Kowabana Encyclopedia: Red Bridge
Found in: Kowabana 167: Exploring the Unknown
The Red Bridge is a mystery. It’s located somewhere in the countryside of Japan, but what exactly it is, how it appears, and how you find it remain unknown.
A teenage boy tells of how he volunteered at an orphanage in the countryside while staying with his grandmother one time. One of the children at that orphanage, who lost his entire family, was found drawing a picture and asking, “Hey, do you know the red bridge?”
The picture he was drawing had a scribble in black in the centre of the page that looked like a bridge, and on top of that, from top to bottom, was scrawled “Hey, do you know the red bridge?”
That same night, the teenager finds the picture by his shoes when he leaves, and as he walks home in the dark, lo and behold, he stumbles across a red bridge he has never seen before. This bridge looks rather new and has a long staircase leading to the top.
When the boy touches the bridge, it’s wet. He also notices something red dripping at the top like blood. And, horrifyingly, there’s a piece of flesh hanging from the bridge as well. As he stumbles up the stairs, the lump of flesh seems to follow him, but once he reaches the top, it disappears.
At the top, it seems like a normal road. Which is weird, because the bridge is in a rice field. There are no roads nearby—certainly nothing big enough for a truck—and there were only stairs leading up, like a pedestrian bridge.
As the truck closes in, the boy falls from the bridge, and then it’s gone, like it never existed. The next day, he asks the young boy exactly what the red bridge is, but the child doesn’t reply. At this point, the teenager suspects he has a good idea though. The boy’s family died in an accident, which was how he ended up at the orphanage. Presumably, they died on a bridge in an accident with a truck, but it’s left up to the reader to decide what it really is.
So, what is the Red Bridge? The story leads us to believe that it’s something conjured by the child’s trauma. His family died in a traffic accident, and that traumatised him so badly that somehow a monstrous version of the boy’s memories came to be. The lump of flesh on the bridge, as well as the dripping blood, are horrifying recreations of what happened, a way for the young boy’s broken mind to process what he has seen.
But in the end, the teenage boy was simply frightened by the bridge, and it brought no actual harm to him. But whether the bridge is explicitly tied to the young boy (and his picture), and whether you can only see it if he directly asks you, “Hey, do you know the red bridge?” are questions ultimately left unanswered.