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A Japanese man puzzled by food mysteriously disappearing from his refrigerator got a shock when he found out a woman had been living in his home for months without permission, police said Friday.

The 57-year-old man living alone in the western city of Fukuoka installed a security camera to find out the truth.

One of the cameras captured someone moving in his home Thursday after he left, and he called police believing it was a burglar. But when they arrived, they found the door locked and all windows closed.

"We searched the house in the man's presence. We found the woman in the closet," said a local police spokesman.

The woman, named as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found in a flat storage space only just big enough for a person to squeeze into lying down.

She had moved a mattress into the closet space and even took showers, police said, calling the woman "neat and clean."

The women had been arrested.

"She told police that she had nowhere to live," the spokesman said. "She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time."

It is unclear how she managed to enter the home undetected. Police suspect she might have been "closet-hopping", moving from house to house.