Good evening. I appreciate you taking my call. I am calling from Japan, from Hiroshima Prefecture. I do not speak to many people about this anymore. My family thinks I should let it go. But I heard your program, and I thought, here are people who might understand. What happened to me was in the summer of 1970. July. I was a farmer then, working land near Mount Hiba. Beautiful country. Very green, very quiet. The kind of place where nothing strange ever happens. That is what I believed anyway. I should tell you, my wife had been complaining all week that I was working too hard. She wanted me to rest. But there was rain coming, I could feel it, and I needed to check the irrigation channels before the storm. So I went out to the far fields, the ones that border the forest at the base of the mountain. It was late afternoon, maybe four o'clock. The sun was starting to get low. And that is when I saw it.
There was tall grass at the edge of my property, where the forest begins. Brush, weeds, things I had been meaning to clear for years. I heard movement in there first. Rustling. I thought maybe a wild boar, we have those in the area, or perhaps a deer that had wandered down from the mountain. I stopped walking and watched. And then it came out of the brush. Right in front of me. Maybe ten meters away. I tell you this, and I know how it sounds. It was standing upright. Like a man. As tall as me, maybe a little shorter. But it was not a man. The body was covered in black fur. Thick, dark fur, like nothing I had seen on any animal in Japan. The face. I will never forget the face. Grotesque is the word I have used when I try to describe it. The head was too large for the body, shaped like a triangle pointing down. The nose was flat, pushed in, like an ape. But the eyes, that is what I remember most clearly. They were intelligent. They looked at me, and I knew something was thinking behind those eyes. Watching me. Studying me. Trying to decide what I was.
I could not move. I tell you honestly, my legs would not work. I just stood there, and it stood there, and we looked at each other. I do not know how long. Felt like an hour. Probably only a few seconds. There was a smell too. Foul. Like something rotting. Like old meat left in the sun. It came off the creature in waves. And then it moved. Not toward me, thank God. It turned and went back into the brush, into the forest. But here is what stays with me. It did not run like an animal runs. It moved fast, very fast, but controlled. Like it knew exactly where it was going. Like it had done this before. Disappeared into the trees without making hardly any sound at all. One moment it was there, staring at me with those piercing eyes. The next moment, gone. Just the smell hanging in the air and the grass still moving where it had passed through.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]