The startled villagers all looked up at the sky. A gust of wind blew
through the trees, sending sparks from the bonfires crackling through the
air.
“This is terrible! Something awful’s going to happen!!” Bunsuke, the old
man who had been talking in front of the cigarette shop that afternoon, had
jumped to his feet, shouting, “This is terrible, terrible!!”
By this point the commotion had spread. There is an old proverb: even if
just one dog howls for no reason, ten thousand dogs will follow. Everyone
gathered by the shrine dedicated to the village’s protective deity was soon
in an uproar.
“Ken . . . Where are you?”
“Mom! . . . Mommy . . .”
“I’m frightened, sis.”
Children cried and called out for their parents. Parents shouted
plaintively for their children. Fear ran through the crowd like a dog with its
tail on fire. Everyone was suddenly afraid.
Whoooooosh . . . Whoosh, whoooooosh . . . The wind was growing
steadily stronger. The cypresses were so large that a man’s outstretched
arms couldn’t reach around them, but even so, they were starting to bow
their tall heads. The trees let out such a terrifying creak that they seemed
ready to snap.
Perhaps it was better that no one could see what was going on in the
darkness, but it seemed as if a pitch-black whirlwind was whipping wildly
through the forest, doing whatever it liked . . . They could hear an eerie
howling that seemed to shudder up from nowhere—Whoooooooo-
hoooooooo . . .
Crack! Then a rustling noise . . .
Right before the eyes of the fleeing villagers, one of the really big trees—
twice as big as the ones that were bowing their heads before—snapped off
right in the middle and fell to the ground with a loud THUD.
Shinkichi and the others dashed home so quickly that they hardly
remembered how they got there. They continued to huff and puff for so
long it seemed like their breath might never return to normal.
“Masaji, do you think something’s really going to happen? I can’t stand
it . . . My heart’s beating so fast.”
“Shinkichi, you don’t think!? . . .”
“Don’t think what?!”
“That . . . That, he might have climbed ashore.”
“‘He’?”
“Yeah, that wind just now was like the wind I felt the other day. It was
really strong—so strong you thought it might blow you over—but it was
warm, too, and strangely sticky on your skin . . .”

Godzilla: Godzilla in Tokyo
The Eerie Island of Odo