Before I moved to my current house, I lived in a very rural village.
Surrounded by mountains and several large rivers, we rarely had visitors from the outside world.
One day, when I came home from school, my father was just about to leave.
He was obviously not dressed normally, wearing boots and kappa pants, and he had a very grim expression on his face.
I was curious as to why he was going out, so I asked my father, who was trying to put on his boots, “What’s wrong?.”
Then my father said with a grim look on his face, “Hiro-chan went missing while playing in the river.”
Hiro-chan was a neighborhood kid, about three years old.
There is a river near his house, and he was playing in the water with his mother.
His mother noticed the house phone and returned home, telling him to get out of the river and wait for her.
When she returned, Hiro was already gone.
The river is basically gentle on the bank side, but the current is quite strong in the middle.
There was a possibility that Hiro was swept away and went downstream, so they said they would go as a search party.
After saying that, my father said, “I’m going,” and left.
I knew Hiro-chan well, and it was only a two-minute walk to the river from here.
I put on my boots and headed for the river.
When I arrived at the river, I found that several adults had already entered the river to search for him.
I saw his mother sitting and crying at the gravel.
I decided to go down and find my father and search with him for now.
It was true that the current was slow in the shallow part of the river, but when we got to the middle of the river, even I, a high school sophomore, was almost caught in my feet.
I was thinking to myself, “I don’t know if he can survive this….”
I kept searching for a while, and when the sky had turned to a light ash and the sun was about to set, I heard a voice saying, “Hey, did you see something floating by?”
I looked hard and saw it myself.
I looked closely, and sure enough, something black was flowing toward us from upstream.
I wondered what it was, but as I got closer, I could see what it was and a chill ran down my spine.
A Buddhist altar was flowing.
The more I looked at it, the more eerie it looked, and the smaller it looked, the more tattered it looked.
The timing was just right, and we were all unable to move.
After a few seconds of silence, the former village chief suddenly spoke up.
Hiro-chan, I think God may have taken you away.
Hearing those words, I became even weirder.
Hiro’s body was found three days later further downstream, but it was so badly decomposed that it looked like a rag.
Still, I was curious about that Buddhist altar.
Later, I went to the upper reaches of the river, but there was not a single house there, and it was a steep cliff that was almost inaccessible to people.
Nor did I hear of anyone going upstream that day. Why did the Buddhist altar come from upstream? I don’t know.
