On the fourth of May, something was off about the sky.
Mist had been falling since morning. “Falling” may not be quite the right word for it — it didn’t rise up from the pond, but slid down soundlessly and without warning from somewhere overhead, damp and shadow-like, the way a flood of data packets silently overwhelms a network. The grown-ups called it inverted mist.
It was just as Kopo crossed the stone bridge along the river that he was wrapped in its curtain.
Color drained away. The pale pink of the weeping cherry, the green of the pond’s water — all of it turned the same shade as an old monochrome photograph. Kopo stopped and stared, bewildered , at his own hands. A gray hand traced along a gray railing .
That was when the shadow on the cobblestones stirred.
There was no wind. And yet the shadow kept changing shape, as if it had a will of its own. Eventually it lost its outline and, spreading toward Kopo’s feet, began to draw something. A morning where he swallowed a confession he’d practiced. A night memory where he closed his eyes at the sound of Keromi’s singing, unable to bear it, and fled . A pile of paper on which he’d written “I like you” to Ohisama three hundred times by the pond’s edge, then crossed out, over and over.
“Stop it…!”
Kopo trampled the shadow. But it stayed firm — more robust than any fault-tolerant mechanism Spice had ever designed — flattening only for the instant it was trampled, then instantly regaining its shape. Leaning against the bridge railing, Sonchō watched Kopo with the calm face of a man about to smoke a cigarette.
“Inverted mist. Been a while since it came around.”
“Sonchō…! The shadow’s… exposing everything inside me…!”
There was a tremor in Kopo’s voice that couldn’t be classified as anger or shame. The secrets were still playing out on the cobblestones. Sonchō rose quietly and stepped to the center of the bridge.
“Right then. Lend your shadow to the Dragon God for the day.”
It was the language of ritual . As Sonchō gently touched a fingertip to the nose of the carved Dragon God on the railing, Kopo’s shadow lifted off the bridge planks and slid, melting, into the water’s surface.
For the rest of the day, having lost his shadow, Kopo couldn’t manage to get angry. When he tried to raise his voice, the words scattered into mist; when he tried to well up with tears, the feeling dispersed like sand. He simply looked up at the sky. The May blue slowly tilted toward evening.
By dusk , the shadow had returned.
But ever since, Kopo has felt that his shadow is just slightly shorter than it used to be. Did the Dragon God take something from him? Or did part of his secret simply fail to make it back into the shadow? Unable to ask anyone, Kopo goes to the stone bridge every night now, quietly checking the length of his shadow beneath the moonlight.
Margin note: Even now, only right after rain, a faint shadow of someone’s swallowed confession rises up on the cobblestones. Whether it’s Kopo’s or not, no one will ever know.
【Core of the Tale】
- Phenomena used: inverted mist, shadow transfer (a ritual contract with the Dragon God)
- The story’s hidden theme: a secret cannot be erased. It can only change shape.
This is an English translation of “影の告白”, part of Tales of Amencho Town (蛙鳴町奇譚).