The Train to Tsukihara

The train to Tsukihara chugged slowly, like it didn’t want to arrive.

Ren Aoki, nineteen, watched the mist thicken outside the window. Pines blurred into gray silhouettes. The world outside looked half-asleep, like it hadn’t fully formed. No cell service. No announcements. Just the rhythmic clang and hum of the train on cold metal tracks.

No noise. Perfect.

He had no suitcase — just a duffel bag and a sketchbook wrapped in plastic to protect it from the rain. His hands were buried deep in his coat pockets. The right one clenched tighter than the left, knuckles bone-white. He kept feeling the edge of something — a ribbon, worn smooth — though he never brought it out.

People always said that moving helped.

“New place, new you!” his therapist had chirped once, all sunshine and pamphlets.

But Ren wasn’t looking for a new self. He wanted the opposite. He wanted to disappear — to be invisible, to melt into cracks in forgotten towns.

Tsukihara was that kind of place. A quiet mountain town with crooked roads and no welcome signs. The streets curved like unfinished thoughts, the trees leaned over the roads like conspirators. Fog blanketed everything and never truly lifted, even at noon. Time here was elastic. Everything felt like it was waiting for something that would never come.

He found lodging in an old wooden house above a stationery shop that smelled of ink and mothballs. The landlord, an old man with one glass eye and a voice like sandpaper, gave him a single key and didn’t ask questions.

“Quiet, that’s what you’re looking for,” the man said. “You’ll find it here. Maybe too much of it.”

The mirror in the bathroom was warped, showing Ren in multiple, fragmented pieces. The tap sometimes dripped water with a faint violet hue. The walls creaked at night — not from wind or weather, but like something was shifting inside the wood, resettling itself when no one was looking.

Ren didn’t mind. The silence was enough.

For a while.

At Tsukihara University, he enrolled in art theory — no studio classes. He didn’t want to draw. He didn’t want to explain. He wanted to learn the language of absence, the theoretical edges of meaning where art ceased being seen and simply existed.

He rarely spoke. Sat near windows. Wrote nothing. Drew nothing.

Until she appeared.

Sora Kanzaki.

She wasn’t loud. She didn’t demand attention. But there was something about her — as though her presence altered the air pressure in a room. She wore short hair, a violet scarf knotted loosely around her neck, and carried an old book of poetry in her bag. Her smile was soft and familiar.

Too familiar.

“Do you always sit alone, Ren-kun?” she asked one foggy afternoon.

He blinked. “How do you know my name?”

Sora tilted her head, her voice playful. “You told me. Once.”

He frowned. “I didn’t.”

She only smiled. “Maybe you just forgot.”

From that day, she kept appearing — at the vending machines, in the hallways, across from him in the cafeteria. Always sitting just close enough for him to hear her, always asking strange questions:

“Do you still draw?”
“Do you like jasmine tea?”
“Do you remember the sakura trees in April?”

There were no sakura in Tsukihara.

But there had been — in Tokyo.

There had been Airi Hoshino.

She had loved spring. Tied violet ribbons in her hair. Quoted obscure poetry while they shared ice cream in the rain. She used to say nothing with him, and it always meant something.

And then… the fight.

The storm.

The cliff.

The scream.

And silence.

He told himself he had moved on. That it was an accident. That people slipped. That you couldn’t hold on forever.

But one night, Ren dreamt of her.

Not a memory — not a flashback. It was now.

He saw her walking barefoot through the fog, hair soaked, violet ribbons trailing behind her like smoke. Her eyes were hollow. Her lips were moving, but he couldn’t hear the words.

When he woke, his fingers were trembling.

His sketchbook was open.

A freshly drawn portrait stared back — Airi, as she looked in the dream. Same soaked hair. Same expression. Same missing warmth.

He hadn’t drawn her in over a year.

But the pencil lay there, warm in his hand.

The dreams worsened.

He began hearing footsteps at night. Whispering behind the walls. Once, he saw a shadow in the warped bathroom mirror that didn’t belong to him. And then the scent of jasmine — her perfume, subtle and exact — began clinging to his clothes and bedding.

One morning, a photograph lay at his doorstep.

It was him, asleep in bed.

But in the corner — barely visible — stood a figure.

Her.

Violet ribbons, blurred face, standing in the shadow of his room.

He tore it. Burned it. Flushed the ashes.

That evening, it returned — the same photo, uncreased, untouched — resting on his pillow.

He confronted Sora the next day.

They were alone by the river. The fog clung low to the ground. The water made no sound.

“What are you?” he whispered.

She didn’t look surprised. Only… sad.

“You remember now, don’t you?”

“I remember that Airi is dead,” he said.

Sora’s smile faded. “Is that how you explain it to yourself?”

“I didn’t mean to let her fall.”

“But you did.” Her voice was barely a breath. “You stood there. You hesitated. You called her name too late. And now…”

She stepped forward. Her shadow split into two on the rocks.

“I’m what’s left.”

He staggered back.

“You’re not her.”

“No.” Her voice was lower now, layered. “I’m the part that couldn’t move on. The part that fell with her. The scream still echoing. The promise still unkept.”

That night, every mirror in the house cracked.

Photos lined the walls — dozens of Polaroids of Ren: walking, drawing, brushing his teeth. In each, a girl lingered just out of focus. Sometimes, her reflection was smiling even when Ren wasn’t.

He stopped locking the door. It didn’t matter. His sketchbook, once burned and discarded, reappeared every morning on the table, pages freshly filled. Her. Always her. But more detailed now — her hand on his shoulder. Her whisper in his ear.

And in every drawing — he was smiling.

He never remembered smiling.

He returned to the cliff.

The one from Tokyo.

Except now it was here, in Tsukihara, woven into the fog.

The rocks. The same slope. The memory playing in full — over and over.

He carried something with him — a violet ribbon. The last one he had kept, tucked away in his coat pocket like a buried wound.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, letting it fly into the wind.

“It’s too late,” a voice said behind him.

He turned. She stood there — not Sora, not Airi, but something between. Her scarf fluttered. Her eyes shimmered like cracked glass.

“You said we’d run away together,” she said. “Leave Tokyo. Escape everything.”

“I was scared,” Ren said. “I didn’t know how.”

“And now… you will.”

She stepped forward.

He stepped back.

But the ground gave way too easily, as if waiting.

The cliff had never been stable. Maybe it never existed. Maybe Tsukihara never existed.

Or maybe it was made for this.

They say a boy lives alone above the stationery shop.

He doesn’t talk. Doesn’t draw. Doesn’t eat in public.

But sometimes, locals claim they see a girl standing behind him — in the window at night, in reflections during storms.

Once, a delivery boy stared too long at the window.

He forgot his own name for three days.

Because the boy still smiles sometimes.

But it’s not always his smile.

EPILOGUE

Months later, the landlord noticed something strange.

The boy’s room remained untouched, but a second toothbrush appeared. The mirror — once cracked — now reflected two people. One always blurred.

He tried to rent the room again, but no one stayed more than a night.

They complained of footsteps.

Whispers.

A girl with violet ribbons standing at the foot of the bed.

And sometimes, in the sketchbook left behind, new drawings appeared.

Always of the same two people.

Always smiling.

Even when no one had touched the pencil in weeks.