This story is about A, a freelance designer living in Kokura, Fukuoka.
“I was born and raised in Tokyo, so I’ve always wanted to live in a smaller city. A large part of why I became a freelancer was so I could work from anywhere.”
Spurred on by the recent wave of de-urbanization, A left her job at a major advertising agency six months ago and began her new career.
“Well before I quit, I had been looking online for places to live. Recently, local governments have been helping renovate vacant houses into affordable rentals for single people moving into the area. Lots of them are quite stylish, and I used to spend every night checking listings and imagining living there. It was kind of like my hobby.”
At the time, A was considering moving somewhere other than Kokura.
“I was looking at an area called , in the Kinki region. Some vacant houses in a historical residential area had been turned into rental properties.”
A didn’t want to move to some tiny, remote village where all her neighbors would be hundreds of meters away. She just wanted to escape the bustle of Tokyo and to breathe some fresh air. This area seemed ideal for her purposes.
Heart set on the location, she began researching rental properties.
“I usually do an internet search with the location name, plus ‘renovation,’ ‘rent,’ and ‘house.’ That brings up pictures of the interiors, exteriors, and floor plans all in one place, so I don’t have to keep clicking through info on a property just to get a good look at it. Instead, I can see everything at once, then click on the pictures that look interesting to find out more.”
One evening after work, A was sitting in bed searching through renovated properties in the region.
“I don’t remember exactly what keywords I used, but I think they were something like ‘rent’ and ‘.’”
Starting at the top of the list, she checked exterior photos, floor plans, and so on, until she noticed a strange image on her screen.
“The picture in the search results was small, so I clicked on it and opened the source web page to get a better look.”
The picture showed a woman standing in the dark.
“The lighting in the image was really bad, and I couldn’t make out that much. But it was this eerie picture of a woman in a red coat with long, ruffled hair. She was standing stiffly upright in a run-down Japanese style room.”
Above the picture was a line of garbled text, but nothing else, no links to other pages. The site seemed to exist solely to host this picture.
“It was nighttime, and it spooked me a little, but I brushed it off and went back to the image-results page to continue checking listings.”
She kept scrolling, until something caught her eye about ten minutes later.
“At first, I thought it was the same image. But something about it felt different.”
The next thing she knew, she’d opened the image.
“It looked like the photo was taken in the same run-down Japanese style room. It was the same woman, too. But this time, her arms were raised.”
Once again, there was a line of garbled text over the image, but it looked slightly longer than before.
“The fact it was longer meant there must have been something different written there before the text got corrupted. Whoever uploaded those images was trying to say something to the person on the other side of the screen, and that really creeped me out.”
Unnerved, A stopped looking at listings for the night. From the following day on, she used the image-search function a lot less.
“I’m not sure how long it was after that. I had almost forgotten about the whole thing, so it must have been around a month or so. My boss asked me to copy some documents for an upcoming meeting.”
As she waited for the copier to finish printing, A leaned against the machine, staring blankly at the stream of repeating pages flowing out. Suddenly, something strange caught her eye. She quickly paused the job and riffled through the stack of papers to find what had grabbed her attention.
“The copies were black and white, so the image was in gray scale, but it was a picture of that woman. The copier had printed a picture of the woman with the raised hands standing in that room. The image didn’t fill the whole sheet of paper, though. There was a little space above that had some blocky, handwritten text.”
“Thank you for finding me.”
A panicked briefly, then she crumpled the paper into a ball, stuffed it in her pocket, and finished her day.
After work, A called a friend from elementary school and invited her over.
“I was scared to be alone and knew I had to do something about that paper, but I didn’t know what.”
She explained everything that had happened, then watched, terrified, as her friend smoothed out the crumpled sheet of paper. She saw the same eerie woman in the image, just as she had back at work. But now that she looked again, something about the background felt off to her.
While A turned away, her friend froze, eyes locked on the paper. She sat silently like that, until A asked what was bothering her. Then she spoke, her voice shaky.
“Isn’t this your parents’ house?”
“It was my bedroom at my parents’ house. My friend recognized it because she used to come over when we were in school together. I could tell it was my room based on the shape of my desk and the unique clock on the wall. The moment she said it, I knew she was right.”
A found her current house in Kokura through a real estate agent’s website, not an image search.