Communicable Paranoia

I guess maybe I should tell about the lady the other day. Unfortunately my command of language is not sufficient to adequately express what took place, but I will try anyway.

So yeah I am a Caucasian living in Japan. I live in a town where there are plenty of others like myself, so it is not unusual to see us out and about. It would be more unusual not to see a foreigner, in fact. There are some small villages in Japan where people are still very surprised and curious when they see a foreigner because it is so very rare. But that is not where I live.

But someone forgot to tell at least one person that, I guess. When I got home the other morning, I was getting my keys out of my bag to open the door to my second-floor apartment when I noticed a women, probably in her mid-60's, blatantly staring at me from the street below. She was carrying a parasol and walking by, but apparently I disrupted her day in quite a radical way, because she could not stop staring. Yes, by the way, I did check to make sure there was nothing particularly strange about my appearance that morning. Nothing. But this woman looked at me with an expression that seemed to combine shock, wonder, disbelief, and, well, fear. It was as if she saw an alien. OK, technically I am an alien, but I am white not green. Anyway, I looked back at her, because I wanted her to know that I knew that she was staring at me so she might realize it and knock it off. No such luck. All the way down the street, about 50 yards or so, she kept turning back and looking, as if trying repeatedly to verify that I wasn't merely a figment of her imagination. If only I could have gotten a picture of the look on her face. Very unsettling.

As I thought about it more, it started to freak me out a bit. You see, I am not a person who believes that reality is only what we see. I think there is a lot going on that I don't see. The thought occurred to me that the woman might not have been reacting to me at all, but something that she was seeing that was near me. Even now as I write it it is giving me the shivers a bit. Recently I have been hearing a lot of stories of strange and unexplained occurrences--ghost stories, angel stories, psychic events, etc. Not long ago I spoke to an acquaintance, call her 'A.' A. has a friend who claims to see spirits and that A. is always being followed/attended by a 'person' that she herself cannot see, who is there to protect her. Also I heard a story from a student about a funeral portrait (a large photo of the face of the deceased which is hung for all to see at the funeral) of a person appearing upside-down within another photo. Weird things about that: The upside-down portrait wasn't actually there when the picture was taken. In fact it didn't even exist yet, because the person in the picture had not yet died. He was in the group photo with everyone else, very alive. He himself saw the mysterious photo later and was very angry at first, thinking it was some kind of sick joke. Then I suppose he must have been a bit frightened. The photo was taken to priests who prayed, performed religious ceremonies over it and such, etc. Anyway, according to my student that man did in fact pass away not long after.

So somehow such stories came back to my mind after I saw the way that woman looked at me. To be honest it scared me a bit. I wonder what she saw.... If this happens again, I think I will try to talk to her. I hope she doesn't run away screaming. Then again at least that would make a good story.