In the spring of 1989, I moved into a Japanese-style apartment building in the old part of town. I rented a single room on the first floor. There was a shared kitchen and bathroom. Not long after I moved in, the people living across the hall moved out. After that, the room sat vacant for a long time.

I appreciated the peace and quiet. I only had a single room and I never went across the hall, but I enjoyed feeling like I was the master of an expansive suite. The way I figured, if I was going to live alone, I might as well enjoy the solitude. If I needed someone around all the time, I’d go out and get married.

I’m a lazy person by nature. Back then, I spent most of my free time reading. I liked wuxia stories—martial arts masters descending into the underworld to seek revenge, that kind of thing—or collections of strange stories about ghosts and immortals. I wasn’t even above picking up the occasional gossip magazine. In order to preserve my indolence and give me enough time to read, I found a job as a night watchman guarding an engine room. My shift started at four o’clock every afternoon. Each day, I showed up with my book, dutifully took my post, and read until midnight, listening to the machines whirring behind me. Except for whoever came in to relieve me, I never had to deal with any coworkers. That was another perk of the job.

When I got home each night, I took a shower and cooked up some noodles or something else simple to fill my belly, then I would stretch out on my bed with a cup of tea and start reading again. I usually read until around four in the morning. Sometimes I would drift off to sleep with the lights still on. Sometimes I just didn’t feel like turning them off. Sometimes I even fell asleep with the TV on.

A middle-aged couple lived down the hall. We shared a wall. The husband was a brute. He liked to yell at his wife. Sometimes, she shrieked back at him. I was more or less used to it, though. The apartment across the hall from them—and so, down the hall from me—was being rented by a woman who was around 28 or 29. Come to think of it, she might have been even younger. She was a quiet woman, to the point of seeming removed from the rest of the world. You might be picturing her as elegant and aloof, but she actually seemed a bit eccentric to me. You know, there are some people who stand out because they are strange, but people can stand out for being too normal, too. Personally, I didn’t mind having an eccentric neighbor.

The night I met her, I had gotten home later than usual. I’d put in a half hour or so of overtime and taken a shower at work. Not long after I got home, I heard a knock at my door. I went to open the door with my coat still on. It was the woman from down the hall. You know, the quiet eccentric. She seemed a bit nervous. Instead of coming inside, she poked her head in and glanced around, then looked back at the closed door of the room across the hall. She had knocked because she wanted to know which room was mine. She seemed shocked that I wasn’t living in the room across from me, which shared a wall with her own.

I asked her what was going on. She hesitated for a moment, then said: “I thought you were living in the room next to mine. The last couple days, right around this time every night, I keep hearing someone knocking on the wall. I even heard someone singing.” I laughed and asked her if she was trying to spook me. That wasn’t the right thing to say. “You think I would come and knock on your door in the middle of the night just to mess with you?” she demanded.

I decided to take her more seriously. I turned on the light in the hall, motioned for her to come with me, but left my door open behind us. “Go knock on the door,” I told her, gesturing across the hall. “You can see for yourself if anybody’s in there.”

She hesitated. “You’re scared to knock?” I asked. “I’ll do it for you.” I stepped across the hall and rapped on the door. Just as I expected, nobody answered.

She walked back down the hall, but I could tell she wasn’t completely satisfied. “Sorry,” she mumbled reluctantly. “I should apologize for disturbing you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I was still awake. You were probably just imagining things.”

She didn’t make any reply. The door slammed behind her. Standing alone in the hallway, I suddenly felt uneasy. I crept back to the closed door of the vacant room and put my ear against it. There was no sound coming from inside. It was so quiet in the building that I could hear the TV in the room above me. A half-deaf old man lived there with his mute son. I figured that must have been what she heard. That was my conclusion: She was working herself up over nothing. I could tell she was the type of girl who liked to give herself a fright. She was definitely a bit neurotic.

The next day, right around the same time, she knocked at my door again. This time, I was less patient. I stared at her coldly. She shifted awkwardly under my gaze, struggling with what she wanted to say, then finally blurted out, “I heard the same sounds again. The same as the night before. Exactly the same.” She begged me to come to her room, so I could hear for myself. She wanted me to know she wasn’t hallucinating. I considered for a moment, then followed her, closing my door behind me.

The young woman’s room was clean. There was a faint aroma in the air that I thought could have been perfume or cosmetics. From my own observations, though, she didn’t seem to be a woman who used either. Her room was mostly empty and simply furnished. The books were a surprise, though. She didn’t have a bookcase, but there was a stack of books on the floor, a pile on the desk, and even a few on the bed. Her tastes seemed quite peculiar, too. The pile on the floor was devoted to history, geography, and fortune telling. The stack on her desk was divided between astronomy, feng shui, and research into various paranormal phenomena. I noticed that some of the books were in English, including a six-volume set of Daniel Harrison’s Studies on Paranormal Activity in Ancient China. The binding on the set was so beautiful that I couldn’t stop myself from picking up one of the volumes and flipping through it. Of course, my English wasn’t any good, so I couldn’t read much more than the copyright page. I could make out when it was published, by whom, and who the editors were. The rest was incomprehensible.

The young woman was annoyed that I had gotten distracted by the books and seemed to have forgotten her problem. She cleared her throat loudly and pointed at the wall beside her bed. As I took a seat on her white duvet and surprisingly soft mattress, I once again noted a faint fragrance.

I listened closely. Silence. I glanced back at her. “I don’t hear it,” I said. She didn’t believe me and came over to listen, too. There was still no sound.

She looked disappointed, thought for a moment and said, “Maybe it’s done for the night.”

“Fine,” I said. “You want me to come back tomorrow?” She had no choice but to agree.

As I left, I took another look at her books. I told her she had decent taste. Some of the books looked rare. “But don’t read too much of that stuff,” I warned her. “It puts ideas in your head.”

She shot me a dirty look. “You mean reading those books is causing me to imagine all of this?” she asked.

I waved her off. “It’s just a suggestion,” I said.

“Well, thanks, I guess,” she said.

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “After all, what are neighbors for?” I could tell she didn’t find that funny. That woman didn’t have much of a sense of humor.