The Ubume: The Ghost Mother Who Came Each Night to Buy Candy
The story is told in a hundred Japanese towns, each certain it happened at their own sweet-shop, and it begins with the smallest of mysteries: a late customer. Every night, just at closing, a young woman comes to the candy store — pale, quiet, her hair a little damp, holding one coin — and buys a single portion of ame , the soft malt sweets that infants can suck. She says almost nothing. She comes the next night, and the next, always one coin, always the same sweets, always the hour when the lanterns are being taken in. On the seventh night — in most tellings it is the seventh — she has no coin. She stands in the doorway with her sleeves together and asks, in a voice like paper, whether kindness might stretch to one more portion; and the shopkeeper, moved and unsettled in equal measure, gives it. Then he does what people in these stories must do: he follows her. Through the empty lanes, past the last houses, up the hill — to the temple graveyard, where she passes among the stones and ...