The City with Memories of a Past Life

My third year as a working professional.
Just as I had finally learned the entire workflow and was entrusted with training junior staff, I received my transfer order.
A transfer to City A.
The duration was three years.
It is a regional city surrounded by mountains, about two hours away from the Tokyo headquarters by Shinkansen.
It was the first major turning point in my professional life.

City A.
I had never heard that name until I was given the transfer order.
Of course, there was no way I could have visited it.
Just to be sure, I asked my parents, but they said none of our relatives or acquaintances had any connection to this city.
A blank space that had never even existed on the map of my life until now.
That was City A.

However, from the moment I stepped off the train, something inside me began to creak quietly.
A strange sense of déjà vu, as if a landscape I should have been seeing for the first time was somehow burned into the back of my retinas.
I couldn't help but feel that the clear air and even the color of the bus slowly driving through the rotary in front of the station were things I had seen somewhere long ago.
A sense of discomfort that could not be explained by logic wrapped around me like a thin film, and it was never wiped away while I was in this city.
Even though my head understood it was an 'unknown place,' somewhere deep in my soul, it was whispering, 'Welcome home.'
Without knowing the true nature of this inexplicable feeling, I began my new life in City A while simply feeling bewildered.

✅ Memories of the small shrine on this corner

My new apartment was in a quiet residential area a little away from the city center.
With my unpacking barely finished, I went out for a walk in the neighborhood as if guided by something.
And then, at a street corner a few minutes' walk from the apartment, I found that shrine.

It is not a particularly large shrine.
It is not a famous spot that would be in a tourist guidebook, but rather a place where local people quietly press their hands together in their daily lives.
However, the moment I stood in front of the moss-covered stone steps, my heart surged.
Nostalgic.
That was the only word that came to mind.

I passed through the old torii gate and stepped into the shrine grounds.
The sound of crunching on the gritty gravel.
The sound of leaves rustling in the wind.
All of it touched the strings of my heart like listening to an old song I had forgotten.
A large camphor tree towering in the center of the grounds.
I felt that I definitely 'knew' both the powerful texture of its trunk and the spread of the branches and leaves I looked up at.

Unconsciously, I walked up to the water purification pavilion.
I picked up the ladle, scooped up water, and purified my left hand, then my right.
I felt a slight dizziness at how naturally and smoothly that series of movements flowed from my body, even though no one had taught me.
As if I had repeated it hundreds, thousands of times.

I pressed my hands together toward the main hall and closed my eyes.
Then, in the silence, I felt as if I heard a voice from the back of my head.
'Hide and seek, are you ready yet?'
It was the voice of a young child.
Cheerful, and slightly breathless.
When I opened my eyes in surprise, of course, there was no one in the grounds, just the camphor tree swaying in the wind.
Was it an auditory hallucination?
But the warmth of that voice definitely remained on my eardrums.

This place is not just 'feeling nostalgic.' An important piece of my lost memory is sleeping here.
A premonition akin to that conviction was beginning to take clear shape within my chest.
This shrine was not just a shrine to me.

✅ Memories of the elementary school that is now a closed school

When I climbed the slope beside the shrine, the building was on the hill.
An old wooden school building that is no longer used.
It is an elementary school that has been closed.
The rusted iron school gate is firmly locked, and a 'No Entry Except for Authorized Personnel' sign is sadly tilted.

On a holiday afternoon, I visited the hill again.
When I peered inside through the gap in the school gate, a schoolyard overgrown with weeds spread out.
Some of the window glass was broken, and the twilight light was illuminating the empty classroom unreliably.
A desolate, ruined landscape no matter how you look at it.
And yet, my chest was tightened with a strange affection.
An agonizingly poignant emotion welled up, as if I had returned to a precious hometown.

In the corner of the schoolyard, there is a particularly magnificent cherry tree.
As I stared at that tree, an image like a flash of light crossed my mind.
Laughing together with someone under a shower of cherry blossoms in full bloom.
I cannot remember the face or name of that 'someone'.
However, only that happy feeling, where the world looked sparkling just by being together, revives vividly.

In the corner of the schoolyard, there was a red, rusted horizontal bar.
I gently reached out and checked the cold touch of the iron.
Then, like a flashback, sweat seeped into my palms, and a dull pain ran through them as if a small blister had burst.
Practicing a backward hip circle.
That sunset of the day I failed over and over again, felt frustrated, and yet hung onto the horizontal bar without being able to give up.
Fragments of memory flow in like a torrent through my five senses.

This is the place where my memories sleep.
No, it's more than just sleeping.
The air, light, and smell of this land itself are speaking directly to my soul, trying to pry open the door to my closed memories.
I could no longer escape from this feeling.
I know this city.
The days I learned, laughed, and cried at this elementary school definitely exist within 'me'.

✅ My past life

Days spent searching for the true nature of the discomfort continued.
The camphor tree at the shrine and the cherry tree at the closed school are both trying to tell me something.
However, the core of it is like it's covered in mist, and I just can't reach it.
It was one night, after many frustrating nights had passed.

I was having a dream.
As always, it was a fragmentary and ambiguous dream.
But suddenly, my consciousness awakened, and I opened my eyes in the darkness.
As the boundary between dream and reality melted away, one truth fell into me as if I had been struck by lightning.

I once lived in this city.

It is not the life of the current me, Misaki Tanaka.
It was a long, long time ago.
It was an era when the war had ended and Japan was slowly beginning to regain its vitality.
I lived in this town as a young girl named 'Chiyo'.

The moment I remembered, memories overflowed like a dam breaking.
The shrine grounds were the best playground where I always gathered with my friends.
Playing hide-and-seek by the camphor tree was my specialty.
I learned many things at the elementary school on the hill.
The one I laughed with under the cherry tree was my childhood friend, Kenichi-kun.
He was a shy, kind boy who always followed behind me.

As the memories become more vivid, the heart-wrenching sadness also increases.
Chiyo's life was far too short.
I also remembered that a disease which took the lives of many children at the time ravaged her small body, and she quietly ended her life during the cherry blossom season without ever graduating from elementary school.

I, an office worker who should have been asleep in my Tokyo apartment, felt even the final breath of a girl who had ended her short life in a corner of City A, transcending decades of time.

Are these memories truly my own?
Or is it just that the thoughts of a girl named Chiyo, strongly left behind in this land, are temporarily reviving by borrowing the vessel of me, who came to this town by chance?
Is what I am seeing a memory of a past life, or just a phantom?

What is certain is that from this day on, my three-year transfer to City A has begun to have a completely different meaning for me.
This is not just a mere coincidence of a job transfer.
Perhaps I was called to this town to accomplish something.
Is it for me to live the future that Chiyo could not live in her place?
Or is it for me to simply quietly accept and mourn the memories of her short life?

From now on, I will live in this town as 'Misaki Tanaka'.
However, inside me, 'Chiyo' is always there.
I see the scenery she saw once again, and I feel the wind she felt on my own skin.
Our two lives are now inseparably intertwined.

I have not found the answer yet.
I just listen to the voice of the wind whispering to me when I look down at the town from the hill.
Is it a call from the past, or a signpost to the future?
My soul's journey has only just begun in this nostalgic town.

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