Reiko Read online

  The rain had begun to fall as the train pulled out of Ueno Station and, after a week of glaring sunshine, it gave a different complexion to the cityscape. I was also looking forward to seeing some real Japanese countryside after the monotonous urban sprawl stretching between Osaka and Tokyo. The trolley came past and I bought a green tea from an impeccably dressed server who bowed gracefully at each stage of the transaction. Then, drink in hand, I settled back in my seat to wait for the city to thin out and the countryside to begin.

  Maybe it was the sleepless night I’d had or the ample chicken yakitori lunchbox making me drowsy, but I found my eyes nodding to the gentle rhythm of the train.

  Before long I fell asleep and while I slept I had a dream.

  I dreamt we were gliding through the same urban landscape and I was watching the same parade of nondescript apartment blocks and office buildings. The carriage was quiet as before and I sat back in my seat sipping green tea.

  The train slowed to a crawl as we approached a signal outside a large block of flats. I looked out at the flats – the clothes hanging on the lines, the pictures on the walls, the cosy little family units – enjoying this insight into all these lives.

  Then the train came to a complete stop with the block of flats no more than twenty metres from the track. I started wondering what it must be like to live so close to a mainline bullet-train route, what kind of discount you got on your rent, or whether people just grew accustomed to the constant noise. Then something caught my eye. I looked upwards and my heart sank. Standing on the roof of the building, on the uppermost ledge, in his beige chinos and white T-shirt, was Yoshi. He was staring straight at me, a half-smile on his face.

  He raised his hand in greeting and I exclaimed loudly, making the old lady sitting next to me jump. My cup of tea fell to the floor and I slammed the palm of my hand on the window. Desperate, I waved my arms vigorously at him, trying to tell him, ‘no’. He smiled and shook his head, unfazed.

  I continued to slam my fist on the window, shouting ‘no, no, no’, so that everyone in the carriage look rounded at me. I jabbed my finger against the glass, pointing at Yoshi, screaming ‘he’s going to kill himself, he’s going to kill himself’. No one seemed to see what I saw, just stared in alarm at the mad foreigner.

  Yoshi watched me calmly as I became hysterical. I banged my fist on the glass and shouted for help, looking around for an emergency cord or button. Around me the other passengers were getting agitated and speaking animatedly.

  Still I banged on the glass, crying in anger and frustration: ‘please help, somebody help’. I realized I needed to take matters into my own hands and I left my seat, clambering over the cowering lady and into the aisle. I needed to get to the door, to alert the guard, to alert someone. Two young men grabbed hold of me in an attempt to restrain me. ‘Please, I need to go, I need to get help,’ I shouted, but they held on to me and shouted something in Japanese which I couldn’t understand.

  The train started to move off and I wrenched myself free and forced my way to the window. Yoshi was waving at me as the train moved off, waving at me with a smile on his face. I watched, my face pressed up against the glass, sobbing loudly as we pulled away. I watched helplessly as Yoshi took a short step forward and plunged to his death.

  I woke with a start.

  For a moment I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. Then I saw that people were peering round at me with concern. By the agitated look of the lady sitting next to me, I realized I must have said something or cried out in my sleep. Not only that, but my knees were sopping wet from where I’d dropped my green tea. As far as I could remember I’d never done anything like that in public before. But the dream had been horribly vivid and I was still shaking with emotion. Yoshi’s features had been so clear, his wave so genuine. I wanted to tell the other passengers what I’d been through the night before, so that they’d understand. I didn’t want them to think of me as some random foreign fruitcake. If I could just explain myself to the lady next to me in my broken Japanese, maybe she’d be able to pass on the message.

  I looked at her for a moment, weighing up my options, but she looked as though she might turn tail and run if I even opened my mouth. Better not to embark on some cross-cultural damage limitation exercise. Just shut up and pray for my stop.

  But I couldn’t put the image of Yoshi out of my mind. I kept returning to the last moment of the dream: my face pressed up against the window, tears running down my cheeks, watching him silhouetted against the grey sky, taking that last step. It was the one view I hadn’t had the previous evening, the full wide-angle, no-holds-barred money-shot. If I hadn’t been haunted by that particular image before, then I certainly was now.

  I turned back to the window and began to think of home.

  9. SARAH

  Seeing Izumi for the first time, it was hard to imagine that somewhere so picturesque and tranquil could have seen a history so violent. The rickety local train rattled slowly towards the station and I saw a level plain of farms and houses, surrounded by hills which rose up with alarming abruptness. The station platform had seen better days, with weeds growing through the cracks in the paving and a weatherworn sign in English reading ‘Welcome to Izumi’. The village elders were not taking advantage of the village’s cult status among supernatural tourists.

  The deadpan conductor announced the station and the train creaked to a juddering halt. As I opened the door and stepped off, I saw a young Western woman sitting on the bench, huddled under an umbrella. Professor Atami had kindly rung the village and got me the contact details of the local language teacher, an English girl called Sarah Mayhew. But I hadn’t expected her to be waiting for me at the station. She smiled and got to her feet.

  ‘Hi, I expect you’re James. I’m Sarah.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to meet me. I wasn’t expecting anything.’

  She laughed. ‘As you can probably guess, there’s not a lot to do around here.’

  It was a relief to see a friendly face and hear a familiar accent after the mild trauma of the journey. ‘So, this is where you call home now?’

  ‘Yep, this is home. At least, this is where they placed me. What about you? I understand you’re a ghost-hunter.’

  I smiled at the label. ‘Yeah, but I’m not as weird as I sound.’

  Sarah pointed towards the station exit and we began walking towards it. She lifted the umbrella, inviting me under. ‘You’ve just arrived here, haven’t you? So you may still think you’re pretty normal. A lot of people even continue thinking they’re pretty normal. But the one thing I’ve learnt about the foreigners here – and I include myself – is that we’re all weird. By definition. It’s the nature of this place, the lifestyle, the way it affects you. So if you weren’t already weird when you got off the plane, you soon will be.’

  We emerged from the station and Sarah pointed to a white Toyota parked by the side of the road. ‘My courtesy car. Without it, I’d have lost my mind already.’

  I looked round at the station forecourt and was surprised to see it was completely deserted. No one else had got on the train, no one else had got off and no one else had been waiting. There were a few decrepit houses dotted around, but besides Sarah, there was no sign of human habitation. Izumi could have been a ghost town and Sarah an emissary from the netherworld sent to welcome me.

  ‘Have you made any arrangements for accommodation?’

  I pulled myself together and showed her my list of guesthouses. ‘Do you know any of these?’

  She glanced at them and wrinkled her nose. ‘I wouldn’t bother with all that. Crash at mine. I’ve got more space than I know what to do with.’

  Given she’d only met me two minutes ago and all she knew about me was that I hunted ghosts, I was a little surprised by the offer. I certainly wouldn’t have offered a place on my floor to someone with my credentials. ‘Are you sure about that?’

  She started to laugh. ‘I told you this place does things to your mind. I’ll
be honest with you, I’ve been here for nine months and you’re the first visitor I’ve had. I know I don’t exactly know you, but I’ll take my chances.’

  It was nice to get into the car and out of the rain and not have to worry about accommodation. And sitting alongside this down-to-earth English girl, I felt the previous night’s stress start to ease. The thing that had worried me most about leaving Osaka and travelling to Izumi was the thought of being alone and not having Josh or anyone else to hang out with. The feeling had grown as the train neared Izumi and I’d started to think about having to find accommodation in some Spartan inn. My dream about Yoshi had been a symptom of that mounting anxiety. Truthfully I hadn’t expected much of the resident English teacher. Given all I’d heard about Izumi I was rather expecting a twitching neurotic wreck and not an answer to a prayer.

  Driving through the village, I looked out at the rain-sodden houses and ramshackle shops and was struck by how different everything looked. I’d never seen the Japanese countryside before, but the contrast with the city was remarkable. Professor Atami had told me that the Japanese view of the countryside was unlike that of the English. In England, city dwellers dream of living in the countryside, surrounded by nature and tranquillity. In Japan, the countryside is an undesirable backwater, just a place for farmers and yokels. In Japan everyone would live in Tokyo given the choice.

  ‘Do you like it here?’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘It’s okay. I didn’t really have a choice about my posting. When I signed up to teach in Japan, this isn’t exactly what I imagined. I wanted to be in a city, somewhere with a bit of life. As you can see, there isn’t much of that around here.’

  Looking out I saw a couple of old women in smocks hobbling along the sidepath and, further on, a group of young children on bikes.

  ‘There aren’t any young people, put it that way. Everyone’s very nice, they invite you into their houses, they shower you with attention, but there’s no one of my age. When people reach eighteen, the first thing they do is head to the city, go to college, get out of here. No one wants to be left behind with a bunch of school kids and geriatrics. So you get a kind of eighteen to eighty vacuum.’ She started to laugh. ‘Sorry, you’ve just got off a train and I’m already giving you a sob story. It’s not too late to change your mind and go to one of those guesthouses.’

  ‘That’s okay. You can hear some of my sob stories later.’ I turned back to the window, wondering what she’d think if I told her I’d seen a man die the previous night. Would she still want me to stay with her?

  ‘The only things that keep me sane are candles and Gregorian chant.’

  After arriving at her flat and taking the tour, I’d been overcome by tiredness. Sarah had encouraged me to rest, laying out a futon for me in the spare room. There I’d enjoyed a deep dreamless sleep until seven, when she had woken me for dinner. She’d cooked a tasty meal of yakisoba noodles which we ate cross-legged around the low table in the centre of the room. She even gave me an elementary lesson in the use and misuse of chopsticks, all the while extolling the virtues of Japanese food, insisting the Japanese had the healthiest diet in the world. I wasn’t a gourmet, but the food was excellent and I ate with relish.

  And now I was sitting in a room surrounded by candles.

  ‘I know it must seem a bit gloomy, but I had a religious upbringing. I’m not religious now, but for some reason this bit stuck. I find it relaxing.’

  Except in a church I’d never seen so many candles in such a small space. There were candles on the bookcase, candles on the window ledge, candles on upturned tins and boxes placed round the edges of the traditional tatami mat floor. I could barely move for fear of setting fire to myself, while the Gregorian chant made for a slightly sombre atmosphere.

  ‘So why did you come here?’ I asked.

  She sighed and looked around the room, considering the question. ‘Same reason everyone else did. To find something new. Maybe to escape.’

  ‘Escape?’

  ‘Yeah. Everyone has something to escape from. And I don’t mean the obvious things, like a doomed romance or credit card debts. People come here to escape their upbringing, expectations, the fear of failure. Most people don’t even know what they’re trying to escape from.’

  ‘It’s a long way to come to escape.’

  ‘Of course, no one would actually say they’ve come to escape. Most people don’t even think it. They say they’ve always been interested in foreign culture or exotic travel. They say they want life experiences or something. But I’ve met a lot of the foreign teachers out here and they’ve all got secrets. They’ve all got things lurking beneath the surface, things they’re afraid to talk about. The bottom line is, most of us here were social misfits at home. So we think if we travel halfway across the globe, we might find acceptance.’

  ‘You really think that?’

  She smiled, perking up a little. ‘Sorry, I’ve gone all gloomy again. I admit I do have problems. Maybe it was my parents. They wanted me to be something special and I wasn’t up to the challenge. Maybe that’s what I’m escaping from.’

  In a way, it was a relief to hear Sarah talking so openly. It helped to dissipate the shadow of Yoshi hanging over me. ‘Well, it’s better to be honest about it.’

  ‘Some place to escape to, isn’t it.’ She started to laugh. ‘So, what about you? I’ve said my piece. What brought you to the other side of the world looking for ghosts? I’ve been wondering about that.’

  It was strange, but I felt I hadn’t really talked about myself to anyone in years. Most of my friends were men and we didn’t tend to speak about what went on inside our heads. What Sarah had said about escape actually made a lot of sense. I had absolutely come to escape. ‘I don’t know. Before I came, people kept asking me why I was going to Japan and why I was studying ghosts. The last question is easy. That’s what I got funding to do. The first question is more difficult.’

  She topped up my beer glass as encouragement.

  ‘I didn’t have a very happy upbringing. My parents were too caught up in their own issues, so I kind of disappeared into my shell. I comforted myself with dreams of going places and being important and doing remarkable things. I grew up in a small town, where everyone knew everyone else and nothing ever happened, so I guess I wanted to rise above my roots. I went to university, which was a kind of escape and I did okay. But then I fell in love and that took over my life. It was the first and only time and I didn’t handle it too well. I thought she was the answer to everything, but I always had this feeling she was too good for me and that sooner or later she’d realize it and leave. So I ended up being possessive and neurotic. I saw every other guy she knew or spoke to as a threat which just drove her mad, so she left me. She said I loved her more than she loved me, that I was jealous, that I was dependent on her, that I needed to grow up. And the worst thing was, she was absolutely right on every point. It’s easy to hate someone if you know they’re being unfair. But she wasn’t and I’ve never really recovered from that.’

  I’d said a lot more than I’d meant. It all seemed to come gushing out and I was unable to stem the tide. It was my life story in abridged form and something I could only really have given to someone I didn’t know very well.

  Sarah didn’t say anything for a while, then yawned, stretched her arms and pulled herself to her feet. ‘Well, it’s all out in the open now. No more unhealthy skeletons in the closet, no more secrets. There’s a small bar just down the road, so I say we sod our insecurities and go out and raise a glass. What do you think?’

  ‘What are we raising a glass to?’

  ‘No idea. We’ll think of something on the way. Come on.’

  ‘Count me in.’ She was a godsend. As far as I was concerned, she’d already booked her place in heaven.

  Sarah assured me it was a pretty decent turnout for a Tuesday night: the two of us, a maudlin man in his fifties propped against the bar supping on whisky, and the stony-faced proprietor. I looked round at
the small dark room: a handful of tables and stools, a few shabby shelves behind the bar lined with bottles and a couple of framed photographs on the wall. The place was in dire need of an interior design overhaul.

  ‘It’s not jolly, but it’s damn convenient. If any friends visit, which isn’t likely, at least I know I can bring them here for a taste of Izumi nightlife.’

  We were seated at a table in the corner and every now and then the proprietor lifted his gaze and regarded us quizzically, as though incredulous that anyone would want to patronize his bar. I wanted to ask him how he managed to keep the place open.

  ‘It’s cosy,’ I said, looking for positives.

  ‘I don’t know if ‘cosy’ is the word, but I appreciate your tact.’

  I pointed at the photographs on the wall, which seemed to be of local landscapes. ‘I guess those are old photos of Izumi.’

  ‘From the last century by the looks of it, before the bulldozers moved in. It used to be quite picturesque.’

  I got up and, under the watchful eye of the proprietor, inspected the photographs. They were badly faded, but I could make out the hills and fields and, in the corner of one of them, giant earthen mounds. I jabbed at the picture with my finger. ‘That’s them. The burial mounds. Look.’

  She came over and squinted with me. ‘Oh, those little hillocks. There are a few of them around.’

  ‘Apparently the village used to be covered in them. That’s where its reputation comes from.’

  She went back to her seat. ‘So that’s what you want to see then? Burial mounds?’

  I shrugged. ‘I guess I just wanted to see somewhere different, maybe talk to people here about all the stories. It’s a famous haunting spot.’

  ‘I know. Japan’s most haunted village. It’s funny, I remember waiting for weeks to hear where I was going to be placed. The letter comes, I do a quick search on Izumi and what do I get? Japan’s most haunted fucking village.’ She checked herself with a smile. ‘Sorry, I know that’s the whole reason you’ve come here. But then you can spend a week and go back to Osaka. I have to live here.’