Friendship
Author: Ukari (translated with author’s permission, please visit their website to see the original Japanese works!)
To say here is far, and to call yonder nearby. Stories on the edge of the every day, strange tales you may or may not be moved by. Strange, curious, fantastic stories told by me, you, him and her. There are many stories but they’re all concluded within a single page, each story around 200 to 1200 characters in length, a short story collection you can easily read. Please enjoy them. Updated every Saturday at 6pm.
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My family home has a separate room detached from the rest of the house. Long ago, the head of the house used to keep his mistresses there, but that’s no longer the case. However, as the name suggests, it’s not a part of the main house so it’s inconvenient to reach, and as such, it isn’t used for much. It’s treated mostly as a storeroom.
Several years ago, something strange happened in that room. In the middle of the night, there was a pale light that didn’t appear to be the normal electric lights, and it was joined by a musical accompaniment that could be heard coming from somewhere. Everyone was creeped out, and even in the brightness of day wouldn’t approach it.
Hearing that, my uncle was the one to take action. He worked in the city, but he was back home because he was unwell.
“Let me spend the night inside. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Worried about his health, his parents admonished him, but in the end they relented.
“Go ahead. You won’t find anything there anyway.”
They laughed as though mocking him, and he could no longer hold back.
Nobody knew what happened out there that first night. But after that, the strangeness stopped, and my uncle continued to reside there. When people asked him what happened, he just smiled as though he didn’t have a care in the world. But every now and then, people could hear him talking late into the night with another voice.
A few days ago, my uncle died. A tanuki came into the garden as we were holding his wake. A tanuki is a rare sight, so I threw it some food, but it didn’t even look at it.
The tanuki didn’t run away, but rather turned towards the coffin and turned its head down, as though it were mourning the death of my uncle.