Night Eye

＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿ Showa Scenery: "The Voiceless Shadow"

In the sky that had forgotten how to darken, clouds carrying the warmth of early spring lingered.
There was no resisting the way ordinary days passed by peacefully, and the sweat from running around cooled quickly.
Shizuo Kureta and his friends, who were obsessed with playing Kamen Rider, truly believed they could become cyborgs, and they would pick up rusted scrap metal from the roadside, insisting they were parts for their secret base.
They even gave nicknames to the flocks of sparrows they saw almost every time and the stray cats that walked by gracefully with their tails held high, casting curious glances at them, wondering when they would turn into Shocker monsters. Even at the ants busily crawling on the ground.

There were still vacant lots left in the town, and when sunset arrived, they would drift with the smell of red-rusted tin cans, and the rainwater from the previous night remaining in the nearby hollows would reflect the small, distant lights of streetlamps.
The children were enthusiastic about the champions of justice, but that passion was naturally beginning to change direction.

Rumors of snake women, vampires, aliens, and the slit-mouthed woman. Horror photos in manga magazines, and dazzling female bodies.
The influence of television broadcasts was certain, but the swirling delusions, trapped in a single photograph and turned into an invisible wind, blew over the roofs of the neighbors and drifted all the way to the river on the outskirts of town.
The illusion that time was being stretched, despite being stationary, felt much like the sensation of lying in the hole of a concrete pipe stacked in the middle of a vacant lot.

Television shows its true face more at night than during the day. That drama was on after ten o'clock on a weekday, I believe.

It was a one-off production that a local station aired like a filler, and no one remembered the title exactly, but the adults, while puffing on cigarettes, would only call it,
"The one with the one-eyed woman."
The actress who appeared in it had a strangely familiar face. But she wasn't glamorous enough to be a star.
Her name felt like it was on the tip of my tongue, and every time I tried to remember it, it would clear up like the air after the rain, but it was only for a moment, reminiscent of the shadows of water striders in puddles seen on the way to school.
However, she had a sexiness that wouldn't be out of place in a run-down snack bar, and a charm that seemed like it could be on the frontispiece of a weekly magazine.

Shizuo watched her as a grown woman. Perhaps telling himself that the sensible elders were doing the same.
The plump white chest visible through her blouse, the bright red nails on the slender fingers holding a cigarette. The flow of sweat from her forehead to her neck.
But what captivated him most was not her body, but her eye.
After being betrayed by her lover, in a fit of passion, she swings a pair of tailor's shears that pierce her own eye. That pain and agony were burned into his mind as a sight he shouldn't have seen, and his mature empathy caused a strange twist.

Only that part was strangely vivid.

The drama soon turned into a ghost story after that. But what left an impression was not the blood or the murder, but that wet look on her face when she took off her eyepatch.

Shizuo Kureta was under his futon again tonight, and although he wasn't trembling, he was harboring an unbearable feeling.
Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he felt a presence in the same room. A sight he had never seen before, where voiceless shadows overlapped.
His parents were not breathing in their sleep, and the bare skin of the half-body melted into the darkness, and his eyes were so blurred he couldn't even tell if it was moving.

"I wish this were a dream."

Wishing that was all he could do; otherwise, he felt like he was just waiting for the storm to pass.
Despite receiving the unsettling air trapped in his bedding, he felt worse for being the one who was sensing it.
The memory of watching the distorted relationship in the TV drama without really understanding it unfolded vividly into the darkness.
The rustling of clothes, which he wasn't even sure he was hearing, faintly intertwined with the ticking of the clock.
Once Shizuo became aware of that presence, he began to wake up frequently in the middle of the night, and his eyes would snap open.

Someone started it.
"They say that's based on an incident in the next town over."
He knew there was no basis for it. But at that time, the town still had enough darkness for rumors to ferment.
It would be a misuse of the word to call it far away, but the fact that the details of everyday life couldn't keep up made the sense of distance in his heart stretch out, and it served as a bamboo broom, suitable for sweeping away obscene delusions.
The back alleys of the shopping district that escaped the glamour and brightness of the main street, the shady women accompanied by drunken customers, the closed-down movie theater.
When night fell, there was still plenty of blank space in the world.

What Shizuo heard from his classmates was no longer a rumor, but the buzzing of a crowd watching a demonstration.

"I saw the one-eyed woman" stories were multiplying.

It wasn't limited to just the corners of the night.
The sunny railroad crossing, the taxi stand, the park wrapping up parents and children, the landing of the apartment complex where conversations never ceased. The back gate of the school that had become lonely.
All the witnesses said in unison, "She was beautiful."
Shizuo believed that story only halfway. He couldn't fully believe it not because he was scared, but because if she really existed, he wanted to see her too.

The young owner of "Izumi Shoten," a shop on the street one block over from his house that sold everything from dagashi and juice to daily necessities and small appliances, was also talking about that actress with a customer of the same age.
However, it was a soft memory, like ice cream on a summer day melting on the spot, whether he had actually heard it or created the scene himself.

"That kind of woman is the one who ruins a man the most."

"I heard a rumor that she was seen in the next town over."

The whispers echoed through the town like a mountain echo.

The evening shop smelled of a mixture of soy sauce, soap, and pencil lead.
Only the orange glow of the bare lightbulb was strangely intense, and even the bottled juice in the glass case looked like the colors of a somewhat translucent dream.
Shizuo began to feel rapidly uncertain about whether that woman was truly just a person on television, and even his own shadow stretching out on the way home felt as if it were an emissary for someone else.

That night, he watched a scene where the daughter, the protagonist of his usual serial drama, picked up a puppy abandoned by the concrete pipes in the industrial district, brought it home, and was scolded by her parents.
Suddenly, a scent that couldn't simply be called animal-like—a mixture of rotting straw, soil under a persimmon tree, and the shoe lockers at school—pierced his nostrils.

Thinking it resembled Pero, the dog he couldn't keep and had to give away when he was young, he turned his face away.

Showa Original Landscape Series