Yo ni mo Kimyo na Toshi Densetsu: https://yonimokimyo.com/
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WANT EVEN MORE JAPANESE HORROR?
Read a sample from Reikan: The most haunted locations in Japan, also by Tara A. Devlin.
Young Lady’s Prayer
Location: Nishinohama 79-8, Isozaki, Matsushima-machi, Miyagi District, Miyagi Prefecture, 981-0212
In a forest in Miyagi Prefecture, there stands a tree. Carved into the trunk of that tree are the final words of a young woman who took her own life. They say that anyone who reads the “Young Lady’s Prayer” will be cursed to die as well.
Undeterred, a young man set out to find the tree. The first time, he was unsuccessful; there are a lot of trees in the forest, after all, and the sheer cliffs make the area dangerous to explore. But the second time, lady luck shined upon him. He found the Young Lady’s Prayer.
Cigarette butts littered the ground. It was an unwritten rule that, instead of leaving incense, you were to leave smokes as a gift to the young lady’s spirit. The young man didn’t smoke and struggled to light the cigarette, but he persevered. He didn’t want to upset her, after all.
The words stood before him. The girl carved out a large section of trunk before carving her final message to the world. They were a strange mix of Chinese characters and katakana, a script generally used for writing foreign words. Trying to read the combination was both off-putting and difficult. Not only that, the words themselves were puzzling. What was the girl trying to say?
The young man left his offerings to the girl and got up to leave. He was satisfied that he finally found the tree and he was able to read her final message firsthand. But as he turned around to go home, he felt something brush the back of his head, like a hand running across his hair. No, it wasn’t a touch. It was more like something grabbing at him. Tugging on his hair. He turned back. There was nobody else there but him…
In 1967, a female high school student was found hanging from a tree in Miyagi Prefecture with a mysterious message carved into its bark.
“At this time, I have realised my limit.
I have lost all meaning to exist with nature.
Holding death in my hands,
I will overcome this.
Showa Year 42, Eldest Son.”
What the girl was trying to convey with her final words remains a mystery. Why did she sign it with the Chinese characters for “eldest son”? Why did she use a combination of Chinese characters and katakana, making the words extremely difficult to read? It’s possible, of course, that she carved her message in katakana, rather than the standard hiragana script, because hiragana is curved and thus more difficult to carve, but the end result was foreign and off-putting nevertheless.
People have spent years trying to find the hidden meaning behind her final words. Some have suggested the girl didn’t carve the message at all; the message is unrelated and that just happened to be the tree she picked. Others have said that the characters used for “eldest son” at the end of the message were actually meant to signify her boyfriend. In reality, she was so heartbroken by boy troubles that she took her own life. The true answer is that we’ll never know; all we have are the remains of a message that was carved over 50 years ago, but that won’t keep people from speculating on what really happened.
One of the rules for visiting the Young Lady’s Prayer, if you can find the tree, is to leave cigarettes as an offering. Nobody knows how this rule came about, but over the years it became the accepted thing to do. To this day, mountains of cigarette butts surround the remains of the tree the young lady hung herself from.
The original tree was, at some point, cut down, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the stump is now little more than burnt remains, likely from a rogue cigarette butt that wasn’t put out. The carved message remains, however. The section of tree was cut down and now lies a few metres away on the ground, deteriorating, but still legible over 50 years later.
Over the years, a legend sprung up that said anyone who reads the Young Lady’s Prayer would be cursed to die as well. Considering pictures of the tree and its message are all over the internet, this seems highly unlikely, but it’s possible this legend grew out of another real-life tragedy.
A female announcer from Miyagi Prefecture visited the site to film a report for a local TV channel, but on her way back she was involved in an accident with a truck and died. Ever since that incident, visits to the tree decreased dramatically, but its legend continued to grow.
It’s difficult to say how much longer the tree will be around. The original stump has already been burnt to the ground thanks to the carelessness of those who visit it, and it’s possible that if people aren’t careful in the future, the Young Lady’s Prayer may be the next to go.
WANT EVEN MORE?
Also available in the Kowabana: ‘True’ Japanese scary stories from around the internet series:
Volume One
Volume Two
Volume Three
Origins
Volume Five
Reikan: The most haunted locations in Japan
The Torihada Files
Kage
Jukai
Read new stories each week at Kowabana.net, or get them delivered straight to your ear-buds with the Kowabana podcast!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tara A. Devlin studied Japanese at the University of Queensland before moving to Japan in 2005. She lived in Matsue, the birthplace of Japanese ghost stories, for 10 years, where her love for Japanese horror really grew. And with Izumo, the birthplace of Japanese mythology, just a stone’s throw away, she was never too far from the mysterious. You can find her collection of horror and fantasy writings at taraadevlin.com and translations of Japanese horror at kowabana.net.
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Toshiden: Exploring Japanese Urban Legends: Volume One Page 17