sitting in his room with his beer and his cigarette. I saw him look down at his handwritten manuscript, then blow smoke at the ceiling, and then look at the neatly folded towels in the wicker basket by the sliding door.
“I wonder what was going through his head when he did it,” I said.
“Who?”
“The man. The one who hung himself.”
The girl thought for a time.
“I suppose you could ask him.”
“I what?” I said.
The girl smiled.
“Well, the place is haunted.”
“You’re suggesting I go to an abandoned hot spring hotel in search of a ghost?”
“Let’s bet on it.”
“Bet on what?”
“You spend one night in that ryokan, and if you don’t see a ghost, you win.”
“And what do I get if I win?”
The girl winked.
“Whatever you want.”
I smiled.
I was young, and I was stupid, and I did not think to ask what I would get if I lost.
So I left the girl at my apartment, and went out to buy a sleeping bag.
——
I parked my car in the empty parking lot, and took a long look at the setting sun over the sea before making the slow walk to Akari.
I had never seen it up close before, but it was very much as I had imagined.Long grass swayed to a lazy wind, hiding the path that led to the entrance. Miscellaneous trash — cup noodle packages, old magazines, empty beer bottles — littered the grounds like memories told halfway and then abandoned. There was something of an old, dusty smell about the place, the kind I associated with photo albums and the attics in old homes.
At the entrance, I stared for a time at the lock and chain on the doors, and the faded message announcing the hotel’s closing. The grayed letters and the polite language struck me with the echoes of a note someone leaves before they disappear.
“By the time you read this, I will be gone…” I thought.
I tried turning the key still left in the rusted lock, but it was stuck tight. I thought about how it might have gotten this way — whether someone had left it realizing it would not make a difference, or used a different key hoping it might still work — and then I simply climbed through a broken window and into the hotel.
——
Inside, I took off my shoes and left them at the entrance, then slid into a pair of dusty slippers still left on the shelves by the front doors. I knew the gesture was unnecessary and somewhat pointless, but it felt rude to do otherwise, regardless of the place being abandoned or haunted.
I tried a few light switches and got what I expected: nothing.
At the front desk I found a few notebooks, some pens that no longer worked, and a phone that reminded me of my grandparents’ house. Along the walls were a few old photographs — the hotel under construction, the grand opening, a picture of the Shimabara port — and a series of dusty silhouettes where photographs had once hung.
I ran a finger along the line of a silhouette; it reminded me of the sunken cushions of the sofa in my old home: proof that my father had once existed, even years after he was gone.
As the sun continued its descent, slowly sapping the sky of its light, I ruffledthrough the drawers and cabinets of the front desk, looking for things of interest; hints of memories and stories half-finished.
If the message from Yasunari Kawabata had really once been here, it no longer was.
——
There were two guest rooms on the first floor, with the remaining six on the second, including the renovated storeroom that had been room number 4.
I wandered lazily through each of the guest rooms, looking for nothing in particular. Memories were stuck to the place like old coffee on white linen; scratches on the floors, smoke-stained walls, and litter that whispered of a different time.
I had hoped there might be a few stray pillows or a futon I could use, but the mold and dust that filled them was more than I could stand.
I found an old broom and dustpan in the once-haunted storeroom, and took them downstairs.
——
The lounge next to the lobby was a haphazard blend of dust, broken glass, and dirt that had come in with the change of seasons.
As the last light of the day sunk beneath the sea outside, I swept a small space near an old sofa. The sky drifted from red to pink to purple to black against a soundtrack of an old wooden broom scraping along wooden floorboards.
And I told myself that this was why I was here: for the sense of peace and tranquility that comes with inhabiting spaces abandoned by time.
——
I spent the early part of the evening reading by torch light and listening to the wind as it wove around the broken glass of Akari’s many windows. When I grew bored of the words that danced on the pages of my book, I turned my ears to the world in the distance; to the grass outside, and the sea beyond it, and the few vehicles that drove along the roads that encircledthe hotel.
This was perhaps not such a bad way to spend an evening, I thought, shivering.
——
At some point late into the night, it occurred to me that I didn’t really have to be here; I could have taken the girl’s bet, parked around the corner, slept in my car, and then returned triumphant.
So what exactly was it that brought me to this place, then? What hopes and dreams and expectations had coalesced into the motivation that brought me here, to an old hotel, on an old sofa, in a brand-new sleeping bag, waiting for a ghost?
But by then it was already too late to go back. I was mostly comfortable, drowsy from a hangover, and lacking in sleep.
Slumber that night came more quickly than I expected.
——
I woke to the gentle echo of boots on shards of glass, and footsteps trudging carefully across the floor. Moonlight streamed in through the open windows as I watched the petite figure of a girl walk through the empty space of the hotel lobby.
There was a familiarity, and a freedom, to the girl’s movements that made me think this was not her first time here.
“Uh, hello?” I said.
The girl paused for a moment, as though doing so might make her invisible.Then her eyes settled upon my caterpillar-like form on the sofa.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“Uh… what are you doing here?”
“I kind of live here,” she said.
“Oh.”
——
Hideko told me that she had moved to the hotel a few days earlier.
“Why here, though?” I said. “Why not somewhere… I don’t know. More… inhabited?”
Hideko paused, as though slowly counting the pages in the book of this particular memory, and deciding whether it was worth reading again.
“It’s a long story,” she finally said.
I looked around at the empty hotel lobby, and the pages of an old magazine ruffling in the wind, and the silhouette of dust that had once been a frame hanging on the wall.
“I’ve got time,” I said.
——
Until a few years ago, Hideko worked at a hostess bar in Nagasaki. The work was what you would expect: late nights and early mornings with the lonely and the lecherous, and hangovers as unpaid overtime.
Hideko’s gentle features, porcelain skin, and natural grace made her a popular addition at the bar, and it wasn’t long before word got around that this was a girl worth seeing, and a girl worth talking to.
“I was good at it,” Hideko said. “I was good at the work. I knew how to put on the mask, and I knew how to bring it to life; I knew how to make people like me, and I knew how to like them back. I knew how to make it convincing.”
The clientele were a mixed bunch — the ordinary and the eccentric, the rich and the poor, the playful and the obsessive — but they all came for the same thing; a visit to the border where dreams and reality blurred.
It was never the booze that brought the men back, but a different kind of concoction, and a different kind of drunk. It was the way their feelings felt embraced, understood, and accepted; it was a cocktail unique to the bar, and impossible to re-create elsewhere, and very, very difficult to resist.
It was what every customer paid for.
Their dreams and fantasies.
——
For about a year, the nights wove a patchwork blanket of flirty smiles, lazy conversation, hazy innuendo, and a growing line of unfinished shochu bottles sitting against the wall, each labeled with a customer’s name.
When Hideko started, the flow of time along this particular river ran more quickly than she expected, but she was not concerned so much with where the river was going; at the time, it was enough to simply be along for the ride.
But that time could last only so long.
——
And one night, a year into her hostess career, Hideko saw where the river might go.
Wrapped in a fur coat and waiting for a taxi, Hideko watched an old lady in an old dress locking the door of a bar as the sun began its rise behind the sloped hills that surrounded Nagasaki City. Without the dimmed lights, and the flowing alcohol, and the banter and the laughter that filled her bar, the old lady struck Hideko as a tired, sleepy shell of a creature, locking the door to a world that had become her entire life.
And that, Hideko realized, was as good as it would get.
It occurred to Hideko in that moment that hostesses did not graduate into higher-paying positions or move into more glamorous work. Instead, they fell into loveless marriages with the rich, or returned to countryside homes defeated, or otherwise opened their own bars to continue the cycle of lost souls, quick money, and nights best forgotten.
The rivers that stretched out in front of Hideko spoke of lives she had never wished or dreamed of, and lonely futures that cast dark, inescapable shadows.
Hideko began to dream of a way out.
——
This way out came more quickly than Hideko expected, in the form of two interwoven coincidences: a chance opportunity, and with it, a convenient stalker.
The chance opportunity arrived around midnight one evening, as Hideko helped a drunk customer by the name of Mishima into a taxi and saw that the bag he carried was packed full of cash.
It was a moment that stretched, and a moment in which Hideko saw two paths. One was the path she already walked, ending with an old lady in an old dress locking the door to a bar at sunrise. The other was a foggy gray mist, where the future was still a question mark.
“I think there is a moment in everyone’s life,” Hideko said, “where you accept your fate, or you take the chance given to you and attempt to change it.”
“Is that what it felt like?” I asked.
Hideko nodded.
“Yes.”
This is why, after helping Mishima into his taxi, Hideko took his bag.
——
The stalker, Yukio, was a regular who had been visiting the bar for about a year. He worked in construction and usually came once a month, on the weekend of his payday.
Yukio was not much of a talker, and he preferred to simply sit and drink until his cheeks went red and he found the confidence to ask the girls behind the bar for stories.
“Tell me something interesting,” he would say.
Yukio was memorable for his tendency to do something most other customers did not.
Listen.
——
“As soon as I took Mishima’s money, I knew that Yukio would help me,” Hideko said.
“Why?”
“Because he loved me.”
“You knew?”
“He never said it, but I knew. When you do my job long enough, you feel it.If you want to be successful, you have to.”
“Why?”
“It’s a fantasy that grows in the bar, like a flower the customer waters that never blooms, but always feels on the cusp of doing so. It’s how we make our money. Most men know this, and they play along because it’s as close as they’ll get to what they want. Yukio was different.”
“Oh?”
“He could never just leave the flower at the bar.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he was following me around outside of work, and he was there the night I took the bag from Mishima.”
“That sounds bad.”
Hideko shook her head.
“It was what I wanted,” she said.
——
Yukio had been stalking Hideko for a few weeks. Everybody knew, but nobody did anything because nothing had come of it, and nobody would do anything until it was already too late.
“That’s just the way it goes,” Hideko said. “That’s just the way it is here.”
The night Hideko stole Mishima’s bag, Yukio was hiding in a nearby alley. After paying the driver, Hideko fell out of the taxi, stumbled to her feet, and hobbled toward Yukio.
“I don’t want you to ask me what happened in that taxi,” she said.
“Okay.”
“But I need your help.”
Yukio paused for a time, blinking.
“Okay,” he said.
——
“I knew people would be looking for me,” Hideko said. “I also knew that in a worst-case scenario I could say I was kidnapped, and that Yukio had taken the money when I was helping Mishima into his taxi.”
“So you told him you needed his help, and he just said okay? Just like that?”
“I told him I didn’t have anyone else.”
I saw myself as a lonely man hiding in an alleyway, faced with the girl of his dreams asking for help. I saw Hideko staring up at me, with a bag under her arm and fear in her eyes.
I saw the whole world pause for a single moment in time, and tremble under the weight of destiny.
“I would probably fall for that,” I said.
——
Yukio stared at the dashboard of his car, his hands resting on the wheel.
“Shimabara?” he said. “You want to go to Shimabara?”
“Yes,” Hideko said. “My… my sister lives there. She’ll be able to hide me for a while.”
The lie rolled off Hideko’s tongue in a way that surprised her, and she watched it hang in the air, where in the silence between them it slowly hardened into truth.
Yukio looked up at the lights on the hills surrounding the city, as though thinking about who they all belonged to, and what might happen to them while he was gone.
Then he started up the car and nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
——
Music wafted from tinny speakers and drifted on the wind out the windows as the car ambled along seaside roads lit by the moon.
It took Yukio 30 minutes to say something.
“What’s… what’s on your mind?” he said.
Hideko thought of her nonexistent older sister. She wondered what kind of work that sister did, and how she had come to live along the Shimabara Peninsula. Had she been abused, too? Had she chosen to run away like Hideko? Or had she chosen the path of least resistance, and met someone of decent standing — probably a teacher — and moved with him when he transferred to a new school?
Hideko wondered: Would her sister like her? Would they talk the way she imagined sisters talked? And how would she explain her predicament; running from a dangerous man with a bag of his money, together with a young man who was hopelessly, stupidly in love with her?
Hideko shook her head.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Tell me something interesting.”
——
Yukio told her he worked with a construction team, pulling buildings down and putting up new ones in their place. He read books on the short breaks during the day, and wrote poetry at night.
“Have you ever published any of it?” Hideko asked. “Put it online or something?”
“No,” Yukio said. “I don’t think anyone would read it. How many poets do you know who started in construction?”
“I don’t know any poets at all,” Hideko said. “But I’d be happy to read some.”
The words tasted like the truth.
Yukio tilted his head in thought, then said, “Sometimes at the end of a project, when I look at a building we’ve finished putting up, I won’t be able to remember what the old one looked like. I’ll try and I’ll try, but unless I see a photograph, it’s just gone. Sometimes I wish there was a team I could hire who would do that to me, too.”
He laughed.
Hideko went back to staring out the window, and she thought about Yukio’s words for a long time as the car puttered along empty roads in the dead of night.
——
“We’ll have to find some place to stay,” Hideko said eventually.
“What?”
The sun was still a few hours from rising when they reached the sleepy town of Shimabara and passed through its empty streets. It had just occurred to Hideko that she would need time to build a new lie on top of the old one she had crafted about her sister.
“She has a child now, a son. He’s… he’s still very young. I don’t want to wake them at this time and have to explain everything to her. Can we look for a business hotel or something?”
Yukio was silent.
“There’s a ryokan here,” he said eventually, “a hot spring ryokan hotel. Yasunari Kawabata stayed there a long time ago. They say he wrote a short piece on a whim during his stay and they still have it. I want to stay there one night, before I take you to your sister. We can get separate rooms, and I’ll pay for everything, but I want to stay there, even if it’s just one night.”
Something about Yukio’s voice in that moment echoed with a feeling Hideko couldn’t place, as though it vibrated on an emotional frequency she was powerless to resist.
“Okay,” she said.
——
The ryokan was, unsurprisingly, closed for the evening, but Yukio rang the doorbell until the night manager answered, and eventually convinced him that Hideko was sick.
Not only did the night manager set them up in a room, but he also gave them a discount, and opened the outdoor baths in case they wanted to use them before they slept.
Which they did.
——
Hideko spent an hour soaking in the rocky onsen pool and listening to the sea in the far-off distance. She looked at the bamboo fence separating the men’s side from the women’s, and she wondered if Yukio, too, was listening to the sea.
Something about the young man struck Hideko as earnest and naive. This naiveté appealed to her, and made her think of simple joys like books on lunch breaks and poetry before bed.
But there was also something fractured in him; something that lurkedbehind his eyes and echoed in his subtle, probing questions. Something in the past had broken Yukio, and left him in a pile of rubble with a need for a very particular feeling, and a fear of looking for it anywhere else but the bar.
As she stared up at the stars, Hideko wondered, What happens when the truth of his feelings meets the reality of my lie?
——
At around 4 a.m., Hideko returned to the hotel room, in which a pair of mattresses and blankets had been laid out for the two of them to sleep on. Yukio sat by the window, pouring a bottle of beer into a small glass.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get you your own room,” he said.
Hideko shook her head and sat at the end of a mattress.
“It’s okay.”
She listened to the ticking of the wall clock, and Yukio’s beer fizzing in its glass by the window. She fidgeted a moment before speaking.
“Do you want to…?” she said.
Yukio looked up.
“Hm?”
Hideko put a hand on the mattress.
“You know, for… payment. For your help tonight. For all of this,” she said. “If… if you want to, we can.”
She felt Yukio’s fractured gaze on her body.
“No,” he said. “That’s not… I don’t… you…”
He looked at his beer and took a breath.
“I… lost my wife not so long ago,” he said. “I was never very good to her. I loved her but I didn’t know how to tell her. I cared for her but I didn’t know how to show it. I made mistakes. I did stupid things. But she stuck around, and I thought she would always be there. I thought she would always be there, until the day that she wasn’t.
“You can’t apologize to ghosts,” he said. “But when I met you, I saw her. It’s not in the way you look, it’s in the way you feel to be around; where you pause when you talk, how you stare out the window, how you shrug things off; things like that. And when you asked me for help, it was like her ghost giving me a second chance. I know it sounds stupid when I say it like that, but in that instant I thought maybe I could make things right. Maybe I could pay for what I did.”
Yukio took the glass and stared at it.
“But now that we’re here, I know that after I’ve dropped you off and you’ve disappeared, I still have to go back. I have to go back to the city, and to work, and to the hole in my heart that never fills, no matter how many poems I write or ghosts I meet.”
Hideko looked for some words to help them float upon the waves of raw emotion, but found none.
Yukio shrugged.
“But at the very least,” he said, “I have this moment, and the poem I will write about it when you fall asleep and the sun starts its rise over the sea.”
Yukio finished the remains of his beer and placed the glass on the bedside table.
“Tomorrow I will take you to your sister,” he said, “and then I will go back.”
And as he slid open the door and stepped out onto the balcony, Hideko realized what had fractured and broken inside of Yukio all that time ago, and what he searched for in the stories he listened to and the poetry he wrote.
It was his dreams.
——
That night, as Hideko fell into slumber, she decided that the following morning she would tell Yukio about her sister, and give him some money in the hopes he might grow some dreams with it.
She thought this would be a nice thing to do.
——
In the morning, however, Hideko woke to a banging on her door, and her traveling partner hanging from the balcony, his neck wrapped in bath towels tied to the hand railing.
“There was no time to think,” Hideko said. “I didn’t want to deal with the police, I didn’t want to end up back where I started, and I didn’t want to look at Yukio anymore, swinging gently from the balcony, his life as lost as his dreams.”
“So what did you do?”
“I ran. I threw on my clothes and I ran.”
“You didn’t take the bag?”
“I thought it would link me to the incident. I didn’t want to be caught with it, so I stuffed handfuls of cash into my handbag and I ran.”
Hideko said she took Yukio’s car as far a Minami Shimabara, where she parked it at a shopping center and bought a change of clothes. From there, she wandered on foot toward the seaside, stopping when she found an old kissaten cafe run by an old woman who smelled like old cigarettes.
She sat there for a long time, lost in the aroma of coffee and smoke, her mind a complete and total blank.
——
“I knew Mishima would find out about Yukio eventually, and I knew he would not claim the bag as his own when the police announced it at the scene of the suicide. I also knew that as long as I did not turn up in Nagasaki City, he would keep tabs on my name and credit cards. He would wait until I popped up, and he would come for me.”
“You didn’t think he’d just forgive and forget?”
Hideko shook her head.
“Mishima did not earn his money and power by leaving loose ends untied.”
“So what did you do?”
“I did short stints at local snack bars; little holes in the wall off the main arcade, where people didn’t ask for ID and they paid in cash at the end of each night. It was good enough for a time.”
“For a time?”
“I’m a ghost here,” Hideko said. “I don’t exist. My identity floats somewhere between who I was and who I pretend to be. I’m forgetting who I am.”
I waited for her to continue.
“That’s why I came back here, to the ryokan. I wanted to revisit those memories. I needed to. I had to know that they really happened.”
I looked around at the empty lobby, and the memories etched into the faded remains of all that was left.
“Did you ever see it?” I asked.
“Hm?”
“The poem Yukio said he would write. Did you ever see it?”
Hideko nodded.
“I did. I found it in my handbag when I was at the kissaten cafe the morning he died.”
“What was it about? What did it say?”
Hideko looked past me to the second floor, at the space I imagined she shared with Yukio just a few years earlier. There was something in her eyes in that moment, as though she had taken a book from the shelf in her study, opened it, and realized that she liked it better closed.
“Do you mind if I show you in the morning?” she said. “I don’t like thinking about it at night.”
“I’m… I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Hideko said. “I’ll show you in the morning. When the sun comes up. Okay?”
——
I never saw Yukio’s poem or found out what it was about.
When I woke, Hideko was gone, along with any trace that she might have ever been there.
The ryokan looked different in the morning light. I wandered again through each of the guest rooms, looking for nothing in particular. The memories were still stuck where I had last seen them; scratches on the floors, smoke-stained walls, and litter that whispered of a different time.
And on the balcony of room number 4, I noticed a bend in the railing, as though it had once been wrenched badly out of shape, and forced back to something resembling what it once was.
I spent some time leaning against that railing, staring out at the morning sun above the sea, and thinking about the story Hideko had told me.
And I wondered if Yukio had watched this same view before he left, and what dreams he might have seen in the moments before his world went black.
But I would never know.
——
When I returned home, most of the stuff in my apartment was gone. I rang the Russian girl’s number but she didn’t answer. A few days later, her number was disconnected.
I never heard from her again.
As I made myself a coffee that morning, in the mostly empty kitchen of a mostly empty apartment, I felt something like a displacement, as though at some point in the evening I had passed from one world into another, and the door had closed behind me. I thought about people, and ghosts, and the world they both inhabited, and the story Hideko had left me with.
And I never went to Akari again.
—-
Music
(Pola & Bryson — Dusk)
Original art: Dao Thao
If you enjoyed this story, I also publish stories monthly in my newsletter here.
Thanks for reading!
— Hengtee