[Short scary story translation] The Red Room:

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 The Red Room:




There once was a man who had left the countryside to come live alone in an apartment in Tokyo, where he was to attend university.

This new life took for him some getting used to. Days became weeks, and weeks became months. By the time a few months had passed, he noticed a girl living in the apartment just next to his. 

He always clocked off work late at night, when the small hand of the clock was nearing two, and he would always run into the same girl on his way upstairs to the second floor where his apartment awaited him. 
She had long hair and a slim figure, and she looked gloomy but there was beauty to be found behind this facade. Although he had  never seen her face as she was always facing the ground. 

One day, the man left work early and got back home in the evening, only to be greeted by a hole in a wall staring at him.
The hole opened on the apartment nextdoor. That girl's apartment.

He knew all too well that peeking inside a girl's room was wrong in many ways, but curiosity had gotten the better of him and he tried looking through the hole.
However, all he saw was red. Pure red, and nothing more.
He wondered whether it was her wallpaper or some poster blocking the view.

Ever since that day, the man had taken a habit of peeking through the hole every day, though not without a faint sense of guilt in the back of his mind. 
He knew he wouldn't see anything other than the crimson red shade, but he couldn't help himself.
Every time he got back home before 02:00 AM, he'd see nothing but red.

A few months passed, and one evening when he got back to his place and tried looking through the hole in the wall. All he was greeted by was total darkness. 
Intrigued, he left his room to check on the girl, and just as he was about to try to enter her apartment his landlord showed up. 

"Did something happen to her?" he asked. 
The landlord hesitated to answer, but told him that the girl living there had passed away.

"I think she might have suffered from some disease, but I don't know the details..."

It might have been because of his sense of guilt, but the man had a hard time articulating his thought. He only muttered that she seemed fine every time he'd come across her as some kind of excuse.

"Surely she must have been sick," the landlord said,
"I mean... her eyes were crimson red."



- Sources -

Story: https://kowabana.jp/stories/7
Picture: Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

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