SUMMER VACATION, one year prior.
I stood on the rooftop of a tall building. As I gazed down on the street below, I wondered how many seconds it might take for my body to hit the ground if I were to hop the railing and jump off, right here and now.
I heard that falling to one’s death was the second most common method of suicide in Japan, accounting for about 7 percent of all male suicides—and especially prevalent in urban areas with no shortage of tall buildings to choose from. The only thing you had to be careful about was to not hit anyone else on your way down; there were countless cases of innocent pedestrians being killed by a suicide victim who chose to jump down onto a busy main drag. But given the general correlation between suicide and mental unwellness, chances were that most of these victims were simply not in a state of mind to spare a thought for the people down below.
I wondered what type of building I might choose to commit suicide. Obviously, it’d be ideal to pick something more than twenty meters tall to ensure an instant death upon hitting the ground. Maybe I should write up a shortlist of candidates when I have some spare time, I thought idly to myself—but just then, I felt the buzz of my smartphone alerting me that I received a new message. Apparently, the two people I was waiting for had just arrived.
I headed back inside from the rooftop and took the elevator down to the floor with the café we agreed to meet up at. Upon entering the establishment, I was greeted by soft music, cool air conditioning, and two pairs of eyes staring in my direction from a round table near the window. One girl, one boy, both of high school age and dressed in casual attire. I didn’t recognize either of them, but I could tell from their glances that they had to be the two I exchanged messages with over the past several days—Harukawa Aoi, and Kobayashi Ryo. I walked over to greet them at their table.
“Aoi-san and Ryo-kun, I take it?”
“Oh, yes! H-hello!” said Aoi, slightly flustered, and she gave a little bow to greet me. She reminded me a bit of a small animal—petite, timid, and cute.
“Nice to meet ya, Tomoya-kun,” said Ryo, raising one hand. His street-style fashion sense certainly left a bold impression, but his chiseled features and confident body language were just as striking.
I pulled out the sole unoccupied chair at the table and took a seat. It was a small round table for three, which meant we were all seated 120 degrees apart from one another. First, we ordered drinks. Then, we proceeded to make casual small talk for a while to help shake off some of the initial awkwardness that seemed inherent to these sorts of first-time meetups. It turned out that Ryo and I were both the same age—eighteen-year-old high school seniors—whereas Aoi was one year our junior. We all lived within a few stations of here by train.
After a few minutes, once we broke the ice and a lull in the conversation hit, I felt we were more than ready to delve into the topic at hand. I pulled out the map from my backpack and laid it out across the table.
“All right. Now let’s talk about this Summer Ghost, shall we?”
Way out in the suburbs, near the very edge of the prefecture, there was an old, abandoned airfield. Originally constructed at the behest of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, it later saw extensive use during the final years of World War II. At that time, it was particularly used as a takeoff point for fighter jets sortied to repel enemy bombers throughout the countless air raids conducted over the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area. Following the war, it was converted into a small airport to service some of Japan’s smaller outlying islands on an irregular basis. However, it ultimately went bankrupt and closed down some years ago. The terminal building and the control tower had already been dismantled, so all that remained now was a large runway in the middle of a wide, open field. Supposedly the prefectural government had been discussing how to better make use of the land for many years now, but it had been left utterly untouched since as far back as I could remember. It was hard to believe it wasn’t simply forgotten.
Every so often, you’d hear stories about groups of rambunctious kids or teenagers who would sneak their way onto the fenced-off property, just for the thrill of it. And it was from the stories those groups told of their experiences that, over the past few years, a new urban legend had been born—namely, that of the Summer Ghost.
“Our first reported sighting dates back to three years ago, when some junior high kids on summer vacation trespassed onto the property to light off some fireworks without permission,” I explained, using my pointer finger to indicate the abandoned airfield’s location on the regional map—an empty, rectangular space in the middle of a rural sector that was otherwise just rivers and open fields. “Then, the following year, a group of elementary schoolers claimed to have encountered a similar apparition. Also in the summer. Also while playing with fireworks on the runway, supposedly.”
“There’s our pattern, I guess…” Ryo mumbled.
“You got it,” I said. “It seems it only appears during the summer, and only when fireworks are being lit. Those are the two major constants I found in every eyewitness account—of which there are several more, by the way. Some dad who took his whole family out there, a motorcycle gang that wanted to party, a loner who wanted to see the ghost for themself… All of them spotted it in the summer, and all of them were setting off some kind of fireworks.”
“You keep saying ‘it,’ but it’s really a she, right? Assuming the rumors are true, that is,” commented Aoi.
“Yeah. A woman around the age of twenty, apparently,” I said. I pulled out my sketchbook and a pencil from my backpack to draw a quick visual aid as I explained further. “Long black hair, long dark skirt… Probably somewhere in this ballpark, if I had to guess.”
I quickly sketched out the image I’d constructed in my head of the Summer Ghost based on the various bits and pieces of information I could glean from the eyewitness accounts. Once it was done and I lifted my pencil from the page, Aoi looked down at the crude drawing, apparently impressed.
“Wow, Tomoya-kun,” she said. “You’re a really good artist.”
“Yeah, I was in art club back in junior high. Don’t draw too much anymore, though.”
Pretty much all I drew back then were rough pencil sketches like this—usually portraits from the chest up, largely realistic. It felt a bit strange (and perhaps a bit melancholy) to realize that I was already feeling rather nostalgic for those days.
“So she’s a ghost, but she’s still got legs, huh?” said Ryo, also examining the sketch.
“According to our primary sources, yeah,” I said. “Not that no one’s ever gone on the internet and told lies before.”
Still, these were the only accounts we had of this seasonal specter—this Summer Ghost. And if we wanted to verify them, then there was only one thing we could do.
“Well, they also said she’s the ghost of a woman who committed suicide, right?” said Aoi. “Wonder how true that part is.”
“Hard to say. Guess we’ll just have to ask her when we get there, won’t we?”
For that was exactly what we’d gathered here to do—and why we’d gotten in touch with one another in the first place. We needed to see this apparition for ourselves.
After leaving the café, we made a quick stop at a nearby hardware store to buy a wide variety of fireworks. Then, we hopped aboard the bus and set off on our little journey. Not long after pulling away from the station, we left the commercial district behind, and the buildings we could see from the bus windows grew fewer and farther between. This wasteland of suburban sprawl grew sparser and sparser, and the other passengers got off one by one until eventually the three of us were the only ones left aboard.