Black Kimono

The Black Kimono is a scary true story about a Japanese man who has a strange encounter while staying the night in his friend’s house.

I live in Japan and a lot of my friends have told me about their scary experiences with the supernatural. I guess the scariest one came from my friend, who used to be able to see ghosts when he was younger.

One day, he wanted to meet up with a girl he had gone to school with. Her name was Asako. They arranged to meet at a popular location in Tokyo. However, when the day came, he waited there for a few hours but she never showed up. Thinking she must have forgotten about it or got the day wrong, he went home.

Later that night, he called her and he found out that she was mad at him for not showing up. Apparently she had been at the meeting place at the right time, but somehow they had missed each other. Although it was strange, Tokyo is a big city and the meeting place was busy, so they laughed it off and made plans to meet at a smaller train station outside of the city.

But this time, when my friend went to meet her, he ended up waiting for a few hours. He even asked the station employees to make an announcement asking Asako to come meet him at the exit, but she never showed up. Eventually, he gave up and went home.

He called her again that night and she insisted that she had been waiting there at the exit like they had arranged. He told her how he had asked them to make an announcement and she said that she had heard it while she was standing right there at the exit, but no one else was around.

This really creeped them out, so my friend suggested that he and his girlfriend Yukiko go to Asako’s apartment to meet her that night. She agreed and my friend and Yukiko headed over right away.

When they got there, everything seemed normal. They spent the night drinking and talking and having fun. They lost track of time and before they knew it, they had missed the last train home. Asako told them they could stay overnight and pulled out a futon next to her bed for them to sleep on.

Somewhere around 3 AM, my friend woke up suddenly. He was unable to move. When he opened his eyes, he saw Asako looming over him. She was sitting on his stomach. Her eyes were black and her face was pale. Her long, black hair was hanging down in his face. She was wearing a black kimono and had a strange headdress that looked like a 3-pronged candlestick with burning candles.

As she moved closer, her hair started to blow around in a strong wind and it caught on fire. He could feel the searing heat from her blazing hair against his face, but he still couldn’t move a muscle. He began to really panic when she reached for his neck, and he tried to call out to Yukiko but his voice wouldn’t work. She started squeezing his neck, all the while whispering something that he couldn’t make out.

Suddenly, he was able to yell out and he heard someone moving on the bed. He turned to look and it was Asako, looking sleepy and confused. He looked back up at the woman strangling him and she had disappeared. His girlfriend Yukiko was lying on the floor nearby instead.

He didn’t tell them what happened so they wouldn’t get freaked out, but about a month or two later, he went to a traditional play with his girlfriend. One of the characters was the ghost of a vengeful woman who had been betrayed in her past life. Her goal was to hunt down the reincarnation of the man who betrayed her and kill him. She was pale with long, black hair and wore a black kimono. She also had a 3-pronged candlestick headdress, and her hair would catch fire from the burning candles on there.

Later on, he went to a fortune teller and asked her about it. She told him that he had betrayed a woman in his past life and that the spirit of the woman was reincarnated as Asako. When he had tried to meet up with her, his protector spirits had prevented them from seeing each other to keep him safe. However, when he went to stay in her apartment, he had trapped himself in a place where she could attack him. The fortune teller told him he was lucky to be alive.