“Promise?”
“Yeah, promise.”
What happened after that? Missing memory might be the key to solving the mystery…

Today’s story will focus on a Kaidan of childhood memory.

This story is originally from Hikaru Ijuin who is a famous comedian and radio personality in Japan. He is also known as a Kaidan storyteller as well.

This is a story that he heard from a friend of his, Takafumi. He was just called Taka.

Taka works for a moving company, and on the day of the story, there was a moving project at a site in Tochigi.

Tochigi is an area which is just an hour’s drive from Tokyo more or less. So, there was a team composed of a leader, a colleague, and Taka, and they were heading to the site together in a truck.

From here, the story will be told with Taka as “I” just to make it easier to understand.

As I was approaching the site and kind of looking out the window, I started to have a strange feeling. The feeling like, “Ah, I’ve been here before”.

When we arrived at the site, it was a large old Japanese-style house. It had a fine gate, and when you went through it, there was a Japanese garden next to a tiled-roofed house.

It was a job where everything was already being demolished, so a client wanted the stuff inside to be taken out.

When I stood in front of the house, the door of memory finally began to open.

“I definitely recognise this place. I was a little boy, and I’d walked past this house a few times.”

Then I looked up and saw the window of the second floor, and more visions popped into my head.

“Ah, I lived over there this way, and there was a candy shop down the road the other way, and I was going to the candy shop on that day.”

Then suddenly a red paper balloon made from origami fell at my feet from above, and I picked it up and looked up where it might have come from.

There was a girl, who looked a bit older than me, and she was looking at me with only her upper body leaning out of the window.

Coming back from the memory to the present, I looked at the nameplate at the entrance of the house. It said “Kikuchi”.

“Yeah, Ayame Kikuchi, that was her name”.

When I remembered her name, more and more memories came back again.

On that day, the girl asked me from the window. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Takafumi. What’s yours?”

“I am Ayame Kikuchi. Won’t you be my friend?”

When I think about it now, her invitation seems rather sudden, like coming from nowhere. But conversations as children are usually like this and often don’t engage each other, so perhaps it didn’t feel bizarre at the time.

Anyway, I replied to her like… “Okay. Then let’s go to the candy shop together.”

But she said, “I can’t leave this room, so come up here.”

I didn’t have any particular reason not to go upstairs, but at the time, I really wanted to go to the candy shop.

“OK, but I’m a bit busy now. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, promise.”

The memory just stopped there, and the rest of the story did not appear at all.

“Umm, so, what happened after that? I can’t remember anything after that at all.”

Then the leader said, “Let’s go. We’ve got work to do” and we went inside that house.

I went to the front door, but I didn’t remember anything there. So, it means I didn’t keep my promise to go upstairs for Ayame the day after.

We started organising the first floor, and there, our client came out and started giving instructions. He seemed like an ordinary old man with nothing unusual about him.

I couldn’t stop my curiosity, so I decided to ask him about the girl. “Sorry, sir. That might be awkward to ask all of a sudden, but how is Ayame doing now?”

Then something unexpected happened. The old guy suddenly snapped.

“What is it? I’ve lived here alone forever. I don’t know any Ayame. There is no such girl.”

I was going to say, “But I kind of remember that there was a girl on the second floor…”

But he didn’t let me finish and talked to my leader instead.

“What is it with your company? He is intruding on your client’s privacy. Is that the kind of training you are giving him? Get this young man out of here. If you don’t, I’ll change moving companies.”

In the end, the leader told me to get off the site, and I went back home alone. However, once I remembered Ayame, I couldn’t help but be concerned about her.

And what was more was the attitude of that old man. Why did he lose it that hard?

After I came back home, I called my mum. What I remembered was a memory from the past, so she could be the one who knew anything about it.

“I went to work today in a town called brabra in Tochigi, and I had a feeling that I lived there. Do you happen to know it can be a real memory?”

Then she was really surprised and said, “How could you remember? That was when you were only about three years old.”

According to my mum, she was having a divorce from my dad at the time, but they had a custody dispute. And I was kind of kidnapped and taken to Dad’s family home in Tochigi. Eventually, I was taken back to my mum, but I stayed in that town for a couple of weeks before that.

So everything I remembered earlier turned out to be true.

But the question remained. What’s going on with the girl? What’s happened upstairs?

I messaged the colleague and asked how upstairs was in that house.

After about 10 minutes, a message was returned. It was only with a single sentence.

“Hey man, upstairs was just weird.”

The message was accompanied by three photos.

The first one was an old wheelchair, which seemed to be for children.

On the second one, red origami paper balloons scattered all over the floor.

The third one had a lot of letters on the wall, which looked as if they had been scratched with something. All of them said…

“I won’t forgive Takafumi.”

---