Rain at the end of May turns Amencho Town’s cobblestones into a single sheet of manuscript paper.
The woman who came from the city set up her tripod just as that rain began to fall. Carrying a state-of-the-art 8K camera and a waterproof case holding an external SSD over her shoulder, she said she was collecting footage for a video-sharing site under the tag “true records of the otherworldly ,” having traced the rumors about this town flowing through social media. One leg of her tripod kept sinking into a gap between cobblestones, never quite steady. No matter how many times she adjusted it, it tilted . She didn’t yet know that this was the first reply this town had given her.
“They say rain writes letters on the stones here. Is that true?”
Kopo stood at the edge of the plaza without an umbrella. Silently, in answer to the woman’s question, he pointed at the cobblestones.
Rain falls. Stone gets wet. And on the surface of the wet stone, thin lines begin to run. Not ripples , not the trace of flowing water — shapes that could only be called letters, added stroke by stroke with each falling drop. This is a phenomenon that has long appeared in Amencho Town, called the rain’s dictation . The content differs depending on who reads it, and it’s common knowledge in this town that no two people, even standing over the same stone, ever read the same sentence. Who first confirmed this, and why no one questions it, are things the residents of Amencho Town never particularly think about.
The woman raised her camera. The lens fogged.
Wiping it, using two lens cloths, still it fogged — every time the 8K resolution tried to capture the stone’s surface, mist welled up from inside the glass. Changing the aperture, raising the ISO, switching to manual focus — nothing worked. Recording to the SSD never stopped, yet all that showed on the monitor was white haze . The woman stood there for a while, still peering through the viewfinder.
“I can’t get it,” the woman murmured . There was no anger in her voice — only confusion and a faint relief, mixed in equal measure.
Minico peeked out from under the edge of his umbrella to look at the cobblestones. “…Ah, it says ‘I know the way home.’”
“No,” Kopo said. “It says ‘you’re still welcome to be here.’”
The woman quietly folded her tripod. She knelt on the cobblestones and, in place of her lens, watched with her own eyes for a while. Her lips moved. No sound came out. What she read, she never said, to the end. Her knees, wet with rain, must have been cold, but it took her a long time to stand back up.
By the time the rain stopped, the letters had vanished too, and the stone dried as if nothing had happened.
The woman put the SSD back in its case and began walking slowly toward the crossing. She carried the tripod on her shoulder, but her camera stayed in her hand, unpacked. She didn’t look back.
Margin note: The next morning, only the one cobblestone where the woman had set up her tripod stayed wet half a day longer than the rest. No one asked why, and Kopo didn’t notice either.
【Core of the Tale】
- Original phenomenon created: the rain’s dictation (rain writes letters on the cobblestones, but the content differs by reader; high-precision equipment cannot record it)
- The story’s hidden theme: to a gaze trying to cut this town out as “evidence” from the outside, it hands over nothing. But to those who stand here and read, it leaves each their own words.
This is an English translation of “雨の代筆”, part of Tales of Amencho Town (蛙鳴町奇譚).