My parents’ home is located in a mountain village.
There is a cemetery in the village, and since I was a child, my family regularly visited the cemetery.
The graves are not the splendid ones you would normally think of, but rather old and handmade.
Even so, in our village, they have been handed down from generation to generation and have been cherished.
I was a child, so it must have been about 30 years ago.
As my family and I were going to visit the graves as usual, we passed an old woman wearing a black rag with a crooked waist.
Our village is not so big, so we all knew each other.
However, I had never seen this old woman before.
My siblings and I had never seen her before.
“Who is that?”
No one would open their mouths.
I couldn’t help but wonder, but if the adults wouldn’t tell me, there was no way to find out any more.
The old lady is huddled in the open plain off the grave, doing something.
I wondered what she was doing, but eventually it was time to leave after our family had finished visiting the grave, and I left the place.
Time passed, I grew up and settled in the city.
My grandparents had already passed away, and I thought it would be a not good idea to live in a remote, depopulated area with only my parents, so I invited them to move in with me, but they were adamant that the place where they had lived for many years was the best.
So I decided to go back to my hometown for the first time in a while and visited the cemetery.
When I arrived at the cemetery, I was surprised to see the old woman I had passed when I was a child.
She looked exactly the same as I had seen her when I was a child.
I had a very strong impression of the old woman, so I remembered her vividly.
She was exactly the same as I remembered.
She ignored me and went straight to the outskirts of the grave and crouched down, as if she did not notice that I was so stunned that I could not move.
It was the same situation I had seen when I was a child.
What in the world is she doing?
I was curious, so I decided to sneak up to the old woman and check on her without her noticing.
Blood was scattered in front of the huddled old woman.
She seemed to be killing some kind of animal and dismembering it. She was absorbed in chopping up the hairy pieces of meat into small pieces with what looked like a knife.
The unexpected sight literally made my blood boil and I managed to hold my ground, almost falling over.
I made a noise, and the old lady turned around and locked eyes with me.
Feeling that my life was in danger, I ran back to the cemetery, but I was too scared to visit the gravesite.
When I told my parents about this incident, they listened to me with surprising ease and finally opened their heavy mouths.
In fact, my parents had noticed that I had passed that old lady at the graveyard when I was a child.
That the old lady was a descendant of a taboo family.
She was a non-existent person in the village and rarely spoke in public, so she had kept it a secret from her children.
The place where the old woman was crouched was the grave of the old woman’s family.
But here is where I noticed something strange. At the time I saw her as a child, she was quite an old woman.
She is still alive after more than 30 years, and yet her appearance has not changed.
What is the meaning of this…?
My parents…
”There are some things in this world that are better left untouched. Besides, most of the people who knew the old days are gone, and even Mom and Dad don’t know the details. Maybe my grandfather would have known something, but he is no longer with us…
We don’t know much more than that.”
My hometown is now a marginalized community and will probably disappear in the near future.
Was the old lady a ghost? Even if she was a person, she may no longer be human, but a Yamamba.
I feel somewhat sad to think that the old woman’s existence will remain a mystery, buried and forgotten.
