I grew up on this story. Everyone my age in Japan did — our parents lived through the 1979 panic, when schools actually organized group walks home. So believe me when I say I know exactly what this legend is, how it spreads, and why a tired brain on a dark street is primed to produce it. I'm telling you what happened anyway, because the archive says detail is documentation.
Last February, a Thursday, I missed the last express and walked home from Sangenjaya station through the back streets of Setagaya. Cold night, streets empty. A woman was standing under the vending machine glow at the corner where I turn — coat, scarf, surgical mask. Nothing unusual; half of Tokyo wears masks in February. I noticed her only because she was perfectly still.
As I passed she turned and asked, politely, 'Watashi, kirei?' Am I pretty?
Every hair on my arms stood up at once, and my mouth — I swear my brain had no part in this, it was pure inherited firmware from my grandmother — said 'Maa... futsuu desu ne.' So-so. Average.
She tilted her head, the way you do when you're recalculating. I bowed slightly, kept walking, and did not run, because the one thing every version of the story agrees on is that you cannot outrun her. I heard nothing behind me. At the next corner I looked back. The street was empty all the way to the vending machines, which means in eight or nine seconds she had gone somewhere on a street with no side alleys.
I bought hard candy the next morning and it lives in my coat pocket now. My girlfriend thinks it's a funny superstition. It is. It's also staying in the pocket.