From the Judges:
“In this atmospheric piece, the seemingly unseen is made palpable. Evocative prose and supernatural implications draw the reader in, perhaps causing the heart to beat faster. One also gets a hint of Kyoto’s eerie qualities in the snow. Kyoto is, after all, a city of ghost stories. With an air of mystery, “The Knife Salesman” seems to straddle time, as does the city itself. The judges were reminded of Tanizaki Junichiro’s work.”

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The Knife Salesman

When Yumi wakes, the inn is mute beneath winter’s first snowfall and the light is heavy with the peculiar stillness it brings.
She thinks of the knife salesman from Kochi, always noticing his absence more keenly when the snow arrives, still steadfast in her belief he will return to Kyoto.

It was the year her parents died when he first stayed at the inn; she’d struggled to get everything running smoothly at first, but he was patient with her clumsy mistakes.
He reappeared for the Jidai Matsuri and asked her to accompany him, then for a piano recital and the spring blossom. Yumi began to hope he would propose marriage, yet the staff sounded puzzled whenever she talked excitedly about him. ‘Mr Omote? No, I don’t think I’ve actually met him.’ Each time he left, they found his allocated room untouched, but they remained discreet.
The final time he stayed, Yumi was woken early by the rattle of the front door. Snow swirled softly, and a lantern across the street illuminated a line of fresh footprints leading away from the inn towards Kawaramachi station. They came to an abrupt halt at the FamilyMart, as though their creator had disappeared into thin air.
Yumi went outside and stepped inside each footprint as far as the store. At the crossroads, an unmarked ribbon of white stretched in every direction.
She never heard from the knife salesman again.

Yet this morning, there are footprints leading to the inn door. They start in the centre of the street, as if their maker has fallen straight from the sky.
As Yumi stares at them from the window, the air stirs, then stills itself. Someone has crossed the room and stopped at her side. A finger strokes the nape of her neck.
‘You’re back,’ she whispers.

Photo Credit: Moollyem (Sourced from Unsplash)

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Amanda Huggins is the author of the award-winning novellas All Our Squandered Beauty and Crossing the Lines and seven collections of short stories and poetry. She has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Colm Tóibín Short Story Award, the H E Bates Short Story Prize and the BGTW New Travel Writer of the Year. She has also been a runner-up in the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition, the Costa Short Story Award and the Fish Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and others. Her fiction has been broadcast several times on BBC Radio.

For the full list of this year’s competition winners, click here.
For the original competition notice (with prize details), click here.