When I was a child, there was a shrine I used to visit from time to time. It was a small shrine at the foot of a mountain, about a kilometer away from my house. The shrine was usually deserted and remarkably quiet. Beside the shrine was a small grove, and the vines hanging down from the trees there formed something like a swing. Since they were tree vines, the range of motion was small, but to a child's mind, a naturally formed swing straight out of a manga felt fascinating. The neighborhood kids would occasionally head to the shrine just for that. One day, I went there all by myself. I can't remember why I was alone anymore. Probably the kids I usually asked to play were all out, or something like that.
The shrine's grounds were well-kept as usual, but empty of people. As I entered the grove beside it and headed toward the vine swing, something odd caught my eye. A human face. A strangely pale human face was lying just in front of the swing. Imagine someone lying flat on their back in a swimming pool, with only their face floating above the surface. It was just like that—only the face was resting flat on the ground, pointing upwards.
I stopped and stared at the face. Was it a mask? But it didn't look artificial. I remember the features being quite well-formed—so much so that if it were a woman, you could call her beautiful. Its eyes were staring straight up at the sky. The urge to get closer and check it out, and the urge to run away, pulled me in opposite directions, leaving me frozen. However, I soon bolted like a frightened rabbit. The eyes had suddenly darted around and stared right at me. I never went back there after that.
It's hard to imagine that someone was actually physically buried there. The ground was crisscrossed with tree roots, so it should have been extremely difficult to dig. (Part of my own yard is in a similar condition, and we had to dig it up when building the garage.) To pull that off seriously, it would take a crew of people to dig and bury a body. But for what purpose? If it were for some kind of filming, in a small countryside town like that, it would bound to have become a rumor. If it were a prank or some kind of voyeurism, it made no sense at all, since you could wait all day and nobody might even show up.
Yet, more than anything, it was that face. There was no sense whatsoever that someone had gone through the trouble of burying themselves and was patiently enduring something while waiting. It was just a disturbingly beautiful face, quietly gazing up at the sky. I can't help feeling that it wasn't buried at all, but rather bobbing up from beneath the earth. A few years ago, I visited the place for the first time in about twenty years. The vine swing had drooped all the way to the ground and was no longer a swing at all.