Most of my relatives live in Kyoto. When I was an elementary school student, I took the train to visit one of my relatives there.
The seats were arranged facing each other. I was sharing a box with a middle-aged woman who was a complete stranger, and a businessman in his twenties. As the train emerged from a tunnel, the windows were suddenly filled with the magnificent, untouched nature of towering mountains.
Then, I noticed a strange object. The woman sitting by the window muttered, "What is that?" The businessman also reacted, saying, "Huh? What on earth is that?"
On the top of one of the mountains, perched on the branches of a large tree, was a human—or something that looked like one—dressed in the traditional garb of a yamabushi mountain ascetic. It leaped from mountain to mountain, tracing a massive parabolic arc through the air.
While we sat there, dumbfounded and staring, the train entered another tunnel. When it came out the other side, the figure was gone.
The three of us looked at each other in silence, mutually confirming what we had just witnessed. For some reason, I felt a strange sense of solidarity with them, transcending age, gender, and everything else.
Later, I found out that someone in the Edo-period collection of strange tales *Mimibukuro* had experienced the exact same thing, which made me wonder if quite a lot of people actually see this. Bizarre occurrences like this might just happen in the spaces where the modern and the pre-modern intersect.
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