It was the spring of my second year in university. "I heard there's a hotel where ghosts appear," Kyosuke-san said, inviting me along. At that moment, I felt an indescribable sense of unease. "Want to check it out?" "Yes." More than figuring out what that unease meant, I was simply overjoyed to receive an invitation from Kyosuke-san after so long. Ever since the day Kyosuke-san had that terrifying dream, she had cut off all contact. She stopped showing up on online occult forums, and whenever a while passed without seeing her, anxiety would set in. I had a feeling she might just up and leave for parts unknown without a word to anyone. She had that kind of aura about her. Yet here she was, inviting me to a haunted spot once again. Overjoyed, I put on some clothes I'd just bought and waited for Kyosuke-san on the street in front of the university, a full thirty minutes before our scheduled time. It was eight-thirty at night. Right on the thirty-minute mark, a blue Impreza pulled up in front of me, its headlights blinking like a signal. "Sorry to keep you waiting." The window rolled down, revealing Kyosuke-san's face. She looked as dignified as ever, but I sensed a softening, as if her sharp edges had been smoothed away. Perhaps that was just a projection of my own heart, feeling relieved that she had finally been freed from devouring nightmares. I climbed into the passenger seat and asked, "Where are we going?" "Toward the port." Kyosuke-san turned the steering wheel south. Sinking deep into the seat, I caught the scent of cigarette smoke. Kyosuke-san's scent. As I savored this moment of bliss, we arrived at our destination in what felt like no time at all. What kind of hotel was it? Since we were arriving at this hour, we wouldn't be able to get a guest room, so would that ghost appear in the lobby or the hallways? As I wondered this, a brightly colored sign came into view: *Hotel Seaside* It wasn't the name, but the exterior that told the story. This was what you called a love hotel. Ignoring my startled state, Kyosuke-san calmly pulled the car into the parking lot. "What's wrong?" "Oh, nothing." Urged on, I got out of the car. Entering the building, I found a front desk with no sign of staff. However, I knew it was open for business by the rows of photo panels displaying rooms. A few of them were lit. "I made a reservation." With that, Kyosuke-san reached past the wall of the unstaffed front desk and picked up the key to our room. Seeing how accustomed she was to this, my heart raced. When we stepped inside, the lights switched on automatically. It was a cute room. A stuffed toy that looked a lot like Mickey Mouse was sitting on the sofa. Beyond it stood a large bed. "Wh-what kind of ghost appears here?" My voice came out pitched high. I felt embarrassed of myself. "Well, according to rumors I heard online..." Kyosuke-san moved the knockoff Mickey aside and sat down on the sofa. "Couples who stay in this room keep seeing it. The ghost of a man in a suit." Standing around felt weird, so I took a seat on the opposite sofa across the table. I was glad there were two sofas. Sitting right next to her in this room would have been too nerve-wracking. "If it were just that, it's a story you hear anywhere. The interesting part is how he appears." "How does he appear?" "Imagine one of you goes into the bathroom while the other waits in the room. Right then, a voice comes from inside the bathroom: *'Huh. A place like this opens up.'* After that, absolute silence falls. While the person waiting in the room wonders what's going on, the bathroom door suddenly opens, and a man in a suit with a completely blank expression—one you've never seen before—slinks out. Then he walks right out of the room, disappearing as if he never opened the door at all. The startled partner peeks into the bathroom, but there's no one inside. Even though they should have just been taking a shower a moment earlier. And no matter how thoroughly you search the bathroom, there's no place where a door 'opens.' There's nowhere a single person could hide." A chill ran down my spine. That was genuinely scary. Or rather, rather than just a ghost story, wasn't that basically an Indian rope trick—a vanishing? "The punchline is that the couple was just a hookup, so neither of them even knew who the other really was to begin with. That's why even if a person vanishes, it just gets brushed off as a spooky tale." "What is that suited ghost, anyway?" It had to be connected to the vanishings, but the link didn't make much sense. "Who knows? Most stories were just about seeing the ghost of the man in the suit, so maybe the vanishing part was added later. Just seeing a ghost isn't scary enough, you see. It might have gotten tacked on from a different story." "Well, I'm gonna go take a look." With that, Kyosuke-san headed toward the bathroom. Toward the very bathroom where there shouldn't have been any opening, yet where someone had said, *"A place like this opens up,"* and vanished.
When I tried to follow, she stopped me, saying, "You have no tact." Realizing that the bathroom and a toilet were attached just past that door, I nodded in understanding—*ah, right, that kind of privacy.* I actually felt a bit of an urge myself. But feeling somehow embarrassed, I decided to hold it until I got home. While waiting for Kyosuke-san, who had vanished beyond the door, I looked around the room. Not just love hotels, but hotels in general seem to have a lot of ghost sightings. Looking around calmly like this, it certainly felt like a space detached from everyday life. Sensual decorations. A large bed. For some reason, a mirror plastered on the ceiling. That extraordinary atmosphere might just be the breeding ground for ghost stories. As I was pondering this, I noticed a sound coming from the bathroom. The sound of running water. It was too long to be the sound of flushing a toilet. It just kept going. It was the shower. The moment I realized that, I panicked and rushed over to the bathroom door. "H-hold on, what are you doing?" To my shouting at the door, Kyosuke-san raised her voice from inside and replied, "What, do you prefer not taking a shower?" No, no, no. What on earth are you talking about? No, no, no, no. As I stood frozen in a state of cognitive collapse, Kyosuke-san eventually appeared wearing a bathrobe. "There was nothing in the bathroom. Did anything show up on your end?" "It did." "What?!" A naked woman showed up. I couldn't bring myself to make a joke like that. Seeing me tremble, Kyosuke-san let her usual dignified expression slip just a little and smiled. ◆ Only the dim light of the bedside lampshade illuminated the room. I woke up in that thin darkness. It seemed I had fallen asleep. Kyosuke-san was sitting with her back against the wall, smoking a cigarette. In the faint lamp glow, the cigarette smoke drifted and wavered as it climbed toward the ceiling. She sat there motionlessly in the darkness. What was she thinking? She could only ever sleep in her own room. She was trapped by that curse. Or perhaps, she had simply convinced herself of it. Because of that, she could never sleep anywhere else. Even when we traveled to my rural hometown, she hadn't slept a wink for three days. Physically, it must have been exhausting, but how had she spent those sleepless nights all by herself? Just thinking about it squeezed my heart. Late at night on the wooden veranda in that countryside house, she had sat all alone, cigarette in hand, staring fixedly at the garden. I pictured her profile. Even here, after the man had fallen asleep in a hotel, she would sit alone without sleeping, quietly waiting for morning to come. I thought of the days she spent living like that. And yet, she should have been freed from those days... Before I knew it, tears were streaming down my face. Did a sob escape me? Kyosuke-san asked, "Are you awake?" After waiting a moment, I swallowed my embarrassment and sat up. Then, without waiting for morning, we left the hotel. It was still dark. There must have been a few hours left until dawn. We drove along the coast. When we rolled down the window, the scent of the ocean drifted in, feeling strangely nostalgic. "Want some coffee?" With those words, she parked the car in front of a lone, glowing vending machine. Clutching a hot canned coffee in both hands, the two of us walked toward the ocean. It was a little ways off from the bathing beach. As we sat on the wide seawall, the sound of crashing waves rose up from below. The dark ocean lay stretched out beyond them. Inhaling the scent of the sea, I gazed intently into the distance. Kyosuke-san fumbled through the pockets of her jeans and pulled out a cigarette. Come to think of it, what ever happened to her quitting smoking? I remembered the sight of her biting down on a plastic quit-smoking cigarette on the day she had that terrifying dream. When I casually asked her about it, she replied in a grim voice, "This is the last one." "I'm leaving this town the day after tomorrow." Kyosuke-san said that as she lit her cigarette. Even though I had a hunch it was coming, I still couldn't hide my shock. "There were a lot of bad things. But in various ways, it was fun." The curse that had bound her was gone now. From here on, she would go wherever she pleased and do as she pleased. The person standing beside her in the future might even be a man who hated cigarette smoke. The thought crossed my mind out of nowhere.
"Hey, do you know any constellations?" Her right hand holding the cigarette pointed toward the sky. It was a sky full of stars. A breathtaking night sky, one you could never catch living in the center of the city, spread out over the ocean. "I wonder what kind of feelings *he* was looking at the night sky with," she said softly, looking up. "Stars we don't know." With that, Kyosuke-san began to recount, in a halting manner, a story from her past. It was a strange tale involving an old Western-style mansion and the constellations. When she spoke of a woman named Kyoko Masaki, her expression carried a hint of nostalgia, along with an emotion that seemed like sorrow for something lost. It was a scary story, too, but no ghosts appeared in it. I vaguely understood the nature of the unease I had felt when she invited me with, *"I heard there's a hotel where ghosts appear."* I recalled the adventures I'd had with Kyosuke-san and the various things we had talked about. They were all wondrous, strange, and terrifying stories. Yet, not a single human ghost appeared in any of them. *"What a fraud."* I remembered the words she had hurled at the Shisho. She had been furious at the Shisho for talking about ghosts with a knowing air. "You've never seen a ghost, have you?" I tried saying those words out loud. Kyosuke-san smiled quietly and exhaled a puff of cigarette smoke. Even sitting right here beside her, the world I was seeing and the world Kyosuke-san was seeing might be completely different things. My breath turned to frost. The spring sea quietly washed against the seawall, then receded, leaving behind the sound of cold waves. "Do you know that star?" Kyosuke-san pointed to a single spot in the sky. Ahead of it shone a red star. When I shook my head, she continued. "I read it in some book, but that star doesn't even exist anymore. Apparently, it exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago." Looking at it now that she'd said so, the red light almost looked like the final flash before an explosion. "Yet that light is reaching Earth right now, just like this. Doesn't it feel strange? A star that died and no longer exists is creating our conversation right now." Sitting there, Kyosuke-san stamped out her cigarette. The sound of her shoe sole scraping against the concrete echoed. "Aren't ghosts kind of like that?" She said this while gazing straight up into the sky. Light from a star already dead now, after a long journey of hundreds or thousands of light-years, shone quietly inside her eyes, only to die once more. As I stared at her profile, I imagined it. The fantasy that we, sitting side by side here on the spring coast, were also turning into particles of light and racing across the universe. In the distant future, far out in space, within the eyes of someone yet unborn looking at a star yet unformed, this single moment would revive once more—and then vanish. Earth is a dark star. Could it be seen through a large telescope? There, standing beside her as she was about to leave, there must be a man who could do nothing at all. "My butt's getting cold." With those words, Kyosuke-san stood up. She stretched widely and let out a deep breath. Then she pulled her wallet from her pocket and plucked out a single coin, staring intently at it in her palm. "What is it?" "Ah..." Kyosuke-san kept her gaze lowered. "...We were friends." Saying only that, she hurled the object in her hand toward the ocean with all her might. Without even catching the light, it must have fallen somewhere unknown among the waves. "Shall we head back?" Turning around, Kyosuke-san smiled softly.
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