Story 21
Story from When My Son Was 0 Years Old
When my son was still 0 years old, he suddenly disappeared from our home.
At the time, he was only five months old and couldn’t even crawl yet.
I was on maternity leave then, so I spent all day at home with him. Between 3:00 and 3:30 p.m.—the time he vanished—I was folding and putting away the laundry I’d hung out to dry that morning. My son had been napping quietly in his crib without crying, so I hadn’t been checking on him too frequently.
Around 3:30, when I finished the laundry, I went to check on him—and he wasn’t there.
I flipped over the bedding, but he was nowhere to be found.
I searched the entire apartment, but he was gone.
A baby who couldn’t even crawl couldn’t possibly climb out of his crib and disappear…
I thought—he must have been kidnapped.
Panicking, I called my husband and reported it to the police.
Several officers came and searched the apartment with me, but they couldn’t find him anywhere. The doors were locked. The windows in the baby’s room were always kept shut, and their locks were still in place.
There were no signs of a break-in, and nothing appeared to be stolen.
Besides, it was a small 3LDK apartment—if someone had come in, I would have noticed. I’d been working in silence so I could hear him if he so much as whimpered.
My husband left work early and came home. He called all our relatives, and by nightfall, nearby family members joined the search. The police kept looking too. My husband and I stayed home, thinking that if it really was a kidnapping, the kidnapper might call.
Night deepened, but there was still no sign of our son—despite so many people searching.
The town made two or three public announcements asking for help finding him, and some neighbors from our apartment building joined in as well.
Since we lived in the countryside, I feared he might have somehow fallen into one of the irrigation canals in the rice fields and been carried away. But he couldn’t crawl, and the doors were shut—how could he have gotten out?
We lived on the third floor of the apartment building. Even if he had fallen from a window or the balcony, there would’ve been some kind of trace… wouldn’t there?
All kinds of thoughts raced through my head.
And then—the long night finally ended.
The next morning, around 6:30 a.m., we got word that my son had been found.
He was discovered about 500 to 600 meters away, at a nearby shrine.
It was a small, unmanned neighborhood shrine. Apparently, he had been sleeping peacefully behind the offertory box, just past the torii gate.
A person who happened to be cleaning the shrine that morning—something they did about three times a week—found him there.
At first, the finder was even suspected of having taken him, but there were no fingerprints or evidence to suggest that. In the end, no one could explain how my son had managed to get all the way to the shrine.
After that incident, my son developed a bluish mark on his back—about 10 centimeters wide, shaped strangely.
My husband said it looked like a maple leaf, but to me, it resembled a handprint—or perhaps a bird’s footprint.
Among the neighbors, rumors started spreading that he had been taken away by a tengu (a mountain spirit from folklore).
In any case, since then, my son has grown up healthy and well, so I try not to think about it too deeply.
Apparently, he has no memory of that day at all.
