D-0001 The ticket gate sounds only once per person

The automatic ticket gate at Kirino Station sometimes sounds twice in a row. Although a single person has passed through only once, after a short interval the same sound rings again. Between that first and second time, the person who should have passed through the gate is not there. Looking back, no one is behind them, and asking the station staff only brings the reply that no such report has been received.

A memo recovered from the mid-2010s records the way home of someone who heard this sound. On the train, it says, they could not for the life of them recall the face of the person who should have been sitting beside them. Not who had been there, but only that someone had been there, is what remains. At Kirino Station, the story of “forgetting one person” after the gate sounds twice has been reported again and again over the years.

Going further back, a single letter from around 1998 remains. A resident who had been waiting for someone at the foot of the old Kirino Bridge wrote it — not so much about the person who never came, as about how, for a while afterward, their own mail stopped arriving. The sender’s column is blank and the postmark cannot be read, but along its edge there was said to be a faint purplish bleed. “Kirino” was originally the name of a low-lying land where, when fog set in, the far bank could no longer be seen. After the land readjustment, it is a place name no longer in official use.

On old copies of the resident register, a handwritten mark reading “undelivered,” absent from the current format, remains in the columns of only a few households. The households that bear that pencilled mark are the ones for which no later paper — a change-of-address notice, an obituary — has been filed at all. The mail that never arrived and this mark overlap, here and there, on the names of those same few households.

A reading has been left with these accounts: that in a place meant for passing through, a passage may not hold as a single occurrence. It has also been read as if, each time a gate or a register counts its people, the line between who is counted and who is not shifts a little. No one has confirmed either.

Even passing through the same gate and crossing the same bridge, people’s memories of who was missing and who remained do not agree. New reports ceased after November 2015, but at the foot of the old Kirino Bridge, an unaddressed envelope is said to remain in the mailbox, still uncollected.